CBHS STUDENTS WILL HAVE TO LIVE WITH NEW POLICY

THIRTY YEARS ago, they knew where to acquire the best hashish. Now
their expertise is in weeding out drug users in the workplaces and
schoolyards they supervise.

Why is the generation that experimented with recreational drugs
determined to cast drug users out of schools, offices and factories?
Perhaps its members learned something about excess.

It wasn't a current problem with drugs that led Christian Brothers
High School officials, they say, to institute random drug tests among
the school's nearly 900 students next fall.

Hair sampling, a relatively new technique that can detect drug use as
far back as three months, will search for use of marijuana, cocaine,
opiates, PCP and methamphetamines. Expulsion would follow two positive
tests or a refusal.

Civil libertarians can't touch the testing that's going on in a few
private schools such as Christian Brothers. Even in public schools,
courts have sanctioned drug testing of students who want to
participate in extracurricular activities.

Some CBHS students may complain of the presumption of guilt implied by
testing. But they evidently will have to accept an occasional
screening, as many of their parents have had to accept it in the workplace.

There was little public outcry when companies began testing employees
in the early to mid 1980s, encouraged by President Reagan and other
federal officials. Acceptance grew after a series of accidents
involving drugged or drunken drivers and pilots, and a barrage of
media coverage of an insidiously addictive new drug known as crack
cocaine.

Congress weighed in with measures such as the 1988 Drug-Free Workplace
Act, which required federal contractors and grant recipients to test
their employees, and the Omnibus Transportation and Employment Testing
Act of 1991, which extended the practice to pilots and drivers. Nearly
three quarters of America's largest companies now require job
applicants to undergo urinalysis.

This climate, along with some aggressive anti-drug programs, helped
curb illicit drug use among adolescents. The trend continued until
1992, when - although numbers were still well below the all-time highs
of the late 1970s-surveys began to show a reversal.

At the same time, there has been no dramatic rise in illicit drug use
among kids. A study conducted by the University of Michigan Institute
for Social Research of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders showed drug use
among American adolescents holding steady in 1999.

Drugs that showed little change in use last year included marijuana,
amphetamines, hallucinogens, tranquilizers and heroin. The use of
inhalants went down. The use of Ecstasy and anabolic steroids,
meanwhile, trended upward. These and other factors could extend the
life of the drug-testing industry well into the future.