Update on Aurora, IL students sugar drug case
I blogged earlier about a report that an Aurora, IL student was facing felony charges over possessing powdered sugar as a look-alike drug.
Since then, I have received an email response from the East Aurora School District that included an Aurora Police Department statement on the matter.
The APD statement says, among other things, that the student is facing misdemeanor rather than felony charges over the incident. I wouldn’t blindly trust the APD to deal with the public truthfully, but the part about misdemeanor charges is corroborated by a correction issued by the Chicago Sun Times [scroll down to the very bottom].
A story in Saturday’s editions should have said a 12-year-old Aurora boy was charged with a misdemeanor for allegedly bringing a bag of powdered sugar to school and telling a classmate it was crack cocaine.
The statement from school district officials that I received via email also indicated that the students suspension was being softened by letting him serve the remaining eight days of it in an alternative school, so he doesn’t fall behind academically.
While it may be time to tone down the rhetoric over this, I’m still very displeased about the case as it’s still excessive.
The part about “telling a classmate it was crack cocaine” seems only partially consistent with the mothers version of things from the original news story:
Two other boys asked if the bag contained cocaine after he showed it to them in the bathroom Wednesday morning, the boy’s mother said.
He joked that it was cocaine, before telling them, “just kidding,” she said.
What we’re really looking at, it would seem, is a student getting slapped with misdemeanor charges because an eavesdropping janitor doesn’t understand kids well enough to know their jokes are often dumb. That the police and school district are arguably putting a malevolent spin on what could be viewed a lot more innocently based on the mothers statement to me indicates someone is being rather contemptible here.
Furthermore, I have an additional problem with this in that we’re talking about powdered sugar as a supposed “look-alike” drug. The initial story only mentioned cocaine, so the reader could assign some minor credibility to the notion that powdered sugar looks somewhat like cocaine if it’s assumed we’re talking about high dollar powdered cocaine. Now it has come out that we’re talking about crack cocaine, which looks nothing like powdered sugar. One doesn’t have to be a participant in the drug culture to know powdered sugar in a baggie is not a rock of crack. The claim that it’s a “look-alike” drug in that context is laughable.
While the news that the poor kid is only facing misdemeanor charges rather than a felony is good news, this is still an episode that could be best explained by the police and school district officials being on drugs.
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[...] Update: They’re now saying it’s a misdemeanor. Still though. [...]