Yes, our zealous educational bureaucrats are at it again. This time, yet another school in Texas imposed a bizarre, one-week suspension on an elementary school student. Her offense? Possession of a Jolly Rancher’s candy that a friend had given her. It seems the healthy food police insist that possession of such evil contraband was a blatant violation of the rules and could not go unpunished.
Now, I love Texas. My wife and I lived in the state for 14 years in the 1970s and 1980s, and we plan to have our primary retirement home there. But after this latest incident, I was beginning to wonder if there was something in the water supply that was causing Texans to lose all semblance of good judgment. (It could also explain why they inflicted both Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush on the nation.)
It soon became apparent, though, that the loss of common sense is not unique to Texas schools. School administrators in Georgia suspended an autistic student for drawing a stick figure gun with a caption that implied he would like to shoot his teacher. Not only did he receive a suspension, he now faces possible felony charges. Although the child is 14 years old, his parents and others insist that he has the mental capacity of a third grader. Nice way to show compassion and a sense of proportion, Georgia bureaucrats.
Just when you think law enforcement bureaucrats can’t get any more irrational, comes this story (hat tip to my Cato Institute colleague Dan Mitchell) from Indiana. A grandmother ran afoul of the drug war laws by making two purchases of cold medicine for her family.
When Sally Harpold bought cold medicine for her family back in March, she never dreamed that four months later she would end up in handcuffs.
Now, Harpold is trying to clear her name of criminal charges, and she is speaking out in hopes that a law will change so others won’t endure the same embarrassment she still is facing.
…Harpold is a grandmother of triplets who bought one box of Zyrtec-D cold medicine for her husband at a Rockville pharmacy. Less than seven days later, she bought a box of Mucinex-D cold medicine for her adult daughter at a Clinton pharmacy, thereby purchasing 3.6 grams total of pseudoephedrine in a week’s time.
Those two purchases put her in violation of Indiana law 35-48-4-14.7, which restricts the sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, or PSE, products to no more than 3.0 grams within any seven-day period.
When the police came knocking at the door of Harpold’s Parke County residence on July 30, she was arrested on a Vermillion County warrant for a class-C misdemeanor, which carries a sentence of up to 60 days in jail and up to a $500 fine.
The good citizens of Indiana can now rest easier knowing this nefarious drug lord has been apprehended. Whatever happened to the concept of discretion by police and prosecutors? Whatever happened to common sense?
And then there is this story about how a young couple lost custody of their young children for a month after a Wal-mart employee forwarded “bath-time” photos they had taken of the children to the authorities. How many parents over the decades would have run afoul of such absurd suspicions of child pornography, if that standard had been the norm?
I’m interested in suggestions about how Americans can rein-in this runaway zealotry before it turns our country into something resembling the fascist and communist systems we used to abhor.