ALL ARE PUNISHED

The Lockney school district recently instituted a policy whereby all Lockney
students in the sixth through 12th grades are to be drug tested. The school
board additionally decreed that all parents must sign a waiver granting
permission to do this.

One family, the Tannahills, stood up against unreasonable search and
seizure, against the usurpation of the authority of parents by the schools
and against the hysterical voices of the uninformed.

Superintendent Raymond Lusk touted these drug tests as a way to encourage
students to resist peer pressure. Yet he clearly exhibited a double-minded
reliance on peer pressure from the community to bludgeon dissident parents
into going along with his plan. In fact, like the father who beats all of
his children until the one confesses, he punishes the children of parents
who do not sign regardless of whether they are guilty or not.

Many there are who believe that the drug war is worth whatever is requested
in the name of that cause. Blood-bought rights and freedoms have now been
traded in on this ideal. Decades after this war began, some of us see this
ideal as the chimera it is.

One day the American compulsion to punish "druggies," or even anyone
suspected of being a "druggie," will be seen for what it is: the frustrated
temper tantrum of the immature and the ignorant.

God bless the Tannahill family.

Larry Nickerson
Fort Worth