Headmaster Winters is woefully behind the times and his wrong-headed policy on drugs is hurting our youth.

Kids need to know what the rules and consequences are. Many parents don’t seem to get that now a days. I am not a grower, seller or user of marijuana but my feeling is that the present laws that make it illegal are as foolish as the ones that tried to control alcohol during prohibition in the 1920′s. All they do is make criminals rich and waste the money we spend on enforcement. It would be better to get a little tax money on the billions spent on it.

That said neither alcohol or illicit drugs have a place in our schools.

When our first child started as a freshman at GHS in 2003, then-headmistress Elaine Bessette held a meeting for parents at which one parent asked her if GHS had a drug problem. Ms. Bessette thought for a moment and then replied, “Greenwich High School’s situation with drugs is probably no different than that in any other suburban high school in America. But we have a drinking problem.”

If one drives past the high school either in the morning or afternoon one will invariably see some students smoking cigarettes. While smoking marijuana will not seriously harm one, smoking tobacco, over a period of years, will likely kill you. Over half a million Americans die of smoking-related diseases every year. Indeed, some states are legalizing the use of marijuana for medical purposes. But Headmaster Winters is bringing in police dogs to find and arrest students who might use it? That is overkill, totally unnecessary and downright shameful.

In his book “High Society”, Joseph Califano, chairman of the National Center for Addiction and Substance Abuse, pointed out that there are more teenagers in rehabilitation for alcohol abuse than for all other illicit drugs combined. Alcohol abuse is also far more harmful physically than is marijuana. But the school and the town police are making serious efforts to arrest and prosecute those students using a drug that is relatively harmless. And at significant expense to the taxpayers.

Headmaster Winters should not be attempting to keep the community in the dark about the numbers of students arrested who are seeing their futures destroyed by this drug crackdown. The figures are not only available to the public, but the school and the school board should be publishing those figures on a regular basis. That is particularly important because arrests at Greenwich High School have been out of control for years.

According to Greenwich Police Department data, over the past five full school years 104 arrests have been made at the high school. That figure is equivalent to roughly 2% of all the students who attended Greenwich High School during those years. For a town that is one of the very safest in the entire country with one of the very lowest rates of violent crime, and with a crime rate that has been falling for years, it is insane that the police are making so many arrests. And now to hear that the school is seeing a spike in arrests suggests that the town police are out of control.

Let’s see, we can’t afford to pay the test fees for Advanced Placement exams for our best and hardest-working students, we can’t find the money to build a decent auditorium for that school, we operate the second biggest high school in the entire state because the town refuses to spend the money to build a second high school. Our school has fallen hundreds of places over the past five years in the Newsweek rankings, and we are no longer ranked by US News & World Reports. Our town’s economically disadvantaged students perform worse than those in any other DRG B school in the state. But we have unlimited amounts of cash to use for police patrols, closed-circuit surveillance systems, and drug-sniffing police dogs to roam the halls.

That’s a disgrace.