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March 6, 2001
7:49 AM Subscribe

Undercover cop poses as high school student, busts 27.The 24-year-old officer "attended football games and basketball games. He attended activities after school. He also carried a full course load and did homework. His grades started to suffer. We were kind of disappointed in him,” joked Sheriff Bill Hutson.
posted by darren (34 comments total)

That Jumpstreet crew is kicking ass.
posted by dancu at 8:05 AM on March 6, 2001

I wonder if the cop woke up in the middle of the night having that traditional nightmare about missing finals and having to go back to high school, only to cry out "Oh sh**, I do have to go back to high school!!!
posted by darren at 8:09 AM on March 6, 2001

Two of the charges filed against the high school students:

...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

Why do they even bother?

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

What's with those large color-photographs on the side of the article there, by the way? They're almost the size of a NEWS.COM-ad...
posted by frednorman at 8:57 AM on March 6, 2001

Why do they even bother?

I think this might be as good a reason as any.
posted by ratbastard at 9:12 AM on March 6, 2001

Why do they even bother?

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

What's with those large color-photographs on the side of the article there, by the way?

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

I support decriminalization of marijuana, but that doesn't mean I want high school students smoking it. In fact a large reason for the decriminalization would be to eliminate the criminal enterprises that distribute it, and lure kids into that cliché, a life of crime, especially if they get arrested and spend some time in the pokey aka vocational school for drug dealers -- which increasingly draconian laws are unintentionally creating.

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

Bingo, dhartung. Although, did you see the ages of those arrested? Out of the 27 arrests, only five were minors, and the oldest was 27! Rock, rock, rock, rock, rock 'n roll high school . . .
posted by Skot at 9:52 AM on March 6, 2001

The concept of being legal for adults only makes about as much sense as being for adults only. Namely none.

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

My last post got screwed. it should have read :
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

Kill all drug dealers and users.
posted by Postroad at 10:16 AM on March 6, 2001

I'm actually digging that the site has great big photos with their stories. Plentiful and large photos is still the thing that most print newspapers have over their online editions.

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

That sounds like 'drug talk' to me.
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:51 AM on March 6, 2001

sonofsamiam:
that is pretty damned funny

posted by das_2099 at 11:10 AM on March 6, 2001

Is it me, or did they tweak the color levels of each of those giant Offender Photos in Photoshop? All fourteen of them look blue and downright spooky, with zombie eyes that seem to say: "Please, I need more drugs! I want to corrupt your youth!" Impressive work.

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

Kill all trolls
posted by Postroad at 11:31 AM on March 6, 2001

Sapphireblue,

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

ratbastard,

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

oh, and in my pinko-radical fervor I forgot to make this point:

*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

last year, there was a slight threat at my high school that resulted in cops patroling campus. it was awful. not because anyone was doing anything wrong, but because everyone got paranoid and scared. i was far more scared once the cops showed up than before there was no real threat. no one paid much attention to anything that day because we were all so distracted and freaked out by the police presence everywhere. no one learned a goddamn thing. police presence pervasive enough to make a difference just takes away from the learning process.
posted by pikachulolita at 1:28 PM on March 6, 2001

I think I was was there too. I didn't learn anything on that day, but I did get a chance to clean out my locker while no one was looking...whew.It's really no different inside schools other than there isn't as much pent up frustration caused from social and educational pressures on the "outside." The reason that many parents take offense to the presence of drugs in schools is because it's really their decision to send little Joey to this social-experiment-of-an-institution for the benifit of gained insight and useful knowledge...they might feel somewhat guilty. The truth is, there isn't a magical plastic bubble that surrounds schools. When you enter, you are not automatically whisked off to learning land. Instead, dropped into the current state of society at it's rawest. In order to solve these problems that we see in school, the problems on the outside would have to be solved as well. This is a world on drugs, any questions?
posted by samsara at 3:00 PM 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).

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

Where a good bit of this began.
posted by samsara at 5:28 PM on March 6, 2001

aaron, if das_2099 is a conspiracy theorist, then you're a coincidence theorist. Are you saying people can play "follow the money" all they want, but 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? Ever heard of circumstantial evidence?
posted by Potsy at 6:26 PM on March 6, 2001

Continuing the ritalin thread, here's an interesting story that says "According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, ADHD is not overtreated, but may actually be underdiagnosed."
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

Then of course, there's the other side of the argument.
posted by jnthnjng at 6:57 PM on March 6, 2001

Y'know I am thinking we (as a country) lost the "war on drugs" a long damn time ago. The current restrictions on these substances are reminiscent of prohabition in the 1920's. It didn't work then either. Whether or not you agree with my position, I think everyone would have to acknowledge that it is easier for a 15 year-old to score a joint than a beer. Why? The beer is regulated. Oh yeah, the government makes a buck on the beer too.....Now why can't I go to the store to score a bag of "Roman Red"? IMHO it beats spending billions of dollars and millions of manhours to hold back the ocean with a broom.
posted by Dooberville at 7:43 PM on March 6, 2001

DUTCH, USA AND UK DRUG USE COMPARISON STATISTICS

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

The web site doesn't work in IE5/Mac, which makes it quite unamazing by default.

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

Worked on my IE5/Mac. But then again I never got past all the flash.

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

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.

no, no, no! not cops - teachers.
posted by pikachulolita at 10:59 PM on March 6, 2001

Aaron, the pharmaceutical companies aim most of their marketing attack at the DOCTORS, not at patients (though there are more and more ads on tv for drugs aimed at patients).

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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