![[Company Logo Image]](images/3legstool.gif)
Rehabilitator Lauded At Drug Court Graduation
The Saratogian, 10/4/07
by Jim Kinney
BALLSTON SPA - The priest known as the father
of drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs in New York's prison system
congratulated - and exhorted - 10 graduates of the Saratoga County Drug Court
Wednesday afternoon.
"You are the winners," Father Peter G. Young told graduates of the intensive
drug and alcohol rehabilitation program. "You are blessed to be in this program.
You would be in jail."
But the graduates' work is not done, Young said.
"It is up to you to carry the message forward," Young said. "So it can help
someone else. Don't let it stop with you."
Saratoga County Drug Court honored Father Young with a plaque from the Saratoga
County District Attorney's Office. District Attorney James A. Murphy III
described how Young started out as a parish priest in a tough Albany
neighborhood in the late 1950s, how he was a chaplain at the Albany County Jail
and later at Mount McGregor Correctional Facility in Wilton.
Young personally lobbied state lawmakers and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to
decriminalize alcoholism and establish rehabilitation programs for addicts who'd
gotten arrested. He established Peter Young Housing, Industries & Treatment so
addicts would have someplace to go when they got out of jail.
It's a three-legged stool of housing, employment and treatment.
Murphy joked that by reading Young's accomplishments, someone could assume the
77-year-old priest was really "327 years old."
Young called out: "That's my weight."
From the podium, Young recalled how judges in Albany used to give addicts a
simple choice when they came up by turn on the docket, "Jail or Father Young,
Jail or Father Young, Jail or Father Young."
He recalled helping a woman get back into her nursing career even going so far
as to have the rectory housekeeper watch the woman's five children when she went
to work.
Then one day, the woman, a registered nurse, drank a bottle of paint thinner.
Young recalled asking her why she drank it. Certainly, she knew it could kill
her.
"Father," he recalled the woman telling him. "You don't understand addiction. It
was there and I had to have it."
He asked the crowd not to judge the addicts in the front of the court room too
harshly. It's a predisposition, he said.
Once the brain gets a taste of the chemical changes brought by the drug or the
alcohol there can be no stopping it, he explained.
"It's the monster. You know what that's all about," he said. "You are no longer
in control. It controls you."
To graduate from drug court, people have to spend more than a year attending
court sessions and passing as many as three urine tests, some random, a year.
With Wednesday's ceremony, Saratoga County Drug Court now has a total of 50
graduates over four years. Wednesday's was the program's 11th graduation
ceremony and its largest.