then they should ban water because it looks like vodka.
and cola looks a little too much like scotch.
i'm not saying that powdered sugar doesn't look like coke (i don't know if it does or not.) i'm saying that the term "look-alike drug" is pretty broad and pretty meaningless.
if a student says to another student (who is drinking water), "that looks like vodka", should the second student be arrested?
is the illegal substance something that looks like a drug, or something that someone says is a drug, or what? the quotation from the handbook did not make this clear.
When I was in school, they did just that. School policy dictated that any liquid substance in the possession of a student, not sold in the school cafeteria and consumed entirely therein, was to be considered the same as alcohol. But at least they didn't press felony charges in those days--the schools never punished actual criminals because doing so would require an implicit acknowledgment of their existence.
Another school-district policy required that some off-site educrat operate the thermostat, almost invariably on "full-blast heat" no matter how hot the environs. The building didn't happen to have any water fountains, and because most of it remained under construction, had a grand total of one toilet, access to which was intensely competitive and tightly controlled.
On one particularly warm mid-winter day, we had just received a new student whose family relocated from Vermont. By lunch time, the cafeteria already had sold out of liquids, and she was showing obvious signs of severe heat stress aggravated by dehydration. Once we brought her situation to the attention of the principal, she did manage to recover with the assistance of a bucket of ice. (The school nurse declined to come to work, and given the rules and the condition of the building, no one else could even get her a drink of water.)
In the principles of school rules, punishments inflicted should apply collectively rather than to the individual criminal. Because schools cannot target drunkards directly, they instead punish the broader collective of those in possession of any liquid beverage. Another principle tells us that in a fight between a bully and victim, the victim must receive a stronger punishment for being bullied than the bully. This principle mainly protects bullies, gangs, and drug dealers who operate on school property, thus creating a haven for juvenile delinquents and other criminals.
You're kidding, right?