Photo courtesy of workithealth.com Former judge Linda Davis, who was previously appointed to 41B District Court in 2000, has stepped down from that role to become the executive director of Families Against Narcotics.

HANCOCK — Judge Linda Davis was known for her tough sentences on people who used drugs. Now a retired district court judge and former Macomb County assistant prosecutor, Davis focused on incarceration for people charged with addiction-related offenses, rather than on understanding why people with drug problems were repeat offenders.

“As a prosecutor, I ran our drug unit, then I became a judge,” she said to LegalNews.com. “I really thought I was doing society a favor by putting people who were drug users and drug seekers in jail.”

Davis was appointed to the 41B District Court in 2000.

She admitted that while serving as prosecutor, then as a judge, she believed that in sentencing people with a substance use addiction (SUD) to jail, she was doing society a favor, LegalNews reported on Sept. 5, 2019.

Davis’ hard views on people with SUDs changed when her 17-year-old daughter, a high school student and athlete, sustained a knee injury that required surgery. Prescribed opioid painkillers, they led to her subsequent addiction to heroin. One night, Davis heard the words that causes every parent’s heart to seemingly stop: “Mom, I’m a heroin addict. I need help.”

Davis told Legal News writer Linda Laderman that she was devastated and ashamed.

“It was extremely hard to talk about in the beginning,” she said, “because I felt like I failed. Before that, I was still looking at addiction as a moral failure,” adding that she did not understand that people could become addicted because of sports injuries and teeth being pulled.

While she was arranging help for her daughter, Davis was asked to attend a town hall meeting about drug addiction. Viewing the other attendees, Davis said she saw parents experiencing the same thing, and it was apparent to her that there was a lot of shame and humiliation in the group. Then, Davis became aware of something.

“It was clear that the stigma attached to drug addiction stood in the way of getting good viable help for people,” Davis said. “The treatment facilities we called did not show any compassion and were not encouraging about the possibility of recovery. All of those things made me realize that the system needed to change.”

She realized she had the ability and connections to understand that SUD is not a choice, not a moral failing, but rather a disease.

“We are wasting taxpayer dollars putting in jail untreated,” she said.

Davis has co-founded the grassroots organization Families Against Narcotics (FAN). In March, 2007, she stepped down from her role as a judge to become the organization’s first executive director.

Fourteen years later — this month — Davis is in the Upper Peninsula, speaking at public engagements, continuing to pinpoint a major aspect of addiction that the overall general public does not realize, or chooses to ignore: Stigmas only derail the truth and education that surround addiction — something she said is not a moral failing.

Davis told the Daily Mining Gazette Tuesday morning that stigma is the No. 1 block to treatment.

“People (who) are suffering from substance use disorder are self-loathing,” she said. “They hate the choices they’ve made; they feel like there’s no way out, then when we shame them and make them feel unworthy, because of the stigma around addiction, they often-times feel like there is no help available to them, which is totally the wrong message that we want to be sending the people.”

Davis went on to say that SUD is a treatable disease, and “we need to start talking about it as a disease, rather than as a moral failing.”