Undercover cop poses as high school student, busts 27.
March 6, 2001 7:49 AM Subscribe
posted by darren at 8:09 AM on March 6, 2001
...manufacturing marijuana, use of a communication device to facilitate the sale of drugs...
Why do they make these charges sound so dastardly? Translation: "pot plant growing in closet, cell-phone used to talk with friends about drugs."
posted by MarkAnd at 8:16 AM on March 6, 2001
This is ridiculous. They need to find something better for this officer to do...like maybe spending all day surfing the internet looking for kiddie porn or something...
posted by ritualdevice at 8:50 AM on March 6, 2001
posted by frednorman at 8:57 AM on March 6, 2001
I think this might be as good a reason as any.
posted by ratbastard at 9:12 AM on March 6, 2001
I finally saw Requiem for a Dream last night and it was absolutely amazing (with a fine Web site to go with it). This is why they bother. This is why drugs are illegal. It's too bad schools can't require all kids to watch it. It would have scared the crap out of me.
posted by joshua at 9:35 AM on March 6, 2001
I'm not sure what thats about. Did they intentionally arrest ugly people, or is there some kind of connection between drug use and being ugly? Whats the deal?
posted by howa2396 at 9:39 AM on March 6, 2001
Pot should be legal, for adults. Like alcohol. Which should be legal at 18, but that's another fight.
posted by dhartung at 9:43 AM on March 6, 2001
posted by Skot at 9:52 AM on March 6, 2001
How many high school students are deterred by the fact that beer is illegal?
How much more attractive is that particular vice if only 'adults' can have it, especially when you consider how much energy young adults spend trying to 'act grown up'?
"pot" for example, becomes an equal opportunity vice. it is illegal for everyone. the difference is, it doesn't have a multi-billion dollar industry trying to directly market it to teens.
How many kids are prescribed a _real_ personality altering drug (ritalin for example) on a whim from the family doc? Isn't that a dangerous drug? How many kids really need it? Have you noticed that the number of kids diagnosed each year with ADHD has gone up since ritalin came on the market? or that as the manufacturer's marketing budget increases, so do diagnoses of the disorder?
Have you ever hung out with a family who let their teenager have a few beers every once in a while? That kid rarely gets 'smashed' and he doesn't have to go elsewhere, get drunk, then get on the road to make it home before curfew .
I guess the point I am rambling on about is that :
1) the war on SOME drugs is silly, and downright criminal. We should have the right to decide what we are going to put into our bodies, wether or not it is marketed by Phillip morris or not.
2) parents, not lawmakers, need to take personal responsibility to raise their children, and help them decide what (if any) substances the wish to use (which will help prevent 'abuse')
wow. now that I have solved the drug problem, let's move on to cancer : )
posted by das_2099 at 10:06 AM on March 6, 2001
The concept of (name of illegal drug)being legal for adults only makes about as much sense as (name of legal drug , eg alchohol)being for adults only. Namely none."
sorry, i used the "less than " and "greater than" symbols before. i forgot there was some html involved
sorry, that first post looks insane ; )
posted by das_2099 at 10:09 AM on March 6, 2001
This story, which davidgentle posted to this thread, is all about some guy's sacred mission to get a photo of Thomas Pynchon---it reads like a spy story---the guy finally gets the picture, and on the website, it's 150 pixels wide! Bet it was huge in print.
By contrast, dig the Journal's front page---monster photograph ahoy! Good for them.
In response to Don's hot potato, there: what do school shootings have to do with undercover police operations that take advantage of a school's social network to make arrests related to drug sales where the drugs "were not being sold on the high school campus"?
Postroad: you, sir, are a troll.
posted by Sapphireblue at 10:24 AM on March 6, 2001
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:51 AM on March 6, 2001
Postroad: I'm willing to bet that there are current, former or future drug users in the room. Would you care to elaborate?
posted by sixfoot6 at 11:16 AM on March 6, 2001
Because they both point to a need for increased police presence (uniformed or otherwise) in schools. Call me fascist, but where I went to high school, we could've used 'em.
posted by ratbastard at 11:36 AM on March 6, 2001
Fascist.
I thought, from your original post, you were seeking to draw a closer parallel between drugs in schools and kids with guns in schools than simply two items on a checklist of Things The Cops Could Fix For Us.
By the time the schools are so bad you've got to patrol the halls with policemen, something's already gone wrong that *no* number of cops can fix.
If lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, policemen can, maybe, sometimes, prevent crime. But they can't prevent *criminals*. Saying police presence is the answer makes the implicit assumption that there are going to be kids with guns just because that's how it is, and since that's how it is, we better protect *our* kids, the *good* kids---call me idealist, but it'd sure be nice to show that same concern to the ones who end up toting guns to school. They don't get born that way, I don't believe.
If there were a way to get to those kids before they go over the edge, then we don't have to worry about how dangerous they might be for the eighty-five percent or so of each school year they spend someplace *other* than in school.
posted by Sapphireblue at 12:36 PM on March 6, 2001
*undercover* drug operations in schools won't deter *any* crime unless through student paranoia. paranoia will only come about [insert pot joke here] by making these undercover operations commonplace... and I sure don't like to think about how many cops there'd have to be pretending to be high school students to make that happen.
posted by Sapphireblue at 12:44 PM on March 6, 2001
posted by pikachulolita at 1:28 PM on March 6, 2001
posted by samsara at 3:00 PM on March 6, 2001
The web site doesn't work in IE5/Mac, which makes it quite unamazing by default. (If you can't be bothered to make sure your bell-and-whistle-laden site even loads properly on the 2nd-most-popular platform out there, you're an inept web designer, no matter how pretty your creation may look.) To say nothing of the fact that the site forces you to sit there and stare at its overwrought Flash movie for two or three solid minutes whether you want to or not. Was a lousy "skip intro" button really too much to ask for? Come to think of it, why does the site require Flash in the first place? Sites that want actual hits offer non-Flash versions. Rant off.
As for the movie, I haven't seen it, but any film that contains Jennifer Connelly makes me think twice about its artistic value.
How many kids are prescribed a _real_ personality altering drug (ritalin for example) on a whim from the family doc? Isn't that a dangerous drug? How many kids really need it? Have you noticed that the number of kids diagnosed each year with ADHD has gone up since ritalin came on the market? or that as the manufacturer's marketing budget increases, so do diagnoses of the disorder?
Oh God, not another psychiatric-drug conspiracy theory. Prescribed "on a whim?" If so, that's malpractice, not the medication's fault. A dangerous drug? Most are, when abused. How many kids really need it? Well, no offense, but you're not an expert. ADHD diagnoses going up since Ritalin came? Ritalin was approved by the FDA in 1961. ADD/ADHD didn't become big until 1980. Marketing budget/diagnoses relationship? Even if true, correlation does not equal causation. Next!
posted by aaron at 4:47 PM on March 6, 2001
posted by Potsy at 6:26 PM on March 6, 2001
I was ready to throw in my towel with the conspiracy theorists, but now I'm not so sure...
posted by jnthnjng at 6:54 PM on March 6, 2001
posted by jnthnjng at 6:57 PM on March 6, 2001
posted by Dooberville at 7:43 PM on March 6, 2001
Last month use of cannabis by high school seniors:
18.1% in the Netherlands (1996);
23.7% in the U.S. (1997).
Any lifetime use (prevalence) of cannabis by older teens (1994):
30% in the Netherlands;
38% in the U.S.
a little dated, but you get the general gist.
i'm pretty sure they're not playing 21 jump street in the schools in the netherlands. i think it's got something to do with smarter drug laws. just a hunch.
posted by titboy at 9:20 PM on March 6, 2001
Worked on my IE5/Mac. But then again I never got past all the flash. I got bored and went to IMDB to find out what the movie is actually about. Don't tell marketing firms this: INFORMATION drives the Internet not esoteric free-flowing flash fantasy sites. Technically nice work but, like I said, I got bored.
If lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, policemen can, maybe, sometimes, prevent crime. But they can't prevent *criminals*.
Nicely said. But wouldn't you say that criminals are created by environmental factors? It wouldn't hurt kids to have more positive role models in their lives. But that would mean we'd need to get cops into the schools to encourage and help the kids instead of policing them.
posted by LoraT at 9:47 PM on March 6, 2001
It's near the end of the Flash movie that compatibility starts to completely fall apart.
Are you saying ... unless they come across an actual memo from a drug company's CEO explictly stating "HA, HA! Our evil plan to drug up America's kids will make us rich!', then it's all just a coincidence?
Roughly speaking, yes, at least legally. I don't know that you'd need to produce incontrovertible evidence of the CEO ranting and cackling like the average villian in a Scooby-Doo episode. You would, however, need to discover some sort of direct evidence that the drug company was purposely pumping up a given drug's ad budget with the clear intent of increasing the supply of potential users, not merely trying to get people who already have the diagnosis to ask their doctor about the drug. (And I don't personally recall ever seeing a Ritalin ad campaign aimed at consumers.) Otherwise, it's just a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, which would never stand up in court, or even any FDA regulatory meeting.
Ever heard of circumstantial evidence?
Yup. And circumstantial evidence, when it's the only kind provided, is an ad ignorantium logical fallacy. The burden of proof is on the accuser. You can't merely dump circumstantial evidence on the table and tell the skeptic "Beat that!" because that would swich the burden of proof to the skeptic when you haven't really backed up your point in the first place.
posted by aaron at 10:39 PM on March 6, 2001
no, no, no! not cops - teachers.
posted by pikachulolita at 10:59 PM on March 6, 2001
Take a look at a doc's office next time you're in there. I challenge you to find a pen or pad of paper or even a calendar that does NOT have the logo of a pharmaco prominently emblazoned upon it.
They spend bazillions each year giving away freebies to docs, free samples, catering "educational" lunches for the docs - where they learn about all the great benefits of Drug X, etc. This is big business, and they don't just spend all this money for the good of humanity - they do it because it directly translates to increased profits, and as corporations they have by definition NO more important goal.
And I'm not even touching on the whole infant formula thing, about which I know far too much. Suffice it to say, the pharmaco's (who make baby formula) directly and indirectly attack and undermine breastfeeding in order to increase their market share. And babies suffer and die as a result. Really.
In hospitals that are part of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, breastfeeding rates are much higher than those that don't, because part of the official Baby-Friendly certification is removing *all* freebies "generously donated" by formula companies.
And to take just one angle, formula feeding has been shown to increase the risk of death from SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, aka cot death). So for every n thousand mothers who choose to formula feed their children because of advertising & marketing, a baby dies. Okay, so I am not exactly 100% sure what the value of 'n' is today, but all of this is true. It's insidious.
Okay, I'd better move on now...
posted by beth at 8:52 AM on March 7, 2001
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posted by dancu at 8:05 AM on March 6, 2001