THE WORD 'DRUGS' DOESN'T MEAN 'INVADE MY PRIVACY'

THIS COUNTRY'S well-meaning, but often overreaching, war on drugs has run
into unanticipated resisters. For the second time since November, a bloc of
six U.S. Supreme Court justices has ruled that the government's good
intentions don't override the Constitution's privacy protections.

The most recent case involved a public hospital that screened pregnant
women for cocaine use and turned positive results over to the police. The
women said they never consented to the tests.

By 6 to 3, the court decided that the practice violated the right to be
free from unreasonable searches and seizures. The justices made the right call.

A South Carolina hospital adopted the testing regiment back when a feared
epidemic of "crack babies" -- newborns of cocaine-addicted mothers -- made
headlines. The hospital teamed with prosecutors bent on enforcing
child-abuse laws against pregnant women who took drugs. The policy had a
laudable goal: Find crack mothers, and then help the women end an addiction
that was hurting them and their children.

The Constitution usually requires authorities to have a court-issued
warrant or at least reasonable suspicion to make searches in criminal
investigations. But, in a distressing trend, many judges have been overly
eager to brush aside these protections and defer to law enforcement when
they hear the word "drugs."

This time the Supreme Court resisted that impulse. The justices said they
couldn't accept the claim that the hospital simply wanted to protect the
health of mothers and children. Justice John Paul Stevens noted: "The
purpose actually served by the (drug testing) is ultimately
indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control." This
triggered Fourth Amendment scrutiny.

The case wasn't forecast as a slam dunk for privacy advocates. Since 1989,
the court several times has approved drug screening without a warrant or
probable cause when there was a "special need." For example, it has
permitted urine tests for railroad workers in the name of public safety.
But these other programs weren't so closely tied to criminal prosecutions.

The crack mother case is the second since November in which the court
rejected extensive drug dragnets. The earlier challenge involved
Indianapolis police who erected roadblocks to catch narcotics dealers.
Stemming the drug flow into a city is a worthy undertaking. But to carry it
out, officers would detain and question everyone driving by the checkpoints.

"If this case were to rest on such a high level of generality," Justice
Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the court, "there would be little check on
the authorities' ability to construct roadblocks for almost any conceivable
law enforcement purpose."

Together these strong rulings should encourage police and prosecutors to
consider more thoughtfully their efforts to fight drugs. Good intentions
aren't reason enough to forget about the Constitution's privacy safeguards.