SCHOOL STING WAS A BUST FOR EVERYONE

     Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, for confirming what a lot
of us already knew: Operation Checkup was a poorly executed farce from its
beginning in 1995 to its very sorry end this week.

     Wake County Sheriff John Baker had good -- albeit overly ambitious --
intentions in wanting to clean up drug activity in public schools.

     His department trained undercover agents to look and act like
drug-hungry teenagers, and then set them loose in 12 high schools. Three
months later, they dragged 75 students in for processing.

     It was fitting that the last sting-related case was closed with the
acquittal of Ricky Tholen, 19, a former Garner High School student.

     Tholen's case proved that, in their zeal to save young lives, Baker
and his agents ruined some, too.

     Tholen had dreams of becoming a professional photographer and had
never brokered a drug deal until an undercover agent assigned to Garner
High badgered him daily to "hook him up" with some marijuana.

     Tholen testified that the undercover agent "was so persistent, it was
beginning to distract me. ..."

     In order to appease him, Tholen found someone with marijuana to sell
and arranged a deal.

     It is not a crime to know your surroundings, to know who has what and
to know who will do what. Rather, it's a survival skill.

     Tholen simply knew where to go for what the agent wanted.

     But when he agreed to serve as the middleman and make a hand-to-hand
exchange of money for drugs, there went his future.

     Tholen was charged with a felony, suspended from school and forced to
shelve his plans for college, because he couldn't return to Garner High
School until his case was settled.

     It took two years for that to happen -- two years in which Tholen
married, had a son and went to work as a house-painter.

     It's a good life but not the one that could have been.

     "I wanted to go to college," he told the court.

     On Wednesday, the young man who wanted to stand behind a camera was
instead sitting in front of several, a witness in his own drug trial.

     As for the dealer that Tholen contacted for the undercover agent?
Probably still out there, doing the very damage Baker sought to stop.

     And high school students are still using drugs, as they did before
Baker's agents came through, before Tholen and others like him -- high
school kids more eager to help a friend than to think too far into the
future -- knew what would hit them, and hit them hard.

     The legacy of Operation Checkup is a tangle of ironies that
essentially knocked some good kids off track and largely missed the
troublesome kids Baker and his agents were aiming for.

     One last irony:

     When the undercover agents were chosen for Operation Checkup, they had
to swear they had never used heroin, cocaine, LSD, mescaline, Ecstacy or
peyote.

     Experimentation with marijuana, however, was forgiven. Too many young
people had smoked pot to make not having done so one of the criteria.