PRIVACY TAKEN MUCH TOO FAR

Hey kids, guess what? Now you can keep drugs in your locker at school
and nobody can stop you. Not the police, the teachers, or mom and dad.
It's all thanks to the Supreme Court, that august body that hands down
weighty -- and hopefully wise -- decisions.

The court's recent ruling ordering drug-sniffing dogs to keep their
noses out of school lockers was certainly weighty, but it wasn't wise.
It came down on the side of individualism, a philosophy tailor-made
for teenage narcissism, instead of on the side of the community's
collective good. It is not in the collective good to open the door for
more people to carry drugs on their persons without fear of
repercussion and it is certainly not good for society or for students
when high school lockers are deemed sacrosanct places, off-limits to
random drug searches. The kids must be laughing all the way to their
next drug deal.

The Supreme Court's ruling centred on two cases -- one of a bus
passenger who was apprehended after a drug-sniffing dog detected
cocaine in his luggage six years ago in Calgary, the other of a
Sarnia, Ont. high school whose principal had police dogs come in to
sniff lockers for drugs. Silly principal -- trying to maintain zero
tolerance policies about drugs at his school. Well, the judges sure
showed him. He'll just have to join all the other adults who've thrown
up their hands at trying to keep a lid on a variety of adolescent
antics and let the kids rule. According to the court, these defendants
have had their constitutional rights violated. Tsk, tsk.

But what about other rights? Like the right of law-abiding society to
expect that walking around with large amounts of cocaine or other
illicit drugs remains a taboo and does not become the norm?

Or the right of parents and teachers to expect that certain rules
apply in schools, which are after all intended to be institutions of
learning, not of drug-dealing? The entire ruling is troubling, but the
part about school lockers is doubly so. It further reinforces an
ubiquitous sense of entitlement. When they're little, they're told
they're special and wonderful without ever doing anything to earn such
accolades. When they're older, they learn the Supreme Court has
sanctioned their desire to thumb their noses with impunity at adult
authority and say, "Nyah, nyah, you can't touch me. I can do anything
I please." And if what they please is to keep drugs in their lockers,
they're now free to do so in peace. What kind of adults are being
gestated for this do-as-you-please anarchical society of the future?
More questions for the court: When do kids learn they're supposed to
conform to certain societal standards? When do they learn they can't
do just as they like and actions have consequences? To borrow the
wonderfully succinct title of one of Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's
most famous books: If not now, when?

The court's ruling should have parents fuming for another reason --
schools are public places funded by taxpayers' money. Lockers are not
students' private property. Technically, they belong to the taxpayer
whose clout is sadly eroded by rulings that in essence allow drugs on
taxpayer-funded property.

Surprising that while the court was busy making rulings on dogs
sniffing, they didn't also outlaw dogs sniffing people's crotches. Now
there's an invasion of privacy, if ever there was one. Sounds dumb,
doesn't it? Almost as dumb as shifting the weight of the scales of
justice in favour of druggies and against preserving law and order.

Privacy concerns are supposed to be balanced off with the bigger
picture.

Take the case of Ryan Schallenberger, 18, of Chesterfield, S. C. His
parents turned him in to police recently after the postman left a
delivery notice in their mailbox -- 10 pounds of ammonium nitrate he'd
ordered was waiting for pick-up. Didn't Schallenberger have a
constitutional right to order stuff to make a bomb? Thank goodness his
parents didn't think so. You have to wonder what the Supreme Court of
Canada would have thought of that, if Schallenberger had lived in this
country.