CHILD CASUALTIES OF THE DRUG WAR

Testing Schoolchildren Without Cause

American public schools tend to resemble prisons more all the time, and the
trend is especially conspicuous in the small rural town of Lockney, in the
Texas panhandle. When the parents of one 6th-grade boy refused to go along
with a new drug policy, his prescribed punishment was a three-day in-school
suspension, during which time he would have to wear--I'm not making this
up--an orange jumpsuit.

Lockney appears to be one of only two school districts in the country (the
other is in nearby Sundown) that have instituted mandatory drug testing for
all students. While some schools require such tests for kids who play on
athletic teams or participate in extracurricular activities, Lockney does
it for every single youngster--and not just in high school but in junior
high. Anyone enrolled, from the 6th grade on, has to submit to a urinalysis
for drugs, and is subject to random tests afterward.

This was fine with nearly all parents in Lockney, but not with Larry
Tannahill, a 35-year-old farmhand who somewhere acquired the weird notion
that Americans should not have to prove their innocence at the whim of
government officials. He refused to allow his son Brady to be tested, filed
a lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and is hoping
the courts will find that the Constitution applies even in public schools.

That hope may not be realized. In the continuing national hysteria known as
the drug war, niceties like the 4th Amendment (which prohibits
"unreasonable searches and seizures") have often been cast aside. In their
never-ending quest for a drug-free society, many government officials and
ordinary Americans have come to believe that showing respect for individual
rights amounts to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The Lockney policy is extreme, but it may be the wave of the future. Most
Americans may agree that the survival of the republic depends on treating
12-year-olds as perpetual suspects. We may have so little regard for the
privacy of ourselves and our children that we think the government should
be empowered to commandeer the citizenry's bodily secretions at any moment
for close inspection.

Brady Tannahill's punishment is on hold while the policy is being
challenged. But under the district's regulations, merely declining to take
part in the drug test is treated the same as testing positive--actual guilt
being irrelevant. Besides the three-day suspension, Brady would have been
barred from extracurricular activities for 21 days and would have had to
undergo substance-abuse counseling, even though no one claims he has
actually used any forbidden substance. He also would have to take monthly
drug tests, with ever-increasing penalties for each refusal.

This is a relatively new issue for the judiciary, since American schools
survived for several hundred years without heavy reliance on urinalysis.
But in 1995, the Supreme Court upheld an Oregon school district's policy of
drug testing all student athletes, dismissing privacy concerns with the
airy assertion that "school sports are not for the bashful." At the same
time, the justices said they would not necessarily approve other mass drug
testing programs.

But it's hard to be optimistic about this case. The Supreme Court said the
Oregon program was permissible because drugs are so disruptive to the
educational process, and because when schoolchildren are involved, the
government has the right to conduct any search "that a reasonable guardian
and tutor might undertake." Those excuses will work just fine in Lockney.
In that case, the court nonchalantly discarded the most important check on
government searches: the requirement that they be carried out only when
there are grounds to think a specific person has done something wrong. We
expect police to live by that rule in combating murder, rape and
robbery--but somehow it's too burdensome for school principals trying to
control and educate 12-year-olds.

If Lockney or any other town has a drug problem at the middle school, it
could simply test students whose behavior suggests a chemically altered
state. Either drugs cause serious misbehavior or they don't. If they do,
schools should be able to combat drug use by testing the kids who cause
trouble. If not, then maybe drugs are not as destructive as we have been
told, and maybe it's not worth giving up our right to privacy to stamp them
out.

But maybe it's a mistake to think anti-drug crusaders prefer a tough
approach only because they think it will work--or that they can be
dissuaded by evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, the only point of abusing
people's rights is to abuse people's rights.