Program addresses underage drinking
Panel member Casey Mullen speaks during the town hall meeting.
Panel members included, from left, District Judge Ron Arnoni, Upper St. Clair police Lt. Curt Gallatin and Karen Plavan, executive director of Oasis Recovery Center of Western Pennsylvania and chairwoman of the Coalition for Leadership, Education and Advocacy for Recovery steering committee.
Panel member Casey Mullen speaks during the town hall meeting.
When substance abuse lands young people in the Bethel Park courtroom of District Judge Ron Arnoni, he often has a question for them.
“I tell kids this, pretty plan and simple: ‘If you’re hanging around an idiot, what are you?'”
Many of those in attendance at the Youth Steering Committee of Upper St. Clair’s Dec. 14 town hall meeting about underage drinking uttered the obvious answer:
“An idiot.”
Among those joining Arnoni on the panel for the program was Pittsburgh attorney Casey Mullen.
“To piggyback off the judge, I’m the idiot,” he said by way of introduction. “Growing up, I was the idiot. For whatever reason, I got this amazing gift, where I didn’t have to be the idiot anymore. So to make certain I maintain that gift, I drive across town in traffic, show up at events like this and do what I can to help others.”
Mullen often tells his story in conjunction with programs such as the Downtown-based Coalition for Leadership, Education and Advocacy for Recovery, which collaborated with the youth steering committee in presenting the town hall meeting.
A Lawrenceville native, Mullen said he grew up in an environment where “drinking was a rite of passage.” For him, that meant starting at about age 11 and continuing on a regular basis for a decade, eventually abusing other substances, as well.
“I was that kid who thought I could do anything,” he said. “Nothing’s ever going to catch up to me. I could live any way I wanted to live, and one day I was going to wake up and be successful.”
Instead, he ended up facing major trouble with the law and a situation that made the path to his career far more difficult than it could have been.
“I dug a hole so deep that it took me years to climb out,” Mullen explained. “I begged and pleaded for every opportunity I had, and I’m still fighting back from where I once was.”
Also representing the law on the town hall panel was Lt. Curt Gallatin, a veteran of almost four decades with Upper St. Clair police.
“The biggest problem I see with alcohol is when we get the group of freshmen in,” he said about high school students, “and it seems like the freshmen get taken advantage of because they have no experience with any type of alcohol. Their other friends have convinced them to try it, and they have no idea what their tolerances are.”
Such cases involving underage drinking often end up before Arnoni.
“What I tell a lot of the young people is, ‘You made an error in judgment. It’s how you bounce back. It’s how you respond to that mistake that makes you who you are,'” he said.
As far as his rulings:
“I will evaluate the situation, and quite often, they can attend a class,” he said about first-offender education programs. “The class costs almost $200, and I always tell the parents, ‘Make sure they pay for it, somehow, some way.’ And then community service is usually what I’ll do the first time.”
For the benefit of adults, Arnoni cautioned about the potential for liability.
“If you leave your kids home alone with the opportunity to get themselves into trouble, and they do, you could be on the hook,” he explained. “So if nothing else, I would think long and hard about that fact, that most things you work for could come crashing down on because of a bad decision you made as a parent.”
Gallatin provided an example.
“We had a case many, many years ago where three people died in a car crash, who came from a house where they were drinking at a party,” he said. “Those consequences went out to the people who owned the house, the parents who weren’t even home. They went out to the young people who had gone out and purchased the alcohol.”
The incident also launched a series of civil lawsuits.
“That’s the nature of human beings,” Gallatin said, “and what happens in our society.”