You wanna get high? Don't smoke these, they're Japanese maple leaves
The Roanoke Times has a terribly disturbing story of a Bedford Middle School 11-year-old who was suspended last year for having a "pot leaf" in his backpack, with a lighter. The 11-year-old was a 6th grader in the gifted and talented program at the school in Virginia.
His story, on the face of it is terrible:
Some schoolchildren claim another student bragged about having marijuana. They inform school administrators. An assistant principal finds a leaf and a lighter in the boy’s knapsack. The student is suspended for a year. A sheriff’s deputy files marijuana possession charges in juvenile court.
By itself, this seems like an incredible overreaction by both the school and the authorities. But drugs are drugs and, if
Touch of Evil taught us nothing, it's that marijuana will turn you into a Mexican-racist-greaser—who prays on white women. However, even more terrible than this draconian punishment is the fact that this draconian punishment is for nothing.
There was only one problem: Months after the fact, the couple learned the substance wasn’t marijuana. A prosecutor dropped the juvenile court charge because the leaf had field-tested negative three times.
[Bold my emphasis.]
Holy crap. This child's parents are both schoolteachers and they have been fighting this for a while now. They have filed a federal lawsuit that is hitting hard at the school administration for violating their sons civil rights and the sheriff's office for malicious prosecution.
The suit also charges the officer at the school, Deputy M.M. Calohan, of "malicious prosecution" after filing the drug charges against the boy despite field tests indicating the leaf was not marijuana.
"The field test came back not inconclusive, but negative," said Bays' attorney, Melvin Williams. "Yet she went to a magistrate and swore he possessed marijuana at school."
If you want to pretend that marijuana should be treated with the same vehemence that assault with a deadly weapon does, you are an insane person. However, you'd better have someone who is
actually guilty of what you are charging them with. He's 11 years old!
The school's and sheriff's lawyer, attorney Jim Guynn, has reportedly moved to dismiss the suit because he claims that, under the school board's anti-drug policies, it may not matter whether the leaf was marijuana or not.
Since it turns out that all of the authority figures in this case are criminally incompetent, they are backpedaling like crazy people. Their new argument is that the school has a policy that "look-alike" drugs are equally punishable. So, if something "looks like" a drug you can be punished. The problem is that, that's not really what the law/rule. The real word is "imitation drugs" which is supposed to be more about things that are still actually drugs. This is clearly the loophole the school and sheriff's office are trying to weasel through to get out of malicious prosecution charges. If it's not a loophole then you can be expelled for dumping sugar on a lunchroom table and saying it's cocaine.
The full story by Dan Casey, which you can read here, goes into the fact that every single thing about this situation is terrible and stupid and indicative of an awful cultural shift in attitudes towards not only drugs, but children and the jobs of the adults charged with the duty to protect these children. The evidence, from the beginning was dubious, and when you are meting out huge suspensions, you'd better know exactly what you are doing—and none of these people seem to. Because of this suspension, the Bays' child would be sent to a more problematic school and so they tried schooling him from home, but don't worry, nothing like this could have adverse effects on an 11-year-old, right?
The school system also required the boy be evaluated for substance abuse problems. So the Bays took him to his longtime pediatrician in Lynchburg, who referred them to a pediatric psychiatrist.
They said the psychiatrist told them he didn’t believe their son had a substance abuse problem. But by then, the boy had other problems. After the disciplinary hearing, “he just broke down and said his life was over. He would never be able to get into college; he would never be able to get a job,” Linda Bays said.
Now their son is skittish about going out in public, suffers from panic attacks and is depressed. The psychiatrist is treating him for that.
The child is finally coming back to school because his psychiatrist says it's the best thing for him. But, like any full-of-shit authority figure who has completely blown it, the child will be on
strict probation. Somebody should be on strict probation and it's not an 11-year-old.
