SCHOOLS GOING TOO FAR TO END TEEN SMOKING

With schools around the world eating our educational lunch, you might think
American school officials would have more important things to do than bust
high school kids for off-campus cigarette smoking.

But a growing number of school systems, including several in neighboring
Alabama, are subjecting students to random nicotine testing, banning
tobacco users from extracurricular activities, and proving once again that
bureaucratic busybodies seldom know when to say when.

Drug testing in schools has taken off since 1995, when the Supreme Court
upheld the testing of student athletes on the rather flimsy basis that
sports are voluntary and jocks tend to be role models.

Last spring, the court said schools could test participants in all
extracurricular activities, from football to French club. Stressing
schools' "custodial responsibilities," the court swept aside explicit
constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

Buzzed on the resulting power surge, some administrators now aren't content
just to test students for booze and illegal drugs -- substances that can
impair learning and threaten student safety. They want to have nicotine
testing as well.

The busybodies' basic take seems to be that since tobacco is unhealthy and
schools have the power to test students, schools should use that power to
force students not to smoke.

But proponents don't stop there. Desperate to link tobacco to illegal
drugs, they claim -- absurdly -- that cigarettes are a "gateway" to narcotics.

Treating tobacco like an illegal drug doesn't make sense and teens know it.
People don't overdose on snuff or go to jail for driving while smoking.

The mindless mindset that connects cigarettes with street drugs is the same
one that equates an ax in an Eagle Scout's car with a 9 mm in a skinhead's
backpack.

Cigarettes and smokeless tobacco present serious health risks, and schools
should educate students on the dangers. Ultimately, though, parents should
police off-campus smoking, not school officials.

Good public policy requires a healthy sense of limits, and Georgia
educators have, commendably, not yet followed our Alabama neighbors over
the tobacco-testing cliff. We should insist they don't.