LUCY IN THE SKY WITH DRUG TESTS

WE SAY: Random screenings alone aren't the most effective way to
prevent high school substance abuse

Allow us a moment to attempt to summarize the Bush administration's
doctrine of mad science.

* Stem cells could potentially help the terminally ill, but doctors
can only use the limited and already-created supply available.

* A top climate expert at NASA says the space agency's public
affairs office tried to silence his views of immediate reducing
greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

* Instead of putting money into sensible sex education and providing
information on forms of birth control, the government is content to
fund short-sighted abstinence-only education.

Now adolescent drug use is the latest casualty of this war on science.
The administration would like to devote 50 percent more federal
resources -- totaling about $15 million -- to random drug testing in
high schools, while simultaneously slashing $387 million from drug
education in schools.

We're not even convinced this is an ideological divide on science
anymore. It's beginning to seem closer to an intellectual divide.

The proposal's reception has been fairly lukewarm in high schools,
although they have a constitutional right to randomly drug test any
student involved in extracurricular activities (established in a 2002
Supreme Court decision). Drug Czar John Walters and his staff are on a
blitz across the country to convince schools of the virtues of random
drug testing.

We're not quite ready to slam the door completely on random testing,
even if the Fourth Amendment entanglements seem less obvious to the
Supreme Court than to us. Naturally, there will be some students who
recklessly engage in substance abuse and their habits might not be
known without such a test. But there are still a number of reasons why
drug testing alone is not the most effective method, chief among these
the fact that only students enrolled in extracurricular activities are
subject to the tests.

Also, random drug testing is more punitive than preventive, even
though schools can't send violators off to the police. The explicit
goal of drug testing is to catch who's taking drugs; implicitly there
is a scare factor introduced to the equation, where the fear is
getting caught, and that's enough of an incentive not to do the drugs
in the first place. But common sense tells us that teenagers engage in
all sorts of activity, be it staying out late or having sex in the
basement, never assuming they'll be caught.

The hard data doesn't support testing, either. Few studies have
analyzed random testing, but two -- one conducted by the University of
Michigan, the other funded by the U.S. Education Department and
produced by Institute for Behavior and Health -- seem to suggest
random testing doesn't decrease the rate of drug use.

Walters contends the war on teenage drug abuse will be won in schools.
We agree, but not with the plan of action Walters has put forward. As
we've written before, the administration needs to recognize that
education is the silver bullet, the most important thing when it comes
to preventing, or lessening, behavior that society frowns upon. To
think otherwise is problematic.