Congress debates student strip searches

The FBI issued their annual Uniform Crime Report [1] today, revealing that marijuana arrests, at a record high after 40 years of the failed War on Drugs, now account for over 786,000 arrests per year [2], more than all violent crimes combined. 

"These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor marijuana offenders," said NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre, who noted that at current rates, a marijuana smoker is arrested every 40 seconds in America. "This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism." 

Any sane human being might take this opportunity to reflect upon the effectiveness of our drug policies, and wonder whether prohibition and enforcement are perhaps inserting themselves as causal factors.  A rational person would be frustrated by this increase and ready to consider other options, such as the wildly successful policies of Holland.  Or, they might just try to figure out ever-creative and legal ways to get into the naked rectums [3] of underage boys and girls: 

The Student Teacher Safety Act of 2006 (HR 5295) is a sloppily written bill that would require any school receiving federal funding (essentially every public school) to adopt policies allowing teachers and school officials to conduct random, warrantless searches of every student, at any time, for essentially any reason they want. All they would have to do is say they suspect one of their students might be carrying drugs, and then they could conduct a wide scale search of every student in the building. These searches could be pat-downs, bag searches, or strip searches depending on how far school administrators wanted to go. 

Glad to see our police and policymakers are putting emphasis where it belongs.