Kids See Beetle Baileys Of The Drug War As Screw-Ups
A couple of years ago I noticed my son’s elementary school corridor was festooned with a huge banner that said the following: “Mediation is the answer.”
I’m in favor of mediation, of course, especially when contending with schoolyard bullies. But this sort of pious hectoring tends to bring out the subversive in me.
When I saw the sign, I suggested to my son he should tell his classmates his father’s counsel was slightly different: “Medication is the answer.” My son laughed, as he should have, but he is considerably more astute about these things than me and kept the line to himself.
Which is just as well, for if he had repeated it to the wrong person, we might now be just emerging from a protracted course of family drug education and counseling, not to mention custody hearings.
Do I exaggerate? I’m not so sure.
Last year, a teenage girl in New York was suspended from school for offering a Midol tablet to a classmate suffering from menstrual cramps. And just this past month, in Fairfax County, Va. (where I live), another school girl has been suspended for a week for a comparable crime.
A 12-year-old middle school student was riding on the bus one afternoon when a classmate complained of a headache. Young Nikki Greenberg reached into her bag to fetch a bottle of Advil, but then thought better of it. Too late: The bus driver saw the forbidden substance in her grasp and reported young Nikki to school authorities. She will be suspended for a week, is banned from school activities for a month, must perform community service, and her dreaded “permanent record” will disclose she was “in possession of a controlled substance” on school property.
Moreover, if Nikki Greenberg and her parents fail to attend mandatory drug counseling sessions, she will get no credit for the work she missed during her suspension and will fail the quarter.
First, a disclaimer. I confess to being an aging Baby Boomer, but one who was (and remains) fearfully respectful of the power of pharmaceutical substances in the body, especially the brain, and was generally put off by the drug culture. And while I may find most public and private campaigns to discourage drug use heavy-handed, and think they probably do more harm than good, I do not believe children and adolescents should be popping pills without a prescription - or, for that matter, carrying bottles of Advil in their purses. That is a parent’s prerogative.
Yet this is ridiculous. Advil is not a controlled substance; it is an over-the-counter pain reliever, which any 12-year-old may legally purchase. Nikki Greenberg seems far from a potential drug abuser and her parents are clearly responsible people: Mrs. Greenberg grounded her daughter for the incident.
The idea a 12-year-old and her family should be treated as criminals because she thought to relieve a friend’s headache with a nonprescription analgesic is grotesque.
Nikki Greenberg’s punishment - and the “zero-tolerance” policy it reflects - will have exactly the opposite effect the school authorities intend. It will blur the distinction between necessary medicines and “recreational” drugs. It will needlessly confuse children who are now being told there is no basic difference between such substances as LSD, cocaine or amphetamines and such everyday elements of hygiene and well-being as vitamins, mouthwash, cough drops, Pepto Bismol, aspirin and ointments.
Worst of all, it will transform the Nikki Greenbergs of the system into cynics: Children are never as stupid as school administrators believe they are, and they understand the underlying politics and hypocrisy of such standards.
Young people laugh at a system that sees children lured by Tums into degradation. They see, with skeptical clarity, what their elders cannot.
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