Nose for contemplation

Does the Sweetwater Union High School District have a drug problem? Should the South County’s high school district be renamed Bongwater HSD?

Those are a couple of questions that came to mind after reading a letter posted on various high school websites throughout the district.

“The Sweetwater Union High School District has partnered with the Chula Vista Police Department to bring specially trained dogs onto our school campus to deter contraband substances from being brought onto our site,” the letter states.

Some of the items the police canines are trained to detect are marijuana, cocaine, wine, beer, whiskey, “residual odor: any one of the above previously present”, ammunition, weapons.

While the community was focussed on punishing corrupt  board members and cleaning house on the school board for the sake of the children, were the kids running guns and operating grow houses out of their homerooms? Are students attending second-period speakeasies instead of phys. ed?

A district employee said the use of police dogs on campus goes back a few years but it wasn’t immediately clear what prompted this latest announcement, which was posted Sept. 5.

No one can fault adults for wanting to keep school campuses safe. We live in a time when campus shootings aren’t as surprising as they are horrific. And in light of the dopey prankster at Eastlake High School who recently posted online that the school was going to be shot up, it’s no wonder parents, administrators and police are hyper vigilant when it comes to monitoring threats, real or imagined. But at what price?

The use of canines to ferret out contraband, while legal and typically effective, isn’t without its challenges.

While different law enforcement agencies will offer various success rates in detection, few if any of them— or independent experts—will guarantee 100 percent success. Sometimes dogs misidentify a scent and on other occasions a canine will react to its handler, resulting in a false positive identification.

Then there is the issue of equal enforcement. Are students who are more likely—or financially able—to have access to and abuse prescription drugs given a virtual pass because Officer Rex isn’t trained to sniff out Adderall, for example?

Or if the dog can detect pharmaceuticals, who is to say that the student who does have a prescription isn’t abusing the drug or selling the pills to his classmates? So the dope smoker gets busted but the pill popper walks?

Like most everything else, there’s a gray area that merits examination. And maybe that’s the bigger lesson for students to learn, morseo than an anti-drug message: seldom is anything in life black or white.