SCHOOLS LOSE A FINE ANTI-DRUG PROGRAM

Miami-Dade County public schools' recent decision to abandon
drug-testing is another prime example of bureaucracy run amok. Deputy
superintendent Henry Fraind says the program has "no support from the
community or internally." (July 1 Dade drops drug testing of
students). He is half right. From the beginning Miami-Dade
administrators thwarted the program while my office was flooded with
dozens of calls from governmental entities nationwide looking to
emulate the program.

While dozens of media outlets recognized the program as
groundbreaking, retrograde local administrators hesitated to push the
program and did little to inform parents.

What better example of administrative foot-dragging than the 438
signed-up students who never were tested?

The district never mailed consent forms to parents of high-school
students since the program's inception in January 1998. Principals who
disagreed with the program did not bother to send forms home with
students, while their superiors looked the other way. In fact, the 475
returned forms are testament to the demand for a program that had
little administrative support.

The Herald, on the other hand, remains intoxicated with failing
traditional, preventive drug-education programs (editorials Drug test
debacle and Drug test follies II). Even the best education programs
fail to significantly curtail use. The Rand Institute's recently
released study An Ounce of Prevention, a Pound of Uncertainty,
concludes that in the most realistic estimate of prevention's
effectiveness, "it would take a nationwide model program six years to
achieve a 1-percent reduction in the number of past-year cocaine users.

It would take 40 years to see a 7.5 percent reduction."

Neither drug testing nor drug education is the panacea that will
extirpate drug use. As aptly stated by the Rand study, the drug-use
epidemic is more akin to heart disease than smallpox.

Heart disease will never be eradicated as was smallpox; it can only be
contained.

Similarly, drug use will never be eradicated. Schools need as many
legally acceptable tools as possible to contain this American scourge.

My drug-testing proposal in its original incarnation pushed the legal
envelope, but it was constitutional.

Drug-threatened children need constructive efforts to improve
Miami-Dade's drug-prevention programs.

If the county is hell-bent on killing drug testing, so be it, but
board members should not miss this opportunity to have honest
discourse on the ineffectiveness of current traditional preventive
efforts.

RENIER DIAZ DE LA PORTILLA
Former School Board Member
Miami