It's Come To This: Kids Now Bootlegging Sugary Drinks In School

It’s a sign of the times.

Defying a ban on sugary drinks at his school, which only allows diet sodas, Canadian high schooler Keenan Shaw got suspended for selling Pepsis out of his locker. But, like a modern day Al Capone except selling fizzy drinks instead of booze, Shaw isn’t letting “the man” get him down. He’s now taken his sort-of illicit soda trade to the streets.

He’s even figured out some loopholes to the rules:

“It got me a lot more advertising,” Shaw said about the effect the publicity had on his sales. “I feel like everyone knows about it now.”…

“I can store it at school. I can bring it to school. I can drink it at school. I just can’t sell it (at school.)”

You gotta admire the kid’s chutzpah. And there’s a lesson here about markets, which is that prohibitionism always fails.

Where there is demand, there will be supply. Regulations are static, but markets are dynamic.

But do policies like this really keep kids healthy? I would think it would be better to teach kids how to moderate their diets than to try and manipulate their behavior with outright bans.

Should we want a generation of kids who choose healthy diets, as opposed to a generation of kids not allowed to make their own decisions?