Blowing Smoke

WHY RANDOM DRUG TESTING DOESN'T REDUCE STUDENT DRUG USE

Drug testing of the American public has been steadily broadening over
the past 20 years, from soldiers to grocery baggers to high-school
and middle-school students. In its 2007 budget, the Bush
administration asks for $15 million to fund random drug testing of
students-if approved, a 50 percent increase over 2006. Officials from
the federal drug czar's office are crisscrossing the country to sell
the testing to school districts.

Yet, according to the two major studies that have been conducted on
student testing, it doesn't actually reduce drug use. "Of most
importance, drug testing still is found not to be associated with
students' reported illicit drug use-even random testing that
potentially subjects the entire student body," determined the authors
of the most recent study.

It seems like common sense that if students are warned they could be
caught getting high any day in school, they'd be less likely to risk
it. And principals and the drug czar's office argue that this random
chance "gives kids a reason to say no." But teens are notorious for
assuming that nothing bad will happen to them. Sure, some people get
caught, but not me. In addition, a student who chooses to do drugs
already has more than a random chance of getting caught-adults are
everywhere in this world. Someone could see her, smell smoke, see her
bloodshot eyes, or wonder what the hell is so funny. And since most
schools test only students who do something more than just show up
for class-like join an after-school club, park on campus, or play a
sport-kids can avoid the activities rather than quit puffing. Testing
may not change much more of the equation than that.

Such are the findings of two major studies. The first study,
published in early 2003, looked at 76,000 students in eighth, 10th,
and 12th grades in hundreds of schools, between the years 1998 and
2001. It was conducted by Ryoko Yamaguchi, Lloyd Johnston, and
Patrick O'Malley out of the University of Michigan, which also
produces Monitoring the Future, the university's highly regarded
annual survey of student drug use, which is funded by the National
Institute on Drug Abuse and whose numbers the White House regularly cites.

The early 2003 Michigan study compared the rates of drug use, as
measured by Monitoring the Future, in schools that did some type of
drug testing to schools that did not. The researchers controlled for
various demographic differences and found across the board that drug
testing was ineffective; there was no statistically significant
difference in the number of users at a school that tested for drugs
and a similar school that didn't.

The White House criticized the Michigan study for failing to look at
the efficacy of random testing. So, Yamaguchi, Johnston, and O'Malley
added the random element and ran their study again, this time adding
data for the year 2002. The follow-up study, published later in 2003,
tracked 94,000 middle- and high-school students. It reached the same
results as its precursor. Even if drug testing is done randomly and
without suspicion, it's not associated with a change in the number of
students who use drugs in any category. The Michigan follow-up found
one exception: In schools that randomly tested students, 12th-graders
were more likely to smoke marijuana.

Results like these would mean budget cuts or death for some
government programs. The White House has devised its own rating
system, known as the Program Assessment Rating Tool, to help it cull
failed initiatives. (These generally turn out to be the type of
programs you wouldn't expect a Republican administration to like, but
that's another story.) In 2002, PART deemed "ineffective" the Safe
and Drug Free Schools State Grants program, the umbrella for school
drug testing. The Office of Management and Budget, which runs the
PART evaluations, writes on its Web site, "The program has failed to
demonstrate effectiveness in reducing youth drug use, violence, and
crime." The PART evaluation did not single out drug testing, which is
a small part of the overall state grants program. Still, combined
with the Michigan studies, what we have here is a bureaucratic
pounding. That hasn't stopped President Bush from sounding an upbeat
note. In his 2004 State of the Union, he said, "I proposed new
funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to
reduce demand for illegal drugs. Drug testing in our schools has
proven to be an effective part of this effort."

Pressed for evidence to support the administration's bid to increase
funds for testing, drug officials challenge the Michigan study's
methodology. Drug czar John Walters has called for "detailed pre- and
post-random testing data"-that is, a study of the rate of drug use at
a school before a random testing program was initiated and then again
afterward. Such a study is currently under way with federal funds,
but it comes with a built-in flaw. Drug-use rates are obtained in
questionnaires that school administrators give to students. If the
administrators are asking students about their drug-use habits while
they have the power to randomly test them, how honest can we expect
the students to be, no matter what anonymity they're promised?

Like Walters, the $766 million drug-testing industry isn't ready to
give up on testing students, for which it charges between $14 and $30
a cupful of pee. Melissa Moskal, executive director of the
1,300-member Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association, pointed
me to a preliminary study that she likes better than Michigan's and
that Walters also frequently references. The study is funded by the
Department of Education and produced by the Institute for Behavior
and Health, and its lead author is Robert DuPont, a former White
House drug official. DuPont is also a partner at Bensinger, DuPont &
Associates. DuPont says that Bensinger "doesn't have anything to do
with drug testing." But the company's Web site states: "BDA offers a
range of products designed to help employers establish and manage
workplace drug and alcohol testing programs."

DuPont's study, which he calls "descriptive," chose nine schools that
met certain criteria, the first of which was, "The student drug
testing program's apparent success." The study's methodology appears
to add to the slant. Rather than gathering information from students
and analyzing it, DuPont relies on a questionnaire that asks how
effective administrators think their random drug-testing program is.
He doesn't claim neutrality. "I can't quite get the argument that
[drug testing] wouldn't work," he says. He's now working on an
evaluation of eight schools. The results won't be ready soon, but
let's venture a prediction: Random drug testing will come out looking good.

[sidebar]

In 1988, Congress passed the Drug Free Workplace Act, which required
companies to drug-test employees as a condition of receiving federal
contracts. The act was made possible by a 1975 high-court ruling that
created an "administrative search exception" to the Fourth Amendment
when it declared that the state's interest in a strong military
outweighed the privacy rights of soldiers. The administrative search
exception became the legal basis for all future drug testing.

In 1995, in Vernonia School District in Oregon v. Acton, the Supreme
Court upheld drug testing of student athletes without suspicion.
Vernonia said that athletes on drugs were a discipline problem. The
court ruled that the athletes' safety could be affected by drug use
and that they already had lower expectations of privacy. In Earls v.
Tecumseh Public School District (2002), the court approved random
drug testing of any student who participates in an extracurricular activity.

In his opinion for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas found that
1) "individualized suspicion" isn't necessary before testing because
a school has a custodial responsibility for its students; 2)
participation in nonathletic extracurricular activities diminishes
the expectation of privacy; and 3) Tecumseh's demand that students
pee in cups didn't invade their privacy, since an administrator
stands outside the stall and results aren't forwarded on to the cops.