RANDOM TESTING OF TEENAGERS WOULD INFORM DRUGS DEBATE

When it comes to drug testing schoolchildren strong views abound -
strongly supportive or strongly critical but hardly ever based on
evidence. The lack of evidence in recent discussions regarding the
possibility of drug testing Scottish schoolchildren should surprise
nobody because there simply is no evidence that anyone can base their
arguments upon. In the absence of evidence, intelligent people come
up with a mixture of guesswork, beliefs, thoughts and hunches. "Drug
testing will undermine the trust between adults and young people",
"it will lead to greater exclusion of marginal young people", "it
will encourage others to use harder drugs that are more difficult to
detect using random drug testing". It may also be a step towards
creating drug-free environments within our schools.

All of these are possible outcomes, but whether they would occur in
reality nobody knows because nobody is actually evaluating the role
of drug testing in drug prevention. We have, for the most part,
formed our views on testing and those views sit in a spectacularly
evidence-free zone. When I raised the question of drug testing at a
Scottish Executive-supported conference last week I was subsequently
accused of wanting widespread drug testing of Scottish
schoolchildren. In fact, all I had called for was for us to be bolder
in piloting and evaluating radical solutions to a growing drug problem.

Drug education in its present form is not working. The Advisory
Council on the Misuse of Drugs reported the results of its own
two-year inquiry into drug use among young people and concluded that
drug education initiatives were failing our young people. If anybody
is in any doubt about that statement they only needed to watch the
Channel Four news last Friday reporting that more than 50,000
under-16s in the UK in 2005/6 had been stopped by the police in
possession of illegal drugs and approaching 6000 had been arrested
for dealing drugs. When we think that those numbers represent only
the tip of an iceberg of children of a similar age who are using and
dealing illegal drugs but who are not coming to the attention of the
police we have some measure of the scale of the problem we now face
among under-16s. A recent survey of Scottish 15-year-olds, carried
out by Edinburgh University, found that most teenagers questioned
felt that most young people would go on ! to use illegal drugs at
some time. These are the figures and beliefs of a growing drug
culture in Scotland and elsewhere.

What can you do to tackle that culture? One thing you might try to do
is to develop initiatives that are new and as yet untested. I raised
two possible approaches in my talk last week. One of these was to
develop a pilot drug-testing scheme in a small number of Scottish
schools and the other was to develop a pilot programme for using
recovered drug addicts in school-based drug education. These were not
proposals to develop a national programme for drug testing Scottish
schoolchildren or a national programme of recovered-addict education.
They were suggestions for piloting and evaluating approaches to drug
prevention because of the simple fact that what we are doing now is
not working.

At the moment, the largely US evidence for or against drug testing is
ambiguous. There are some studies that show it might be effective and
others that appear to show no positive effect on the rates of teenage
drug use. In response to that situation you can either wait for
somebody else to carry out a better evaluation or you can go out to
get the evidence yourself as to whether drug testing works in your
schools, with your young people and your drug problem.

I think there is a strong case in Scotland for having the courage to
try these things out, to evaluate their impact and to develop a
programme of evidence, not belief-based, drug-prevention education.

Drug testing, though, raises complex ethical issues. For example,
whether young people can give their informed consent to be tested,
whether testing impinges negatively on the teacher-pupil relationship
and, perhaps most crucially, how you respond when a young person
tests positive for illegal drugs. There are difficult questions to
answer, but they are not so difficult as to rule out even trying to
see if drug testing is an effective method of drug prevention. And if
drug testing were effective would that mean we should mount a
national scheme of regular testing? The answer to that question is
no. What it would mean is that we could then begin a debate as to
whether the ends justify the means, knowing that drug testing is at
least one way of reducing teenage drug use.