Supreme Court Disallows Candidate Drug Tests

WASHINGTON (Reuter) The Supreme Court struck down Tuesday a state law
requiring that candidates for top political, legislative and judicial
office must pass drug tests before they can get on the ballot.

The high court, by an 81 vote, declared unconstitutional a 1990 Georgia
law mandating drug tests for candidates for governor, lieutenant
governor and other top posts, heads of several agencies, state judges
and state legislators.

The ruling marked the first time the Supreme Court has invalidated a
drugtesting requirement, programs which have been used by the
government and private employers across the country since the mid1980s.

Since 1989, the Supreme Court has upheld drug tests for
studentathlethes, government workers and railroad employees, mainly out
of concern for public safety, but it said the Georgia law went too far
by violating privacy rights.

The ruling represented a setback for Georgia and the Justice Department,
which supported the law that required candidates submit to the tests.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said for the court majority that there was
no evidence the state had any fear or suspicion of illegal drug use by
elected officials.

"What is left, after close review of Georgia's scheme, is a state
interest not in public safety, but in projecting an image. Georgia seeks
to display to the public its firm commitment to the struggle against
drug abuse," she said.

"The need projected ... is symbolic, not actual and special," she said.
"However well meant, the candidate drug test that Georgia has devised
diminishes personal privacy for a symbol's sake."

Ginsburg said the constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches
and seizures of evidence protected candidates against the urinalysis
test at issue.

Under the law, any candidate who declined to take the test or who tested
positive for one of five illegal drugs would be barred from holding
office.

Ginsburg said the law was not well designed to identify drug users. "The
test date is picked by the candidate, so all but the uncontrollably
addicted could escape detection," she said.

She said the Georgia law does not fit within the small category of
constitutionally permissible drug tests that can be required without
individualized suspicion of wrongdoing. Ginsburg concluded that the
drugtesting ruling would not affect whether states may require medical
examinations designed to provide certification of a candidate's general
health or financial disclosure requirements.

Walker Chandler, a Libertarian Party member who unsuccessfully ran for
lieutenant governor in 1994, was among those challenging the law, saying
it amounted to an improper expansion of government power for merely
symbolic purpose.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist was the lone dissenter, saying the
privacy concerns implicated by the urinalysis test were "negligible" and
warning that abuse of illegal drugs had become "one of the major
problems of our society."

He said nothing in the Constitution prevents a state from adopting a law
"whose principal vice is that it may seem misguided or even silly to
members of this court."

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