PHILIP TERZIAN Zero tolerance, sometimes zero sense

As always, there is good news and bad news on the zero tolerance front.
First, the good news. Back in the late 1980s, when public hysteria about day-care abuse and satanic cults was beginning to subside, its successor doctrine captured the imagination of school administrators. This was the notion that a "drug-free school zone" did not just mean the absence of marijuana and heroin, but any pharmaceutical product whatsoever.
Since analgesics for headaches and menstrual cramps may be regarded as drugs, our nation's school principals swung quickly into action. Pupils were forbidden either to possess or ingest such dangerous opiates as Tylenol, and pupils with particular medical problems were required to store their pills and elixirs under lock and key in clinics.
This had the salutary effect of preventing scholar-athletes in pain from seeking relief, and putting girls trading Motrin on the school bus under suspension -- if not expulsion. It also meant that pupils with asthma, which affects some 6 million children and is the leading cause of school absence in America, had to store their life-saving medication and inhalers, locked and inaccessible, in school clinics.
As anyone with any experience of asthma is aware, time is of the essence when breathing is impossible. But zero tolerance leaves no wiggle room for rationality: Gasping pupils in need of their inhalers are regarded in the same light as junkies in search of a fix.
The result was inevitable. In California an 11-year-old boy named Philip Gonzalez was excused to go to the bathroom, and shortly appeared in the office exhibiting signs of a severe asthma attack. Because the administration required that medication be stored in one specific place in school -- in contravention, incidentally, of California education guidelines -- he was unable to gain access to relief in time, suffocated, and died.
If he had been allowed to keep an inhaler in his desk, it is fair to say, Philip Gonzalez would be alive today.
New act
All of which prompted Congress this past week to pass the Asthmatic Schoolchildren's Treatment and Health Management Act of 2004. The grand title, it should be said, masks a comparatively modest piece of legislation.
Since the administration of public schools is, essentially, a state matter, the Asthmatic Schoolchildren's Act merely gives federal funding preference to states (31 so far) that have passed laws protecting a pupil's right to carry and self-administer asthma or anaphylaxis medication.
This is some recognition, at any rate, that not all drugs are recreational, and that our zeal to protect children from self-destructive behavior may also result in needless suffering and death.
That's the good news. The bad news is that zero tolerance policies are equally applied to another source of public anxiety: guns. School administrators seem incapable of distinguishing between an M-16 and a water pistol, and the same instinct that confiscates your grandmother's nail clipper at the airport now treats members of rifle teams and skeet-shooting clubs as incipient felons.
Case in point: Seventeen-year-old Joshua Phelps, a high school student and civil war re-enactor in Pine Bush, N.Y., north of New York City, who made the mistake of driving to school one Monday morning after participating in a weekend Union Army reenactment. A member of the Pine Bush High School's Civil War Club, and budding history buff, young Phelps left his replica musket (which fires blanks only), uniform, bayonet and rolled cartridge on his car seat, where a security guard spotted the evidence of interest in Ulysses S. Grant.
Phelps was called from class to the principal's office, and the police were summoned. The cops confiscated the replica musket, placed Phelps under arrest, bound him in handcuffs, and have charged him with misdemeanor criminal possession of a weapon. He not only faces up to a year in jail, but is likely to be expelled from Pine Bush High School.
"I know this might appear to be a minor thing, but it's not," says the local police chief, Daniel McCann. "The musket was found in his car on the high school grounds and could have been used."
McCann is certainly correct to say that "this might appear to be a minor thing, but it's not." That's right, Chief; it's a major outrage. The fake musket might have been used on the school grounds, but it was not -- and a quick, sober review of the facts, and Joshua Phelps, would have explained the circumstances, and prevented a needless abuse of police power.
XTerzian, The Providence Journal's associate editor, writes a column from Washington. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.