Dear 9th Circuit, I love you. Dear war-on-drugs, fuck off. Dear zero-tolerance policies, you are destroying the lives of the young.

Somewhere in the American West in the recent past, a 13 year old girl was strip searched for drugs. At her middle school. The drugs searched for were Advil. She was searched based on the accusation of a girl who was actually caught with prescription strength Advil (hello? cramps!). No corroboration of that claim was sought for. No call to the parents for notification or permissin was attempted.

The girl who claimed that Redding had pills did NOT indicate that she had them on her at the time nor did she suggest anywhere that Redding might be keeping them. Certainly not IN HER UNDERWEAR.

Vice Principle Wilson simply took 13 year old Savannah Redding into his office and took off her clothes. To see if she had Advil in her underwear.

I couldn't possibly explain why this is both shockingly unconstitutional and morally disgusting better than the 9th Circuit already has.

“It does not take a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old girl is an invasion of constitutional rights. More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity.”

The court said further, “A reasonable school official, seeking to protect the students in his charge, does not subject a thirteen-year-old girl to a traumatic search to ‘protect’ her from the danger of Advil,” and obviously, “We reject Safford’s effort to lump together these run-of-the-mill anti-inflammatory pills with the evocative term ‘prescription drugs,’ in a knowing effort to shield an imprudent strip search of a young girl behind a larger war against drugs.”

"Knowing effort"--I like this hint that the Court agrees with many other commentators that any sane person would see the issue here as not whether or not it is constitutional to strip search a student or even if it is moral to strip search a 13 year old student, but rather the issue is how the fuck is some dude who thinks it's ok to strip a young girl naked in the name of "war on drugs" allowed to be near children?

I simply can't believe that this ever happened.