KENT SCHOOL SEARCH WENT WAY TOO FAR

The Kent County High School drug search saddened me ("Sheriff to review
policy on searches," May 14).

Strip-searching students based on the reactions of drug-sniffing dogs
strikes me as overly aggressive and as insensitive to students'
privacy rights.

A drug-free school is an impossible goal: As long as adolescents are
curious about expanding their horizons, which includes drugs, those
drugs will be made available to our children.

In fact, the illegal status of marijuana, cocaine, Ecstasy, etc., even
for adults means the distributors of those drugs are criminals who
have no incentive to avoid targeting children.

And even if a drug-free school were feasible, we must ask: At what
cost?

We can't keep illegal drugs out of prisons; would we be willing to run
our schools with more reduced privacy and continuous surveillance than
a modern, high-security prison?

If we can accept that there will be some teen-age drug
experimentation, then we can work to make it less harmful to our kids
and focus on helping those at greatest risk for dangerously misusing
drugs.

Tyler Smith

Silver Spring