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Ramsey County substance abuse court celebrates 20 years of sobriety support

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Vilye Yang knows how the Ramsey County drug court works. He counts himself among the hundreds who veered off the dangerous path of addiction thanks to it.

As he stood before the group of court workers and fellow addicts in recovery Friday, Yang, 37, told the story of how he was born and raised in St. Paul as the son of Laotian immigrants. Recreational drug use with friends, he said, ballooned into a decadelong addiction that felt like “a very long and lonely road.”

That road soon landed him in jail, where a representative of Ramsey County’s Adult Substance Abuse Court offered him a way out in return for entering its treatment program. It was there that he learned how to wash clothes, budget his food, care of himself, and most important, stay clean.

“When I was in jail, and when I was in treatment and in drug court, [the] only thing I was thinking about was, ‘Please God, just give me a little bit of normal. I just want to have a normal life,'” Yang said. “I just want to live a normal life, normal job, and just for things to be normal. It took a long time for that to really happen.”

Yang was among dozens gathered Friday in the Ramsey County Courthouse to celebrate the 20-year anniversary of the Adult Substance Abuse Court, a drug court that partners substance use offenders with social workers, probation officers and others in order to help offenders find sobriety.

Old and new graduates gathered for the event, catching up on each others’ lives and to hear testimonials about the court’s effectiveness. Chief Ramsey County District Judge Leonardo Castro said the court is critical for helping people with substance abuse and mental health disorders.

In 2020, he said, more than 91,000 people died from drug overdoses in the United States. In the country’s prisons, 65% of all inmates have a substance abuse disorder, and $80 billion is spent on incarceration annually. He cited federal data that shows participating in treatment court can reduce offenders’ chance of recidivism by up to 26%.

“So it doesn’t matter what angle or what perspective you have as it relates to treatment courts … [they] are necessary, and they work,” Castro said.

Evidence of treatment courts’ success is mounting now, but it was not so easy to prove before.

Joanne Smith, the first woman to be appointed chief judge in Minnesota, said that when she founded the Ramsey County program in October 2002, she did so on “a wing and prayer.”

Hennepin County already had launched a drug treatment court years prior, but many clients were breaking the law again soon after leaving it. It was hard to convince potential stakeholders that the court could be successful, but Smith said she saw many Southern states normalizing treatment courts as way to reduce jail populations.

“And I thought, with my Northern arrogance, what’s wrong with us? Why aren’t we doing this?” Smith said. “When I see an obstacle, I see an opportunity. That grows out of my stubbornness, or my perseverance. We faced many of those along the way, but we never gave up. And here we are 20 years later.”

The court is one of 70 treatment courts across Minnesota, with at least one in each of the state’s 10 judicial districts. Among them are DWI Court, Veterans Court, Mental Health Court and Juvenile Drug Court. The Ramsey County program is designed to provide participants with the opportunity to break the cycle of substance abuse by using assessment, drug and mental health treatment, strict supervision, random testing and regular court hearings, along with immediate sanctions and incentives to help participants stay drug free.

Hundreds of people have graduated from Smith’s court, and it has earned national recognition that has included invitations to mentor other jurisdictions’ courts.

Yang acknowledges that recovery isn’t easy. More than a dozen years later, he still has nightmares of using drugs. But through all that time, he has remained sober. He’s the manager of a manufacturing facility, and in 2016 he bought a house — and a Cadillac. He’s also a proud father of seven children, ranging from 11 months to 18 years.

“Yeah,” he said. “Life is good.”



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Former Duluth East hockey coach Mike Randolph violated employee conduct policies

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Not all of the interviews were negative; a fair amount of players and parents reported positive experiences with Randolph, some saying they never witnessed him belittling players.

“To me, he was fabulous,” one parent said, noting their child “blossomed” under Randolph.

Terch wrote he was not able to substantiate an allegation that Randolph received payments from the East End Hockey Boosters, although he did find “unusual financial management practices” by the booster club, including a misrepresentation to parents about the use of at least some of what they paid, a commingling of funds between events and “unorthodox” accounting practices. Several parents said they felt they had overpaid many times without explanation. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension began investigating the former East hockey booster club in 2023 for alleged embezzlement. The status of that case is unknown.

In response to the report’s release, Duluth Public Schools Superintendent John Magas said in a statement that he can’t discuss personnel matters, but the district takes all reports from students and families “very seriously.”

“Our primary goal is to ensure that students have the best possible experiences, both in the classroom and in extracurricular activities,” he said. “We are committed to thoroughly investigating any concerns brought to our attention and taking appropriate action” to maintain safe and positive learning environments.

St. Thomas Academy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.



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How Trump tariffs would shock U.S., world economies

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Gas prices would increase by as much as 75 cents per gallon in the Midwest, where most refined products come from Canada, according to Patrick De Haan, an analyst at GasBuddy. Overall, the Peterson Institute for International Economics said Trump’s tariffs would cost the typical household $2,600 per year; the Yale Budget Lab said in an estimate released Wednesday that the annual cost could be as high as $7,600 for a typical household. As a share of their income, the poorest Americans would pay 6 percent more with 20 percent tariffs, compared with 1.4 percent more for the richest 1 percent, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think tank.

“We’re not talking about caviar — these are things that people have to buy. They’re essentials,” said Neil Saunders, a managing director at the analytics company GlobalData.

Economists say it would take several painful years for alternative domestic producers to emerge for many goods. For instance, almost all shoes and 90 percent of tomatoes sold in the country are imported, according to the Peterson Institute. And the United States does not even have the climate necessary to produce many food items – such as coffee, bananas, avocados, to say nothing of Chilean sea bass – at the necessary scale to meet domestic demand, said Joseph Politano, an economic analyst who has written on the subject on his Substack.

Trump’s tariffs would also reverberate through Wall Street and global markets, inviting turmoil that would affect investors and companies worldwide. Those effects would probably be felt quickly.

During Trump’s first term, stocks fell on nine of 11 days in 2018 and 2019 that the United States or China announced new tariffs, according to a study this year by economists with the Federal Reserve and Columbia University. Comprehensive tariffs would cause a swift one-time jump in prices before reducing economic growth about six months later, according to economist David Page, head of macro research for AXA Investment Managers in London.

Many analysts are hopeful that a stock market panic would dissuade or prevent Trump from carrying out his plans. The investment bank UBS projected that a 10 percent universal tariff could lead to a 10 percent contraction in the stock market. U.S. multinationals are heavily dependent on foreign subsidiaries, and retailers, auto manufacturers and other industrial sectors would be hit the hardest, according to UBS. Chris McNally, an analyst at Evercore, said Trump’s 10 percent tariff plan could cause a more than 20 percent decline in General Motors’ earnings, with slightly smaller declines for Ford and Stellantis.



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On the Wisconsin-Iowa border, the Mississippi River is eroding sacred Indigenous mounds

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Bear and other members of her tribe are serving as consultants on the project, as is William Quackenbush, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin, and his tribe. They also lead teams of volunteers to help care for the mounds, which includes removing invasive European plants and replacing them with native plants that reduce soil erosion.

Some are skeptical of this manmade solution to a manmade problem. There are some tribal partners who’ve expressed that the river should be allowed to keep flowing as it wants to, Oberreuter said. Snow also acknowledged that people have been hesitant about making such a change to the natural bank.

But, she pointed out, “The bank is (already) no longer what it was.”

When the berm is complete, Snow said, there’ll be a trail atop it that visitors can walk. That may help protect the mounds better than the current way to see them, which is to walk among them, she said.

The Sny Magill Unit has been part of Effigy Mounds National Monument since 1962, Snow said, but it’s not advertised like the rest of the park. That’s in part because there are no staff stationed there to properly guide people through the mounds. But if people visit respectfully, she believes it’s one of the best places to take in the mounds because it’s on a flat, walkable surface, unlike the rest of the park, which is on a blufftop.



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