Up in smoke

Righteous people, unite! Fire up the torches, bust out the medium-sized flog, dust off the rack and head to the Clifton Park Ice Arena! Justice must be exacted upon these heathen scoundrels! They must be made accountable for their sins!

Members of the Shenendehowa High School’s varsity hockey team caught smoking the marijuana got off easy. Back in the day, even the ones that weren’t smoking would have gotten 30 lashes at town square. And the ones that did? Well, let’s just say water boarding is too good for them, but pulling out fingernails might be a good start…

…Wait a second. It appears as though another bull-shit news story has flipped iSaratoga’s sarcasm switch. This always happens when more than a half-dozen area news agencies form a lynch mob for a story that is hardly worth the press or airtime it was generously given throughout the Capital Region. Of course, the media needed to do something to fill the void left after the year-in-review pieces and before the next spate of winter weather hits.

The dozen Shen hockey stoners were an obvious target. They’re a group of top-performing athletes who were caught doing…well…what many high school kids do when they’re staying with a bunch of their peers in an out-of-town hotel room: They passed around the peace pipe. Unfortunately, these players must not have known the tried and true subterfuge needed to toke up undetected among the legions of parents and coaches standing guard in the hallway.

Techniques such as using the ‘spoof’ – exhaling through a cardboard tube stuffed with dryer sheets –and the age-old ‘towel the door’ technique would have surely prevented Coach Juan de la Rocha from detecting this hard-to-miss essence. The notion that these students didn’t use these devices suggests they are either lacking in ingenuity, devoid of intelligence or simply don’t puff herb often enough to familiarize themselves with the finer points of undetected teen marijuana use. Shame on them.

Immediately, the coach punted six players from the squad. He threw another six from the team after the team finished their Morrisville road trip. The dearth of players almost immediately touched off a swirling miasma of media coverage, which has hovered around the rink ever since.

Naturally, the monastic throngs of anonymous Internet chatterboxes also found the need to chime in on the debacle at the Saratogian’s Web site. The indignity, the nerve, the shear gall of these…these…ingrates, to violate the code of conduct and tarnish the good name of Shen athletics.

“Send them packing for the season and future students under this iron fist of a moral code of conduct will know there are consequences for their actions,” posted one frothing reader. “That is the real issue here: The continual degradation of our society's moral code of conduct by not holding people responsible for their actions.”

The Times Union, the Daily Gazette and the Saratogian all featured front-page articles on the team, with all varying substantially in their content. The Times Union –a paper known for its brazen ability to pat itself on the back –managed to wait until the second graph in their story before bragging about how they “first reported” the earth-shattering story Monday. They didn’t bother to mention how any sports reporter with half a brain would have realized something was amiss when a third of players didn’t dress for a tournament game.

The most lacking was from the Daily Gazette, which regurgitated everything printed in Tuesday’s addition. The only new information included was from the district flack, who spuriously claimed the school wouldn’t release information about the players’ punishment.

Not true, as the Saratogian correctly reported today. Eight players were booted from the team, while another four were allowed to return. Like the Gazette, the Saratogian stopped short of identifying the players, claiming the district wouldn’t identify them because of privacy laws and whatnot. Of course, this is a load of horseshit.

The district did identify the players quite clearly on the varsity team’s Web site, albeit inadvertently. Is it a coincidence that only 16 players are now listed on Shen roster and statistics database? Conspicuously absent from the top of that database is the team’s lead scorer and his two linemates, among others. In fact, it’s pretty darn easy to pick them out by simply pairing the roster to the season advances printed in the various local papers –each of them also featured on the Web site.

But why name names? It’s not as if these kids broke into a private residence, had a raging kegger and then trashed the place. They smoked weed, which is something that will stunt growth, diminish sexual apetite, kill brain cells and cause a predisposition to spending long nights trying to pair Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ album with video feed from the ‘Wizard of Oz.’ Marijuana, however, is not a performance enhancement drug, nor is it considered physically addictive. In fact, it’s probably less harmful than most of the prescription medication the typical suburban family routinely keeps in their medicine cabinets these days; and certainly not the type of thing teens use before going on a destructive rampage.

Even the long-held belief that it’s the so-called gateway drug is roundly questioned by most rational circles of researchers. Possessing amounts less than 25 grams is less of an offense than doing 20 miles over the speed limit. Incidentally, smoking or being under the influence of marijuana is not a crime in New York, unless one is caught doing it while behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. These are facts some editors and producers might want to consider before charging up the righteous masses that are too chaste these days to remember their own high school indiscretions.