Boy charged with felony for carrying sugar
I post stories like this every now and then to make the simple point that constitutional public local governments are just as capable of doing completely ridiculous and abusive things as the HOAs I usually write about. And here's an example of extending the "all jokes will be taken seriously" policy that originated in airport security to the public school system. The sugar became a "look alike drug" in the eyes of the school and the police because the boy told some friends, jokingly, that it was cocaine, then said, "Just kidding." I wonder if we have a cultural problem here, which is that people in positions of authority increasingly seem to misunderstand that each and every one of them has a limited governmental function to perform. Common sense, for example, once imposed limits on school officials' actions. Now, with "zero tolerance" policies, they have abandoned that limitation and behave like tyrannical robots. The officials here claim that they can't tell the difference between real drugs and look-alikes. If these school officials are incapable of correctly identifying a bag of sugar, I respectfully suggest that the local school board might want to inquire into whether these folks have the intelligence needed to run a middle school.

A 12-year-old Aurora boy who said he brought powdered sugar to school for a science project this week has been charged with a felony for possessing a look-alike drug, Aurora police have confirmed. The sixth-grade student at Waldo Middle School was also suspended for two weeks from school after showing the bag of powdered sugar to his friends. The boy, who is not being identified because he is a juvenile, said he brought the bag to school to ask his science teacher if he could run an experiment using sugar. 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.