DOES SCHOOL DRUG TESTING WORK?

Once a year or so, Roy Tialavea is summoned from his classes at
Oceanside High School in California to report to the athletic
director's office bathroom. He receives a urine specimen cup and heads
for a stall.

Tialavea is unruffled. "I don't use drugs so I don't have to worry
about getting caught," he says.

His mother, Robyn, thinks her son steers clear of drugs and alcohol.
But, she says, no parent can know for sure what a teenager is up to.

"If he doesn't like testing, I really don't care," she says. "I think
it's a wonderful tool."

'Best new idea'

Call it the latest version of "just say no." Concerned with high rates
of adolescent substance abuse, hundreds of middle schools and high
schools nationwide have begun testing some or all students for drugs -
to the dismay of some health and addiction experts.

Although less than 5 percent of all high schools have such programs,
testing is common in schools throughout Texas, Florida, Kentucky and
parts of California. Nationwide, as many as 1,000 schools have
established programs, according to the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy.

The number of schools administering drug tests is expected to grow.
Federal funding for it increased 400 percent from 2003 to 2006. The
Bush administration spent $8.6 million on such programs last year and
wants $17.9 million for fiscal 2008.

"This is the best new idea to reduce the onset of drug use," says Dr.
Robert L. DuPont, president of the Institute for Behavior and Health,
a nonprofit drug policy organization. "About half of high school
seniors have used an illicit drug by the time they graduate, and about
one-quarter are regular users by the time they graduate. Those figures
are worrisome."

School-based drug testing gives kids a reason to say no, say DuPont
and other proponents. The tests are meant to identify students who are
using and guide them into counseling or treatment programs.

But health officials, by and large, oppose school-based drug testing.
NAADAC, the Association for Addiction Professionals, is critical of
such programs. And in March, the American Academy of Pediatrics
cautioned against random school-based testing until more research is
completed. The two groups are among those who say testing is not
reliable enough, violates trust between adults and teens and doesn't
deal effectively with students who test positive.

Though adults debate testing's merits, students at some high schools
hand over urine specimen cups as comfortably as they turn in late
library books.

"Kids pretty much know who does drugs and who doesn't," says Alex
Podobas, a senior at San Clemente High School, which has had voluntary
testing for several years. "But no one says, 'Oh, you're a pothead'
when you get called out for testing."

Screening kids for marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines and other illegal
drugs at school is an offshoot of two decades of experience with
workplace and military drug testing, experts say. Testing methods have
improved during that time to reduce the number of false positives
while providing greater privacy and confidentiality, says DuPont.

And though substance abuse among teens has dropped in the past decade,
parents and school administrators still consider the rates
unacceptably high. Just over 20 percent of eighth-graders and about
half of all high school seniors say they have taken an illicit drug,
according to 2006 data from Monitoring the Future, the University of
Michigan's nationwide annual survey.

Little faith is put in traditional classroom drug-education programs
to further reduce substance-abuse rates, says Jennifer Kern of the
Drug Policy Alliance, a Manhattan-based organization.

"People are overwhelmed and are looking for new approaches," she
says.

School drug testing got its biggest boost in 2002 when the Supreme
Court ruled that schools may conduct random drug tests among students
who wish to participate in extracurricular activities, such as sports
or debate team.