'SCHOOL TO PRISON'

Drug Policies Become More Draconian, Deny People's Basic Rights

American public schools tend to resemble prisons more all the time,
and the trend is especially conspicuous in the small rural town of
Lockney in the Texas panhandle. When the parents of one sixth-grade
boy refused to go along with a new drug policy, his prescribed
punishment was a three-day, in-school suspension, during which time he
would have to wear - I'm not making this up - an orange jumpsuit.

Lockney appears to be one of only two school districts in the country
(the other is in nearby Sundown) that have instituted mandatory drug
testing for all students. While some schools require such tests for
kids who play on athletic teams or participate in extracurricular
activities, Lockney does it for every single youngster - and not just
in high school but in junior high. Anyone enrolled, from the sixth
grade on, has to submit to a urinalysis for drugs and is subject to
random tests afterward.

This was fine with nearly all parents in Lockney, but not with Larry
Tannahill, a 35-year-old farm hand who somewhere acquired the weird
notion that Americans should not have to prove their innocence at the
whim of government officials. He refused to allow his son Brady to be
tested, filed a lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties
Union and is hoping the courts will find that the Constitution applies
even in public schools.

That hope may not be realized. In the continuing national hysteria
known as the drug war, niceties like the Fourth Amendment (which
prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures") have often been cast
aside. In their never-ending quest for a drug-free society, many
government officials and ordinary Americans have come to believe that
showing respect for individual rights amounts to giving aid and
comfort to the enemy.

The Lockney policy is extreme, but it may be the wave of the future.
Most Americans may agree that the survival of the republic depends on
treating 12-year-olds as perpetual suspects. We may have so little
regard for the privacy of ourselves and our children that we think the
government should be empowered to commandeer the citizenry's bodily
secretions at any moment for close inspection.

Brady Tannahill's punishment is on hold while the policy is being
challenged. But under the district's regulations, merely declining to
take part in the drug test is treated the same as testing positive -
actual guilt being irrelevant. Besides the three-day suspension, Brady
would have been barred from extracurricular activities for 21 days and
would have had to undergo substance-abuse counseling, even though no
one claims he has actually used any forbidden substance. He also would
have to take monthly drug tests, with ever-increasing penalties for
each refusal.

This is a relatively new issue for the judiciary, since American
schools survived for several hundred years without heavy reliance on
urinalysis. But in 1995, the Supreme Court upheld an Oregon school
district's policy of drug testing all student athletes, dismissing
privacy concerns with the airy assertion that "school sports are not
for the bashful." At the same time, the justices said they would not
necessarily approve other mass drug testing programs.

But it's hard to be optimistic about this case. The Supreme Court
said the Oregon program was permissible because drugs are so
disruptive to the educational process and because, when
school-children are involved, the government has the right to conduct
any search "that a reasonable guardian and tutor might undertake."
Those excuses will work just fine in Lockney.

In that case, the court nonchalantly discarded the most important
check on government searches: the requirement that they be carried out
only when there are grounds to think a specific person has done
something wrong. We expect police to live by that rule in combating
murder, rape and robbery - but somehow it's too burdensome for school
principals trying to control and educate 12-year-olds.

But maybe it's a mistake to think anti-drug crusaders prefer a tough
approach only because they think it will work. Sometimes, the only
point of abusing people's rights is to abuse people's rights.