Not a "kid". He's a man and should be in jail for selling drugs.
If you went into every good physician's past, or every good person's past, you would certainly find something "unsavory or ridiculous", like telling a racist joke or masturbating in a public bathroom stall. What you would not generally find is drug usage and drug selling. Don't pretend that such socially abhorrent and destructive activities are normal. They are not.
If the "kid" gets his head on straight and turns his life around, more power to him. As of now, though, he's just another sociopath. We should hope most sincerely that he and those like him don't take up valuable space in medical school.
Of course the student isn't legally a "kid," but most older adults would consider him one. It's just a matter of perspective. When you're middle-aged or elderly, someone who is in their early twenties appears quite young. And according to the story in the original post, he clearly has a lot of growing up to do.
But that's a minor quibble. What's more troubling is your inability to put his behavior in it's proper social and moral context. No one is pretending that using and selling illegal drugs in "normal," but it is not
necessarily evidence of anti-social personality disorder. Some illegal drugs, such as marijuana, aren't particularly harmful, and there is no evidence that using and selling small quantities is indicative of psychological problems. Calling him a sociopath, therefore, is inappropriate and presumptive.
It's incorrect to claim that using and selling illegal drugs is socially abhorrent and harmful. It
can be, but that's not always the case. If a college student sells a small bag of marijuana to a close friend for $10, is that socially abhorent and harmful? Of course not. No one is talking about selling crack to children. You seem to be suffering from the toxic mind-rot of 1930s anti-drug propaganda; I bet if I showed you a clip of
Reefer Madness it would ring quite true to you.
What
is socially abhorrent and harmful, however, is the punitive paradigm of the War on Drugs, which offers surprising continuity with the most shameful episodes of our past. Most people don't know this, but the history of our drug laws is based on racism. During the 1930s, immigrants from Mexico and Central America were associated with stories of violence and marijuana, which led to growing public concern about the drug. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 (which effectively prohibited the use of marijauana) passed without medical testimony of any kind, except the opinion of one physician who
recommended that the bill be defeated.
Why am I giving you a history lesson? Because you seem completely unaware of how misguided and unethical some of our drug laws are. The true crime is that we continue to allow the War on Drugs to devastate our communities. As Bertram et al. argue in
Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial, "drug-related crime is actually the result not of taking drugs but of the conditions under which people buy and sell drugs. And these conditions are the product of drug policies" (p. 33).
