Local 'Smallville' star arrested

This is too sad. Former "Smallville" regular and Boston-area native Sam Jones III has been arrested in a federal drug sting and accused of conspiracy to deal thousands of oxycodone pills.

Jones was taken into custody in LA this morning, according to TMZ, with the DEA calling him a "co-conspirator" in several major drug deals in 2008. He has been charged with conspiracy to possess illegal drugs with intent to distribute, which has a maximum 20-year prison sentence.

This comes on the heels of the news that Adam Jasinski, the winner of last year's "Big Brother 9," was arrested on Saturday in North Reading on oxycodone distribution charges.

Jones, who was Pete Ross on "Smallville" and Chaz Pratt on "ER," is from Roxbury and, later, from Mattapan. I spent an afternoon with him and his father in 2002 when he was home visiting his parents. In the cruel irony department, he talked a lot that day about trying to stay out of trouble as a kid. "It's just a bad situation growing up in the inner city, but you don't know any better, so you love it. And you just get involved in what all your friends are getting involved in. If everybody in the neighborhood is smoking weed and selling drugs, then you smoke weed and sell drugs, too.

"My message to the kids is just don't do that; there's another way. Your life can be bigger than Boston. You may have started here but you can go somewhere else."

Here's hoping Jones finds his way back to a good place. The entire interview is reprinted in the previous item on Viewer Discretion.