Back in 2003, Savana Redding had a very bad day at school, you can read about it in today's NY Times . She was a 13 year-old eighth grader at the time, and it seems that one of her friends, having been caught with a couple of tabs of prescription-strength ibuprofen (Advil to the rest of us) informed the school administrators at her Safford, AZ middle school that she got them from Savana.

To make a long story short, Savana was strip-searched for Advil without there being any real evidence that she had hidden any on her body. She says that she wasn't even asked if she had any before being searched.

Now, I'll admit that I'm no phararmacologist, but I don't see Advil as a drug with a high abuse potential, even the prescription grade stuff which is 400 mg vs. the 200 mg pills we all pop out of the bottle.  But, it seems that the school had adopted a"zero-tolerance" policy regarding drugs and Advil was, in their eyes,the same as crack cocaine.

The school's lawyers stated that  the scool was “on the front lines of a decades-long struggle against drug abuse among students.”. I think this says more than the lawyer really wanted to say about the school administration's minsdset. In many, if not most, jurisdictions being a child verges on being a criminal offense and prison inmates have more rights than students. But it seems that at this school, students have now advanced to being illegal enemy combatants. Well, the battle has progressed to the SCOTUS. I expect and hope that she will win there, but on the Scalito court nothing's for sure.

Unfortunately, the collateral damage will include not just Savana, but the rest of the kids in the school system and a small town's taxpayers who will need to pay for a school administration's knee-jerk policy.