California Attorney Learns: “Handcuffs are not fun!!!”

The long time City Attorney from Lakeport, California, was arrested this month after his alleged involvement in a hit and run accident. A DUI charge indicates alcohol may have been the cause. The story is here.

The attorney is accused of drifting into a lane with oncoming traffic and colliding with a pick-up truck. Fortunately, the driver and passengers of the other car apparently suffered no injuries.

What’s particularly unusual is that the attorney apparently posted a comment on the Lake County News Facebook page warning others not to drink and drive because wearing handcuffs was not fun.

Good advice. The Center for Disease Control reports that 32 people per day die in the U.S. as a result of car accidents involving an alcohol-impaired driver. That’s about one death every 45 minutes.



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California Defense Attorney In Treatment For Heroin

In 2008, a Santa Barbara defense attorney was arrested as he prepared to smoke heroin that the police saw him purchase earlier. In 2007, when he also had substance abuse problems, he was suspended from practicing law for three months for ethical violations.

Recently he agreed to enter a pre-conviction drug treatment program. If he completes the program the 2008 charges against him will be dropped.

The story is here.



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Recent Articles on Substance Abuse in the Legal Profession

A couple of recent articles discuss the prevalence of substance abuse in the legal profession.

This article at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune reports on a new rehab program geared for legal professional in Minnesota.

This article by the Daily Iowan is about a program at the University of Iowa School of Law that informs law students about high rate of substance abuse in the legal profession.

Remember the Socratic method of instruction at law school? For anyone that doesn't know, or who blocked it out of their memory, that’s where the law professor picks on one student and grills them for 15-20 minutes. I remember my own particular interrogation in Contracts lasting almost the entire class period. That’s stressful, and it’s no surprise that law students also are subject to higher rates of substance abuse.

Along with demanding teaching methods, imagine taking difficult postgraduate courses where your entire grade in each class is based on the final examination. That’s law school, at least as I remember it. And after three years of that, you then have to take the bar exam in the state where you hope to practice. That’s three grueling days of tests, and in California the most recent pass rate from the July 2010 exam was only 54.8 percent.

That’s enough to drive a person to drink. And it does. Both articles above mention a 1990 article published in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, reporting that attorneys had twice the rate of drinking problems than non-lawyers.


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