Has anyone noticed the exciting action going on up north? The fair city of St. Albert has been going through some interesting times lately. It’s a perverse little town where everyone is bored into kicking up dust in bizarre ways. First there was the Rainmaker Rodeo "Riot", and now the capital of Suburbia is pioneering Canada’s very first "drug-free protocol."

Yes, cops with drug-sniffing dogs will appear, unannounced (after a warning to students and parents and after students sign an "I’m-aware-this-is-going-on" form) to "randomly" search students’ lockers for drugs. This will be unobtrusive to the educational process, being conducted while students are in class. Students will never know a cop, a dog, and a school staff member are rifling through their lockers.

Any kids stupid enough to leave their stash in the locker will answer to the principal (police will be involved when the stash is big enough to warrant a trafficking charge). Students will not face charges for possession, even though possession is illegal. They will, however, be expelled from any St. Albert school. The movie Pump Up the Volume provides the imagination with the many possibilities opened up by this protocol. If I were a corrupt cop or an administrator with a chip on my shoulder and a scarring trauma in my past, I would be tempted to throw a little baggie of electric lettuce in some obnoxious kid’s locker and watch the fun unravel.

It is unclear how punishments will be decided, but this idea comes as no surprise in a city where the motto is "We don’t want that in our community." The place is so plastic it makes Barbie and Ken’s Yuppie Dream Home look like a bad day in Compton. So it’s no wonder such strange things spring up there.

People say the strategy will result in people being more careful with their pot, not in the eradication of St. Albert’s drug "problem." But I’d be shocked if a cop didn’t stay a bit too late and end up in the middle of a throng of students with his herb-seeking-canine having a wacky-cabbage-sniffing field day with the kids in the hall, after the lockers turned up clean.

Others say drug use among St. Albert teens is rampant, that drugs are being used in such places as cafés. Who would toke up in a quaint neighborhood coffee shop in a town obsessed with badgering its teens? Maybe they figure all this drug use has made St. Albert youth stupid.

Anyway, doesn’t this feel uncomfortably like a step closer to those dystopic novels we all had to read in High School, like 1984? St. Albert authorities appear ready to do anything possible to keep every detail of their paradise in strict conformity with their Sunday night Magical World of Disney vision. Youths live in fear of unprovoked beatings from police and now of the contents of their lockers being searched. Soon they won’t even be safe with notes written about sexist, molesting phys-ed teachers or plans to toke up on the weekend. The word "private" will be outlawed; replaced with "unpublic."

But the scariest part of this scheme is the hushed-up deportation of the offending students to shudder-inducing places like "alternative schooling." Perhaps the best way to sidestep someone’s rights is to sidestep the whole legal process. Why bother the courts when they might keep "bad seed" students in school? No, better to save money and time and get them out of the "normal" schools.

It makes sense to discourage kids from gettin’ mellow before class because it could affect their learning. But these measures are extremely shady. That’s why they haven’t been carried out anywhere else. Make note of what happens when St. Albert authorities are given free reign. It would make a fascinating sociological case study – a great isolated, laboratory study of what happens when people act out Orwell and Huxley. I’ll toke to that!