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FILL THIS CUP - THE HIGH SCHOOL DRUG TESTING WAR

Fight For Your Right Not To Party

Jordan Lambert is a rangy 18-year-old with the kind of face you don't see much outside Texas. It's a hard-bitten face, with a squint that seems fixed by generations spent working in sunny fields. Lambert's father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were all farmers in West Texas, a hard life that's getting harder. But Lambert is a senior at Texas' Lockney High, and, right now, Lambert pretty much rules.

In a region known for its high school football, Lambert is captain and quarterback of the district-champion Lockney Longhorns. He's also a pitcher on the baseball team, captain of the basketball team, and anchor of the sprint relay in track. "If you go to school in Lockney, you play sports," he says. And in a rural community of 2,200, those sports are the hottest ticket in town.

Lambert doesn't date anyone regularly because, he says, "in a town this size, there's too much player-hating." Mostly he hangs out with friends, goes to the Church of Christ every Sunday, and listens to hardcore rap-DMX, Ja Rule, Juvenile. Rap stars, he knows, aren't always the best role models. "Some of 'em don't live right, don't have a good moral set," he concedes. "People who live like George Strait are probably going to live better lives than a guy who lives like Tupac." Lambert and his friends find a comfortable compromise. They still pump the beats, still rock the gear-just nothing too baggy, because that's against school regulations.

Lockney High has a lot of regulations. No facial hair, no tattoos, no baggy clothing, no shocking haircuts, no untucked shirts. Lambert, who recently caused a minor controversy by going bleach-blond, considers these minor and well-intended. "When they say 'no baggy pants,' it's not like we have to wear Wranglers, you know, nut-huggers," he clarifies. "You think about Columbine -- you got the overcoat, the baggy clothes. Some kid could walk into school carrying weapons and you'd never have a clue."

He stops and thinks. 'It's aah-ight," he says, hip-hop-style. "You do better when you look better and dress better."

This year the students of Lockney High are dressing better and doing, better than ever. The teams are winning, the extracurriculars are thriving, and the class valedictorian, Danny Huggins, has the highest grade point average in the school's 110-year history. All of which makes the latest state-of-the-art feature at this tiny prairie school just a bit odd: It has the most authoritarian drug policy in the country.

This January, the Lockney Independent School District introduced a measure that surprised Constitution fans around the country: mandatory drug tests for all students grades six through 12, with spot checks to be administered throughout the semester. Refusal to take the test results in the same punishment as failure: in-school suspension, obligatory drug counseling , loss of extracurriculars, and -- until it became something of a PR problem the same orange jumpsuit worn by local prison convicts.

The policy emerged from public outcry over a bust two years earlier, in which 12 Lockney residents were arrested for cocaine possession. Although all the suspects were well into adulthood, the numbers were startling for such a small town. Parents demanded extra steps be taken. In January, the school began testing students.

The following gives some indication of the uproar from students over this invasive, draconian infringement of their constitutional rights.

"I think it was a good idea," says Nicole Mosley, Lockney's pretty blonde salutatorian. "It wasn't like they were doing it to hurt us; it was to help us. Yeah, it might violate our rights, but we don't have a right to do that anyway because it's illegal."

Danny Huggins agrees. "There's kind of a stereotype about teenagers today." he says. "People think that we should be against drug-testing. I think the national media is trying to make us seem like we're the bad guys. Like we should feel bad for wanting this."

Britney Aston, a junior, thinks the whole thing is a nonissue. "I think it's fine that we get drug-tested," she says. "Drugs are illegal. I don't know why it's been made a big deal. It's all because of that one guy."

That one guy is named Larry Tannahill. A father of two boys in the Lockney school system, Tannahill began his transformation into town pariah in January, when his elder son, Brady, brought home an odd parental-consent form. "Something about the wording of it really aggravated me," he remembers. "I just didn't want them telling me how to raise my son." After talking it over with his wife,Tannahill refused to let Brady be drug-tested. As a consequence, Brady was scheduled for the jumpsuit, the drug counseling, and the quarantine from the general population. Brady is 12. After repeated attempts to get the superintendent to change the policy, Tannahill sued the school district with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, over a violation of the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

What followed quickly made national news. Tannahill was fired from his job at a local farm and ranch store. He received anonymous threats. He came home one day to find the family dog, Ranger, shot with a paintball gun and a note tacked to the door. "It said basically, 'You're messin' with our kids, and maybe next time this won't be a paint gun,'" he recalls. Then, at a school board meeting called to discuss the issue, 700 Lockney residents piled into the high school gym, nearly every one of them wearing a white T-shirt that said LOCKNEY ISD DRUG POLICY-WE ASKED FOR IT-YOU DELIVERED IT-WE APPRECIATE IT in red letters.

Tannahill and his father, Eugene, were among the two or three in the gym not dressed for the occasion. "It was a setup deal to intimidate him," says Eugene. "It was hostile." Although most residents dispute this description, out-of-town reporters used the phrase "mob mentality" to describe the scene. The whole thing read in newspapers like a classic tale of small-town hysteria, something straight out of Arthur Miller's witch-hunt play, The Crucible.

But even if the townspeople were quiet and saintly mannered, the statement Lockney made at that meeting is striking. "These people are saying that when you're talking about drugs and my kids, I don't care about the Constitution," says Graham Boyd, Tannahill's ACLU lawyer, who likens mandatory drug-testing to a McCarthy-esque "chemical loyalty oath." And the sentiment seems to be increasingly popular. In the nearby town of Sundown, a drug policy identical to Lockney's went into effect over a year ago without a peep. In Miami-Dade County, a school board briefly implemented random drug and alcohol tests for students -- albeit with the slightly comedic provision that they consent to them -- while in Indiana, a federal court recently upheld mandatory tests for all students who participate in extracurriculars. Even more recently, in Maryland, 18 students rumored to have attended a party where drugs were used were lined up in the high school auditorium, given cups to pee in, and held!
the
re for four hours while officials obtained parental consent to run urinalysis. (The parents of four students there sued; no dogs were shot.)

If this is not hysteria, it's definitely groupthink. Despite a nationwide decline in high school drug use, rising concerns about school violence and drug availability (at a new high per the National Institute on Drug Abuse) are breeding a certain flavor of public policy. "After Columbine, there's a sense that there's disorder in schools, and that drugs are a factor," says Bob Ketterlinus, a University of Pennsylvania developmental psychologist studying drug-use prevention. Combine this with an absence of clear Supreme Court rulings on the subject, and, Ketterlinus says, high school drug tests are becoming more and more common. "Schools are feeling braver now," he says. "They're watching cases Like Lockney's to see if they might try a similar policy."

In other words, what was once considered a serious abridgement of personal rights -- an assumption of guilt instead of innocence, a compulsory search of your very bloodstream -- might be coming to a high school near you. "A victory for the Lockney school district will set the stage for an enormous amount of drug-testing of students in many states across the country," says Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington. According to Boyd, "Lockney signals an acquiescence to having the government monitor aspects of our lives that we really do hold as private."

But it also signals something else. Because not only did the parents, teachers, and police of Lockney all support this measure, which many consider an unfair, intrusive, totally unconstitutional drag in this supposed era of drug-crazed, sex-mad gangsta teens, so did the kids. One after another, they came forward to give mandatory urine inspection a big thumbs-up. And they were quite indisposed to stirring speeches about the Bill of Rights, reminders of their freedoms, or the civil-liberties crusader in their midst.

Jordan Lambert was among the students who spoke out at the school board meeting. It's a night he remembers fondly. "Oh, man,"he says. "We got there, and everybody wore these shirts we had made, and the stands were packed, both sides. just one or two people was against [the policy], but they stayed quiet the whole time. They weren't dumb enough to start yelling. Tannahill, he never said a word."

Whoever named the towns in West Texas sure had a dry sense of humor. Plainview, Levelland, Grassland, Bushland. In some parts of this region, you can rotate your gaze a full 360 degrees and find only the tan line of grassy horizon. And when the line is interrupted, it's by something like a skeletal microwave tower, or a farmer's lunar-buggy "spray rig." A recent study found that eighth-graders in rural areas are 104 percent likelier than urbanites to use amphetamines, 50 percent likelier to use cocaine, and 34 percent likelier to smoke marijuana. Hallucinogens were not mentioned, but out here in Tatooine, hallucinogens seem kind of redundant.

Sitting on the tailgate of his Chevy pickup, Larry Tannahill looks out over his driveway onto just such a vista. The road, called Farm Market 788, stretches off into a dusty infinity. A full moon hangs in the morning sky.

When another pickup drives by, Tannahill gives a friendly wave. "I don't know who that was," he admits with a chuckle. "You can sit here and wave at anybody, and you'll get a wave back.

Tannahill makes a pretty sad excuse for an immoral, drug-crazed pinko. A rail-thin 35, he suggests a weather-beaten Richie Cunningham, with red hair, sunburned face, and an easy smile. A fourth-generation farmer. Tannahill started driving a tractor by age six, although lately he's been trying to make ends meet by building wooden scale models of windmills and barns and selling them on the Internet. He was raised Methodist, likes Merle Haggard, dips Copenhagen tobacco, and has never tried illegal drugs. It's a point of pride with him. Looking out at the empty road, he considers the irony of his present situation.

"They taught me at school, the very same school system, that if you don't fight for your rights, you're not gonna have'em," he says. "I'm not opposed to drug-testing itself if the child shows a reason to be tested. But don't mandate it. Don't tell the child he's guilty until proven innocent."

Asked why he doesn't leave Lockney, Tannahill shows signs of a national consciousness, of a Texas-grown crusader. "The deal is, I can't stop this fight," he says. "If Lockney gets this thing implemented, it's going to go across the country like wildfire."

Brady agrees with his dad. "I think it's wrong," he says of the drug test, cradling a camouflage-patterned air rifle on his knees. He says that no one at the school or in town has hassled him or his younger brother, Coby, since the troubles began. That seems to be reserved for his dad.

While people are too polite to dish invective here, there's a definite charge to the kind, concerned, generous way they have of disparaging him. "Larry's a likeable guy." says Lyndon Morris, Tannahill's most recent former boss at the Floyd County Farm and Ranch Supplies, whose wall bears a Drug and Safety Community Service Award for "helping the American family fight drug use." "He's just got some other problems he needs to deal with."

He may indeed, having left three previous jobs on bad terms and getting fired from the last for what Morris cites as chronic absenteeism. But it's probably not inconsequential that Morris' wife and sister-in-law are both teachers in Lockney, or that his brother-in-law is on the school board. In fact, Lockney's schools are the center of its economy, which makes it a less than ideal town in which to sue the school district.

Sitting on his tailgate, Tannahill shakes his head at the way things have turned out. "They keep saying, 'The community wants this,'" he says. "And what I want to know is, what community? I've had comments from plenty of people, plenty of pats on the back. People are just afraid to speak up."

The town of Lockney has one stoplight, no movie theater, and nine churches. To get to the nearest Wal-Mart, you have to drive 15 miles down Highway 70-past the Spudnuts diner, an industrial cotton gin, and one glaring reminder of modern social ills. There on the highway, a few miles past a sign that says WELCOME TO LOCKNEY - JUST A LITTLE SPOT BUT WE CARE A LOT, another sign offers a less congenial greeting: STATE PRISON AREA - EMERGENCY PARKING ONLY. Behind it is a long series of barracks labeled SUBSTANCE ABUSE FELONY PUNISHMENT CENTER. At night, it can be seen from the road, glowing eerily under amber lights.

Five miles away, the cafeteria of Lockney's elementary school is currently lit up with a different sort of glow. Decked out with balloons and lined with gleaming trophies, the room is filled with students, parents, coaches, and well-wishers, celebrating Lockney's annual Sports Banquet, one of the biggest events of the season.

As people finish their chicken-fried steaks, the handsomely earnest Chad Term football coach and athletic director, walks up to the podium to address the room. He begins by outlining the four types of people there are in the world: the Cop-Outs, the Hold-Outs, the Drop-Outs, and -- clearly the preferred category -- the All-Outs. "The All-Outs keep on keepin' on when the going gets tough," he says. "It's always, 'Team first, me second.'" The awarding and praise-giving goes on for another four hours. At the evening's close, Nicole Mosley leads a benediction to the night's real MVP-ending, "And thank you for Jesus, 'cause without Him we would have no hope."

After the ceremony, people file out, tables are folded, and the cafeteria is silent -- for 15 hours. Such is the condensed nature of Lockney social life that, less than a day later, most of the same people return for the senior talent show, an event that, in many towns, would feature the kids wedgied and toilet-dunked by the All-Outs. Instead, jocks, geeks, and theatrical types all sing and sway together, trading the microphone for karaoke versions of current country hits, with the occasional Destiny's Child song thrown in.

About halfway through the program, Jessie Ledesma, a stocky Mexican-American football player, comes out onto the stage, joined by his friends Lambert and Josh Quebe. The latter two are wearing orange jumpsuits with I.S.S., for "in-school suspension," stenciled on the backs. The shuffling beat from Lou Bega's Latin-funk hit "Mambo No. 5" comes on the loudspeaker and Jessie begins to sing.

"One, two, three, four, five," he begins. "It's the first of the month, hey c'mon, let's hide / From the drug dogs and the camera crews." At the chorus, Ledesma breaks into the jam's sing-songy melody: "A little bit of D-hall in my life / A little bit of I.S.S., stuck inside / A little bit of counseling's what I need / A bright orange jumpsuit's what I see...." Lambert and Josh mime peeing into cups. When they get to a line referencing the "warden," all three point at Principal James Poole, who's sitting near the front row.

Not exactly "Fuck Tha Police," but there you have it.

Sitting backstage after their performance, Lambert, Jessie, and Josh -- wearing Hilfiger shirts and fly basketball sneakers -- explain. "It's just kind of' a joke really," Jessie says of the song. "We aren't really, like, anti-drug test."

In fact, the three welcome school efforts to prevent the drug problems they witnessed in Lockney two years ago. Lambert, who regrets having tried pot, recalls classmates coming in after lunch "smelling of weed, laughing, slurring every other word." He mentions an old friend who he feels would have benefited from drug-testing: an athlete whose promising college football career literally went up in smoke, then fumes. "He started with weed and then started sniffin' paint," Lambert says. "He'd come to school with paint on his lips and nose. He's just ... lost. Unbelievable." But by most accounts, that disruptive element has either dropped out or graduated, the local pothead tally falling to roughly five or six, according to Lambert. This is great news for school order, but it also makes the urgency of drug testing a bit harder to demonstrate. Out of the 57 offense reports logged this year by the Lockney police department -- for drunk driving, burglary, assault, criminal mischief -!
- - ex
actly one is for drugs: possession of marijuana.

Lambert agrees that local drug availability has waned significantly since 1998, "but that number could be cut in half or eliminated," he says. That's what I believe the school's shooting for. To reduce those numbers." Sadly, not everyone at Lockney had that All-Out attitude. Jessie reports that one of his cousins dropped out just two weeks ago, which is a strange thing to do a month before graduation. "In my family, there was five of us that were supposed to graduate this year," Jessie says. "Her, Jason, Jessica, Nick. Everyone dropped out but me.

"They really don't care about school," he continues. "They just care about partying -- like every day."

I ask if the drug test might have encouraged this last cousin to drop out.

"Probably," Jessie says softly.

Opponents of school drug-testing give several nonconstitutional reasons for their positions. One is that the test, which is most effectivetive for detecting marijuana, may encourage students to change to less detectable substances like cocaine, crystal methedrine, Ecstasy, and LSD. Another is that mandatory drug tests, which send a powerful message to both students and adults, can actually turn borderline kids away from school.

"There's a certain rebelliousness involved with teenagers who are likely to be involved in drugs," says the ACLU's Boyd. "A drug test doesn't say, 'We want to help you,' It says, 'We wanna try to trap you.' But there are all kinds of ways to get around the trap. I think a lot of students are going to say, 'Yeah. That's exactly what I'm gonna try to do.'"

And that's exactly what one Lockney senior did. David Martinez is the drug-test advocate's worst nightmare: an occasional pot-smoker in the National Honor Society. A compact, sunny-faced 18-year-old, he makes a pretty strange representative of Lockney's bad element. He competes for the school in a regional contest of complex arithmetics. But when the first drug test was given on February 2, Martinez had prepared by taking some antiurinalysis pills. They didn't work.

"After I failed, they called my mom," he remembers. "She was just mad. But mostly because it's going to give me a bad reputation." The test proved a more crucial turning point for the other four who failed, three of them Martinez's friends. "One of them quit school, and the other ones left. So it was just me and one of my friends who had to go I.S.S."

Worse than I.S.S., Martinez says, were the social consequences. "You just go through school and you feel singled out. The teachers don't look at you in the same way. Small towns are all about rep. If you do one wrong thing, you're a has-been in this town.

Britney, Aston sheds some more light on how rep works in Lockney. A pretty, tanned. 17-year-old farmer's daughter, Britney belongs to both Future Farmers of America and Future Homemakers of America, and she "shows cows," a hobby that took some explaining. For fun. she says, she and her friends "drive around and shoot cats and rabbits." She laughs. "For real. With little BB guns." A wilder night might include it visit to the cemetery, like the time when "Jordan stripped down naked and danced around. He kept his socks on." Britney likes 98 Degrees, she says, but not 'N Sync or Backstreet Boys. I ask her what the difference is.

"[98 Degrees] don't look like a bunch of faggots," she says. "Those guys are all good-looking."

Apparently, homosexuality is not a big extracurricular at Lockney. "Oh my gosh. that's totally unacceptable to me." Britney says of same-sex relationships. "Lesbians are even worse. That's disgusting." She realizes this attitude might be a product of her environment. "If I lived in a big town, I probably wouldn't think that way. [Here.] if you're gay, everybody's going to know about it, and they're going to talk about you and not like you."

Being too actively heterosexual won't make you one of the beautiful people either. "Most of the girls at Lockney, if you're not a virgin, everybody knows it," Britney confides. "I know of a girl that got pregnant and had an abortion. But she's not one of our good decent white girls."

This is, of course, one of the trade-offs of living in a small, friendly, supportive, tight-knit community in the Bible Belt. Out here, where everyone knows everything about you, drug-war phrases like "zero tolerance" can have chilly overtones.

I've never seen any drugs in school," Britney says, "but I have smelled some people that I know used. I think it's fine that we get tested. I didn't care. I didn't have anything to worry about."

I try to get Britney to consider the "slippery slope" scenario -- that allowing one type of intrusive test may lead to others, for all sorts of dangerous or illicit personal behavior. What if they tested for, say, pregnancy?

"Oh my gosh," Britney says. "I don't think that that would be necessary. How would they know?"

They would test you.

"I don't think that they should test me when I'm not even sexually active."

How would they know without a test?

She's quiet for a minute, then resolved. "It wouldn't bother me." she says at last. "It's not like I have some big protest against it."

Indeed, few people in Lockney seem inclined to big protests. In a town whose farmers will join in to plow an ailing neighbor's crops, discord is not a valued commodity.

"I swear, they're trying to bring back the '50s, man," says Adam Pachiano, a senior. A football-playing friend of Lambert's, Adam moved to Lockney in eighth grade from the relative metropolis of Lubbock. Adam has short, punkishly dyed blond hair and a thin, jaw-lining beard-both of which are violations of the dress code, instituted a year before the drug test. He has gotten busted for such infractions before, and he's even been sent to I.S.S. "It was because my shirt was untucked, if you can believe that," he says. Adam can see why parents might feel even more irritated by Lockney High's newest disciplinary measure.

"I can understand, man," he says of Tannahill's suit. "My parents got pissed when they sent that form home. I'd be pissed off, too. I don't know if I'd fight back, but I know I'd be pissed off."

For most pissed-off students, though, battle is less likely than secession. Like Adam, military brat Tim Ballejo spent several formative years out of Lockney, returning from Guam in 1998. Unlike Adam. he doesn't play football. Also unlike Adam, Ballejo, 19. won't be graduating this spring. "I was doing awesome at school in Guam." he says. "But when I came back here, it was downhill."

If Adam's appearance got him I.S.S., Ballejo's would probably get the firing squad: two pierced ears, a pierced eyebrow, baggy skater shorts, a raveishly oversized T-shirt. and--in an insane coup de grace for this region--a backwards Yankees cap. The look was just part of a larger friction Ballejo experienced returning to Lockney

"They got on my hair, my clothes, everything," Ballejo says of school administrators. "In Guam, teachers didn't care how you looked or what you believed in. They just wanted to teach you. Down here it's nothing but politics."

The static during school hours might have been less of a problem, Ballejo says, if there were some extracurriculars that held his interest. In fact, extracurriculars are the most effective tool cited by drug-prevention groups to keep kids clean. But soccer, skateboarding, and electric guitar were not approved electives at Lockney. "They don't do none of that out here," Ballejo says. He dropped out last year and, unlike most of his peers, has made leaving Lockney his main goal.

Ballejo thinks that at Lockney, drug-testing is part of larger fears about a new, encroaching world. "They're all worried about new things, new ideas," he says. "It's not just drugs. It's stuff from the Internet, or TV, stuff from cities -- instead of just small-town crap. They just watch over you here. You can't do nothing without people finding out."

When Jordan Lambert and friends busted sing-song verses about "I.S.S," they were referring to a room that all three had pretty successfully avoided. Walking through the school with Raymond Lusk, former band teacher turned superintendent of L.I.S.D., we end our tour in this very room. This is where Lockney High wrongdoers must spend their day reflecting.

It's not a bad place for reflection. The room has seven cubicles facing the wall, each one containing a desk, a stool, and a poster. One poster reads: "If you expect respect then you must first show it." Another says: "You earn respect by how you live, not by what you demand." A third bears a quote from Benjamin Franklin: "He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else."

Franklin is an oddly appropriate figure to quote here, since right next door to I.S.S. is the classroom where government is taught. Here, students might have gotten hip to another quote from Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither." In this classroom. with its dusty chalkboard and five rows of desks, a pile of Magruder's American Government textbooks sits near the door. On page 62, there's a list that includes the Fourth Amendment, which some consider a pretty explicit ban on mandatory drug tests (though 15 years ago, the Supreme court ruled in favor of random locker searches, regardless of suspicion).

Pushed as to how he feels about this amendment figuring in a lawsuit by his former trombone pupil, Larry Tannahill, Lusk just gives a wan smile. His lawyers have told him not to talk about the case.

Tannahill's case should come to state court some time in September. Until then, people are free to interpret those 209-year-old words pretty much any way they want. And, according to Eric E. Sterling, those interpretations will have serious repercussions. "This case is potentially very far reaching," he says. "If the courts uphold the power of the school to have mandatory drug-testing without suspicion, there is no question that this will become commonplace in American public schools."

But even that line is quite open to interpretation: It's either a threat or a promise. "My personal opinion is everybody needs it," Jordan Lambert says of drug-testing. "And it's gotta start somewhere."