DRUG TESTING OF STUDENTS IS UN-AMERICAN

IN AMERICA, where citizens are supposed to want to keep government out
of their family decision-making, there should be no random drug
testing at public schools. Yet some 19 percent of public schools
engage in some form of student drug testing, the University of
Michigan's Journal of School Health found in 2003. President Bush
proposes to spend $25 million in 2006 to fund more random drug
testing. And the internationally minded U.S. Supreme Court thinks that
drug testing in public schools is just swell.

This is wrong. Parents who suspect their children of using drugs are
free to test their kids. Hence, there is no need for schools to
intervene -- any more than there is a need for schools to set the
punishment for children who disobey their parents' rules. Except that
it is happening.

It started when schools began testing athletes; there was at least the
pretense of a safety argument for the tests -- you don't want stoned
kids leaping for a high fly. But by the time the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled on said tests in 1995, the rationale for the tests had expanded.
The Big Bench supported testing of athletes to prevent the "increased
risk of sports-related injury," but also because athletes are role
models.

Court and school officials understand that it would be a coercive
violation of privacy rights to force all public-school students to
submit to drug tests. It goes against the presumption of innocence,
unreasonable searches, the need for probable cause and other quaint
notions found in the U. S. Constitution. So those officials who want
the government to play parent have come up with a new angle -- require
students who engage in extracurricular activities to agree to random
drug testing. It's not mandatory, they argue, because students don't
have to join clubs. And believe it or not, the U.S. Supreme Court
agreed in 2002.

The surest bet in America is: Once a bad idea is born, it only gets
bigger.

Testifying before a House committee in February, Bush drug czar John
Walters argued that school "drug testing can be done effectively and
compassionately." Its purpose, he explained, "is not to punish
students who use drugs, but to prevent use in the first place, and to
make sure users get the help they need to stop placing themselves and
their friends at risk."

Problem is: It is not clear how many students don't use drugs because
they want to be in the chess club. Probably some students refrain.
Still, University of Michigan researcher Lloyd Johnston noted in 2003
that there is "a serious question of whether drug testing is a wise
investment," as it is not clear that it deters student drug use.

I don't think it is good policy to treat innocent students as if they
might be guilty by making them pee in a cup if they want to be in
debate club.

Meanwhile, there can be little doubt that students who use drugs say
no to extracurricular activities because they don't want to say no to
drugs. Testing for club membership, said Tom Angell of Students for
Sensible Drug Policy, pushes these students "away from those positive
atmospheres that study after study has shown are successful at keeping
students away from drugs."

It's twisted: The very do-gooders who first lament that drug use
consigns students to do poorly in school, now push for policies that
marginalize students and guarantee that they will not have a full
high-school experience.

And it doesn't matter what parents think. When the Supreme Court ruled
in favor of testing for students who sign up for extracurricular
activities in 2002, I asked the National School Board Association what
it thought of a policy that required testing of students, even if
parents took the responsibility. "The answer is that your child cannot
participate in extracurricular activities," an official answered.
"It's not negotiable."

Lori Earls, the parent of an Oklahoma high-school student on the
losing side of the 2002 case, was outraged by the school's drug
policy. She believed that other parents supported drug testing because
it relieved them of the responsibility of their children's drug use,
and ceded it to the schools. "They took away the parents' job," she
noted.

And yet there is no outcry.