I just read a sad article in the Washington Post about a teen killing himself because he was about to be expelled from high school because he possessed marijuana in violation of the school's zero tolerance policy. Very sad, but then I started looking at some of the reader's comments. Wow. The venom in some of those posts. He was a kid and kids make mistakes. While I don't feel there should not have been consequences for the student's actions, ruining his life by expelling him for just smoking pot is a bit extreme. We're not talking about a kid selling drugs to his classmates, we're talking about a kid who was only harming himself.
We've all made mistakes in our lives, especially when we were younger, where the only person harmed was ourselves. Fortunately most of those mistakes didn't have long lasting consequences.
Re-reading the posts in that thread and I'm still not sure if some of the responders are just trolls or the type of people so afraid of every little thing that could go wrong that we've legislated ourselves into a nanny state with limited rights so we can feel safe from the bad guys; you know, the type who live in Iowa but were fine with New Yorkers being searched on the subway so they in Iowa would feel safe from terrorists, regardless of whether New Yorkers were potentially having their Constitutional rights violated.
Whatever happened to using the brains we were born with and looking at every situation individually? If the kid was a seller, expel him. But if he was just a user, then place him in some appropriate program so he can continue his education and move on from this mistake. Get rid of these zero tolerance policies and let justice prevail.
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