STUDENTS DESERVE HONEST DEBATE OVER DRUG USE

We must turn away from panic and fear.

What a terrible notion that we would decide as a community to haul
our youth into school and force them to urinate in a cup to test for
substances that may or may not be causing them harm. The idea that
further tightening the straightjacket around our kids will control
their behavior and set them on the right course is patently false and
rife with logical fallacy. Studies such as a 2003 University of
Michigan "Monitoring the Future" survey have shown that there is
little statistical difference between student drug use at schools
where testing is conducted and those where it is not.

It should also be noted that in 2007, the American Academy of
Pediatrics recommended against student drug testing on the basis that
specific methods for dealing with adolescent abuse excepting punitive
measures would be better for kids. Taken in this context, I wonder
what the Drug Coalition proposes to do with students who test
positive--kick them off the football team or out of the debate club?
Suspend them or expel them? Any punitive measure will no doubt
include further ostracizing them from the education they desperately need.

We owe our students an honest debate about drug use. We owe them
honest answers, which address their fundamental need for
experimentation. Engaging in draconian end-point policy not only sets
a precedent for invasion of privacy, it rushes headlong into judgment
while ignoring the fundamental basis of clear-headed decision-making
that lies in a well-educated and informed student--a student who is
engaged with adults who offer them respect and freedom to make their
own wise decisions. We should spend our time as a community looking
for ways to focus on our students' accomplishments, extending them
opportunity and uplifting them, not treating them as prisoners in the
gulag. We can force our students into drug testing, we can force them
out of extracurricular activities and out of school entirely, but we
will not force them to choose to stop using drugs. This choice can
only be made through personal experience and inner strength, which
sometimes includes experi! mentation with drugs.

The Drug Coalition members would be better serving the students if
they spent their time crafting a message that extended respect and
understanding to a student's ability to make informed choices based
on sound and truthful information, not in perpetuating the 30 years
of hysteria and failed drug policy that have failed to produce
measurable statistical differences in students' drug use.

As for the notion that the entire community has a drug problem, I
would like to note that the entire community is better educated,
wealthier and healthier than the national average. We will only
succeed in ending drug abuse in our community when we address the
root problems that begin the cycle of abuse--poverty, disparity in
wealth, lack of opportunity, lack of education and a system that
treats addicts as criminals. Despite what the Supreme Court may have
ruled (the same Supreme Court that has run roughshod over individual
rights and freedoms of recent), we must turn to a drug policy that
doesn't begin this cycle on the front steps of our schools. We must
turn away from panic and fear, and choose to treat our students with
respect and compassion.