I read a story like this and I feel an odd combination of anger, bewilderment and embarrassment (for being from a country in which such inanities can happen):
Two teens, both asthma sufferers, are together when one commits a henious crime:
Ferguson said she forgot to bring her medication to their school, Caney Creek High School, on Sept. 24. When she had trouble breathing, she went to the nurse’s office.
Out of concern, Kivi let her use his inhaler.
“I was trying to save her life. I didn’t want her to die on me right there because the nurse’s office (doesn’t) have breathing machines,” Kivi said.
“It made a big difference. It did save my life. It was a Good Samaritan act,” Ferguson said.
But the school nurse said it was a violation of the district’s no-tolerance drug policy, and reported Kivi to the campus police.
The next day, he was arrested and accused of delivering a dangerous drug. Kivi was also suspended from school for three days. He could face expulsion and sent to juvenile detention on juvenile drug charges.
Can’t a country as great as America get its priorities straight and get shit like this out of our clogged legal system? Is this what we really want to pay our police and our courts to do?
1
By David Mercer
What utter madness!! I have come to believe more and more that many problems in the US won’t get better until the War on Drugs is ended, as it touchs upon so many areas. Medical privacy, liberty to put whatever you want in your body, freedom to grow whatever freaking plants you care to, sentencing inflation to the point that felonies are routine and nearly meaningless, widespread disenfranchisement, massive corruption of law enforcement, erosion of rule of law and respect for it, increased bureaucracy. Have I missed any biggies?
It’s corroded our national soul.
October 9, 2003 @ 9:28 am | Comment
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By vaara
Albuterol, man. Far out. Dude, like stop bogarting your inhaler!
October 9, 2003 @ 10:10 am | Comment
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By richard
The war on drugs is an aberration, the cause of so much crime and civil war and oppression it can’t be calculated in dollars or lives lost. It is a uniquely American folly, a by-product of our latent puritanism, the kind that breeds asinine laws discriminating against gays, that makes the human body “obscene,” that — well, you can tell how I feel about this. Just say NO to the war on drugs.
October 9, 2003 @ 10:10 am | Comment