CENTEREACH, N.Y. – A Long Island mother is hot over her son being punished for bringing ghost peppers to school in his lunch.

Centereach High School student Nick Lien brought bhut jolokia, reportedly the hottest chili peppers on the planet, in his home-packed lunch.

MORE NEWS: Know These Before Moving From Cyprus To The UK

Two of Lien’s classmates ate some of the peppers and reacted almost immediately.

“My friends saw that I had the new ghost pepper with me, and they all wanted to see how spicy it really was, because everybody thought that basically they could handle it and it was nothing,” Lien tells CBS 2. “So they all tried a piece.”

The students went to the nurse’s office with red faces, complaining of stomach pains and burning tongues.

Administrators’ eyes reportedly turned to Lien.

“I was shocked, because I didn’t realize that giving someone a pepper could get me into as much trouble as I was in,” Lien says.

He was being punished for giving his classmates part of his lunch. He was given the choice of serving an after-school detention for two days or a one-day in-school suspension.

MORE NEWS: How to prepare for face-to-face classes

Lien’s mother, Sharon, who was called to the school, didn’t think he should have received either.

“I ran to the school to wonder why. I didn’t know what it was,” she tells the news station. “I asked if it was pepper spray, peppers on sandwiches, and she said it was my son brought a pepper to school – which I happen to have. We eat hot peppers, so it’s, like, no big deal.”

“Students’ rights cannot be violated by dictating to them what they can and can’t bring in for lunch, so it’s an outage,” the family’s attorney, Ken Mollins, says, who is filing a lawsuit on their behalf.

“I was told that it’s equivalent to giving someone LSD,” according to Nick Lien.

Lien says because of his detention, his end-of-year work is getting “bunched up” and his grades will suffer.

Middle Country School District superintendent Roberta Gerold defended Lien’s punishment, claiming she “does not tolerate any action that compromises the health of their students, and said she has determined that the hot peppers do pose such a threat.”

Mollins didn’t say what the family’s seeking in the suit.