Is There an Illicit Market in Advil?

It's a challenge to enter Safford School District v. Redding, the strip-search case, in the chart I keep of voting patterns. Yes, Justice Thomas, lone dissenter, forcing a 13-year-old girl to reveal her breasts and pubic area to school officials is a strip-search even if she did not actually have to remove her underwear. But there is no two-word way to describe the votes. Six justices found a Constitution violation but also found that the school officials had qualified immunity, two found a violation with no immunity, and one, Thomas, found no problem at all, accusing the majority of ushering in a dangerous era of "deep intrusion into the administration of the public schools" by the federal courts.

That's certainly a substantial overstatement of what the majority has accomplished here. The cases Thomas cites all involve drugs of abuse—OxyContin, hydrocodone, ecstasy. I'm still trying to imagine the illicit market in Advil, which is what Redding was wrongly accused of having. Or maybe I'm missing something.

(Read the rest of this article [2] at Slate [3].)