DRUG TESTS TURN UP USE OF TOBACCO, MARIJUANA

Nicotine and THC from marijuana are the chemicals most likely to show up in the urine of central Ohio high school athletes tested randomly for drugs, according to results from districts.

An increasing number of high schools -- and some middle schools -- have begun testing athletes since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1995 that such a test is not an unreasonable search.

Last month, the Dublin Board of Education voted to begin testing athletes at random, joining seven other central Ohio school districts: Pickerington and Fairfield Union in Fairfield County, Fairbanks and Marysville in Union County, Olentangy in Delaware County, Logan Elm in Pickaway County and London in Madison County.

Dublin Superintendent Stephen Anderson would like to test all students.

"It's such a major issue in our schools," Anderson said of drugs, including alcohol and tobacco. "The only reason we're doing athletes is it's the only area where the Supreme Court has given us authority."

But a Children's Hospital pediatrician who works with drug-addicted teens thinks that only youngsters who show signs of drug use should be tested.

"I wouldn't call it fascist," Dr. Peter Rogers said of random tests, "but it's on the tip of my tongue.''

Rogers sits on a committee of the American Academy of Pediatrics that recently reviewed its 1996 stand against blanket drug-testing of adolescents; the group decided to stick with its view that such tests are punitive and a waste of time.

"This kind of program just plays on parents' worst fears,'' he said. "It's terrible.

"People who design these programs are very well-intentioned, but it's not the best use of somebody's money. I think sometimes it's these labs that are going to the schools and selling it. They are making a lot of money off it. It just infuriates me."

The central Ohio districts ask laboratories to bid on their drug-testing programs and spend between $7,000 and $60,000 annually on them. In most cases, parents pay $26 for an initial test at the beginning of the sports season, and the district picks up the tab for random testing.

Despite the cost, Pickerington school officials don't keep track of the results. The goal is not to see how many students they can catch but to protect youngsters from themselves, said Mark Aprile, athletic director at Pickerington High School.

"The statistic that can't be kept is how many kids has it prevented from getting involved (with drugs)? How many kids has it kept in a situation where their tests come back negative? We can't tell that."

The school's program, now in its fifth year, tests about 250 athletes each school year and generally finds one or two with a problem, Aprile said.

Logan Elm officials refused to divulge their results. It's board policy, said high-school Athletic Director Dan Bise.

School board President Debbie Shaw said she can assure parents that the testing program helps keep athletes off drugs, even though she won't give them any data. "Knowing the data, I guess there's a trust factor,'' she said. "They're just going to have to trust me.''

Other districts mostly find evidence of tobacco and marijuana use.

For example, last academic year in London schools, which tests athletes in grades seven through 12, seven of 325 athletes who took 800 tests screened positive, all for smoking cigarettes, Athletic Director Terry Nance said.

The number with positive drug tests has dropped through the years, Nance said. The testing program turned up 25 athletes in 1996-97; 20 in 1997-98 and 12 in 1998-99.

Of all the students, three tested positive for marijuana and one had been drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and marijuana, he said; all the others had been smoking cigarettes.

Marysville High School has been testing athletes for two years, Athletic Director Cal Adams said. Five students tested positive for forbidden substances, mostly tobacco, during the 1998-99 school year, and two tested positive last school year, he said.

At Olentangy High School, five students tested positive in both the first and second years of testing, and two did last school year, Athletic Director Jay Wolfe said. Last year's students were using marijuana, he said.

Fairfield Union started testing last school year and found one positive test, for marijuana, said George Shreyer, high school athletic director. The student, a senior, was one game shy of completing the spring season and left the team rather than attend counseling, Shreyer said.

He sees the value of the testing as giving students a reason to say no when someone offers them a beer or a joint: "That athlete can say, 'I can't do that. Shreyer might test me.'"

Aprile said it's proper to single out athletes for testing. "If you're under the influence of drugs or alcohol, you have a greater risk of being injured or injuring someone else," he said.

School officials discount the idea that few drugs show up because few students use them.

Dublin's Anderson cited the most recent triennial survey of the Franklin County Safe and Drug-Free Schools Consortium. In 1997, the agency surveyed 70,000 sixth-through 12th-graders from 16 public school districts and 36 private schools in Franklin County.

It found that alcohol was the drug of choice and that cigarette smoking had increased since the 1994 survey. Forty-four percent of high-school students said they had smoked marijuana at least once; 34 percent of seniors said they got drunk at least once a month.

That didn't surprise Anderson. "We just know it from talking with our students," he said. "They talk about the pressures they're under from the drug culture we live in."

Despite such statistics, Rogers said that getting to know youngsters is the best way to keep track of what they are up to, not random testing. "Teenagers have rights, too," he said.

Steve Silverman agrees. He is campus coordinator for the Drug Reform Coordination Education Network in Washington, D.C.

"I'd say, look at the activities of the kid. Is he acting out? Is he being violent or aggressive?" Silverman said. "If that isn't there, why intrude upon somebody like this?"

Schools should educate, not punish, he said.

"What's going to happen to the kid who may have smoked (marijuana) on the weekends and then gets busted? He's going to get kicked out of sports and out of that whole social group."

Schools emphasize that they have progressive punishment, with counseling generally being the first consequence for a positive drug test.

"Our program really pushes the counseling aspect,'' said Fairfield Union's Shreyer. "We don't want kids to quit sports."

In most cases, athletic directors said, even players who must sit out part of the season return to the team.

For example, at London High School, of the 64 athletes who have tested positive for drugs, only two in the history of the four-year testing program have completely lost their eligibility to play; they both refused to seek help.

In Pickerington, Aprile said, a cheerleader was caught smoking and refused counseling. She isn't cheering anymore. He said another athlete was kicked off his team after he was caught drinking three times last school year.

Shreyer said he wasn't always comfortable with testing students for drugs.

"I don't like the Big Brother-type thing,'' he said.

But he decided it might do some good.

"What changed my mind? We had a young man commit suicide a few days after after he graduated," Shreyer said. "He was involved in drugs and things. That made me stop and look. If we had known, what could we have done?

"It made us think. If this is one more way we can help kids find a way to say no, we were going to do it.''