Posted on 09/01/2008 9:34:09 AM PDT by wintertime
They were just four words typically text-messaged to his cellphone -- "What are the numbers?" -- but to a teenage pot dealer at one of Montgomery County's elite high schools they were part of a code used by students interested in making a buy.
The former dealer, speaking on the condition that neither he nor his school be identified, said he answered such texts in cryptic fashion: "24 x 16," for instance, meant $240 an ounce.
"There is definitely a very large market," he said. "The bud follows the money."
The teenager's account comes as school begins and several months after police accused two students, one from Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda and the other from Winston Churchill High in Potomac, of buying $10,000 worth of high-grade marijuana for up to 15 of their peers. The case, and the flood of tips that followed, has prompted county police to target student drug use and drug dealing this fall.
Leading that effort will be a veteran officer, Detective Rick Grapes, who expects to use some of the methods he used to build cases against hardened drug traffickers, interviewing low-level suspects to get to their suppliers and executing search warrants.
"The quantity being moved around by these kids is amazing to me," Grapes said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
In surveys for 2006-07, about half of Churchill and Whitman students indicated that drugs -- the survey didn't specify which -- were a problem at their schools.
The main suppliers for teens are other teens, according to two former dealers, several student users and Grapes, the detective. The students talk about pot deals at school, Grapes said, but the transactions tend to occur off campus, out of view of school security officers and cameras.
Is this the "real" world socialization that homeschoolers are missing? How many adults here on Free Republic are working in environments where drug dealing arrangements are commonly going on around them? An adult has the freedom to quit the job and find a safer and more wholesome work situation. Kids though are under police threat to be in this government school, unless their parents can ransom them with private school tuition or homeschooling.
Finally, the schools reported in this article are among the highest achieving in the nation. These government schools would be considered the nation's most successful, yet, drugs are a problem in these schools. I fully expect there will be Freepers soon insisting that their child's school doesn't have this problem.
Why would any rational parent send their child to one of these Montgomery government schools? Maybe someone could explain this to me.
If these Montgomery government schools are among the best in the nation, what's going on in average government schools?
Nicely put.
Don’t wanna burst any bubbles here, but the homeschooled kid in my neighborhood used to come smoke with us in the woods in the afternoon
When you institutionalized in government schools for your education? ( Just wondering)
No, I went to a Catholic school and got a great education! Won a few awards, got accepted to a few ivies, got big scholarships.
In defense of homeschooling, I think the most important things I learned at home: how to read, and how to enjoy learning. But even like the article mentions, school might help create the networks, but most of the activity goes on away from there.
You find the same thing in prisons, which schools bear some resemblance to. IMHO, the ill effects of 50 minutes of sitting down for boring lessons followed by 10 minutes of going to another class to 50 minutes of sitting down for boring classes is the problem. The pot provides relief from the stress and monotony.
Why do we need high school, anyway?
The only thing I learned there was that ladybugs can fly. During lunch outside when a swarm of them attacked me!
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