Oh, c’mon, it’s not like he’s a “Coke dealer.”
For as long as there have been public high schools, there have been rules against possessing certain substances — from tobacco to chewing gum for masking the stink of tobacco — and young capitalists willing to risk their diplomas for quick cash trafficking the contraband. And in our health-conscious age, the hallways of the black market are flowing with high-fructose corn syrup.
Which brings us to criminal mastermind “entrepreneur” Keenan Shaw, a 17-year-old student at Winston Churchill High School in Alberta, Canada, who has been suspended for providing an illicit product to adolescent caffeine junkies by distributing Pepsi cans out of his locker, reports Canada’s National Post. (Only diet soda is allowed, due to the district’s nutritional guidelines.)
He had sporadically gotten away with this scheme for nearly four years, earning $12 on each $5 case from the supermarket. (Which, we’re guessing, is a fortune worthy of a cartel in U.S. dollars. Kid probably spends millions just on rubber bands for his cash.) But like with his gangster predecessors Al Capone and Whitey Bulger, it was only a matter of time until the authorities caught up with him.
Superintendent Sheryl Gilmour defended the move to kick Shaw out of school, calling his soda-running plot a “steadfast refusal to follow school policies…it’s about refusing to comply with rules.”
But Shaw’s mother is sticking up for her delinquent hellspawn, telling the Lethbridge Herald, “From a business perspective, it’s smart.” And Shaw himself thinks it’s ridiculous, telling the National Post, “I thought it was a joke. I didn’t think they could [suspend] me for selling pop.”
He’s now debating whether to walk away from his moneymaking enterprise in order to avoid a permanent expulsion. We hope he does, because then no young person will ever do anything unhealthy again.
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