DRUGS IN SCHOOL HAVE FLOURISHED, IN NO SMALL PART DUE TO LACK OF NEW
ANTI-DRUG POLICIES

YOUTH CORRESPONDENT

You walk into school, and you think that you're safe and that the faculty
has everything under control. But do they really?

Something that seems to be out of anyone's control is the amount of drugs in
school. My grandma and dad told me the main drugs they had to watch out for
were cigarettes.

Now you've got ecstasy and marijuana. And worse.

As we all know, the schools do routine locker searches. School officials and
narcotics officers come and bring in the dogs, and the dogs search each
locker.

But is this really accomplishing the desired goal? Just think about this for
a moment: If someone wanted to smoke a cigarette, would they have it in
their locker, or on them?

It doesn't stop at the lockers. Some schools are thinking about performing
drug tests on the athletes.

Yes, athletes have been known to take steroids. Steroids aren't the only
drugs that are taken in high school, though. In fact, they could be among
the least prevalent.

Doing drug tests on high school athletes seems like discrimination against
one social group--like saying that they're the only ones that are doing
drugs.

We hear the schools justify specific tests on athletes by saying that it is
the athletes who will be representing the school.

Yet chess team, marching band and myriad other clubs/activities represent
the school also. They may not seem like the ones doing the drugs, but you
never really know.

A straight-A student may not seem like the person to take drugs--but they
could be, just as much as any other.

Schools may not want to take on new approaches or extra precautions for drug
prevention because of the money required. Yet if we want to help the next
generation be drug free, we need to try something new.

Would we rather have families paying a little bit more money each year for
taxes--or hundreds, maybe even thousands of students turning down the road
to drugs?

What are our priorities?

DALLAS HINEGARDNER is a freshman at Chancellor High School.