DRUGGED OUT ON POWER

It's supposed to be the dithering Democrats who stump for the nanny
state, offering protection and nurturing for the price of our tax
dollars and liberty.

So who came to town the other day wearing the flowered dress and clunky shoes?

None other than President Bush's drug czar, regaling local educators
and The Star's Editorial Board as to the virtues of random substance
testing in the schools.

I must say I conjured a different picture when John Walters rolled in
with his Secret Service retinue. Maybe taking an ax to some meth lab,
or kicking in a crack house door on a street where kids were afraid
to walk to school for their tests.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy does do a lot of fighting
on a lot of fronts. But this was more like Maximum Mom, touting new
federal funding and encouragement for schools to work urine- and
hair-sampling into their busy days.

Without warrants. Without probable cause. With, however, the
permission of the U.S. Supreme Court, which has ruled that these
baseless invasions of young captive bodies are OK so long so they are
not "punitive" in nature. Say what?

Walters insists it's a way to help the kids -- "a public health
screening tool." No moral or legal implications, just a practical
effort to reduce the risk of getting started by raising the risk of
getting caught.

It's like TB, for which everybody gets screened already without
complaint. Drug abuse as a communicable disease, spread by peer
pressure. "You get it from your boyfriend."

OK, I asked, does that mean the administration approves of condom
distribution in schools? There's a clearcut public health regimen,
morality, again, aside.

The big guy danced around that one like Mrs. Doubtfire in hard-rock
housecleaning mode. While sex is not his department, he knows that,
unlike drugs, it is a youthful activity about which his boss is much
more ready to settle for "just say no."

Abstinence lectures share the menu with search and seizure when it
comes to drugs, and Walters says the young people he talks to like it
just fine. That's not surprising. This generation is growing up in a
surveillance state, and school serves to prepare them for the
workplace drug testing, official IDs, ubiquitous bar codes and
warrantless wiretapping that will define their adult lives. Perhaps,
as some believe, we are at the intersection of liberal caretaking and
fascist control. Walters, the Republican crusader, would reject
either label. But whom is he helping and how is it Washington's business?

Notoriously porous, all but useless against alcohol, fluid- and
hair-testing is most efficient at intimidating and humiliating good
kids. If public health were its purpose, the Bush administration
would not be simultaneously seeking massive cuts in medical programs
for the poor.

Another initiative Walters was here to promote is an ad campaign to
warn parents against letting kids get at their prescription drugs, a
growing source of abuse. Now, I'm wondering which part of KEEP OUT OF
THE REACH OF CHILDREN is not already understood. I'd also ask, if the
propaganda push truly is a public health imperative, why is it not
also directed at the ferocious marketing of these magic remedies? Or,
for that matter, at the wall-to-wall hawking of alcohol to our precious kids?

Nanny's a specialist, it seems. There are things, like windows, she doesn't do.