SCHOOL TOBACCO TESTS OUTRAGEOUS

For those who encounter teen-agers everyday, America's educators often seem
to have no idea how to deal with them.

Since way before Nancy Reagan started urging young people to "just say no,"
teen-age rebellion at its simplest can be boiled down to one simple truth:
The more you preach to kids not to do something, the more they're going to
at least want to give it a try.

When it comes to the problem of tobacco use, however, some educators have
either forgotten this lesson or never learned it in the first place. In
school districts around Birmingham, Ala., in Blackford, Ind., even in
Decatur, Ga., schools have begun random testing of students to detect
tobacco use.

Beyond the total lack of respect for teen-agers' rights as individuals,
this action makes us wonder if we somehow missed an alarming increase in
tobacco use among teens. Not at all.

The University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research conducts an
annual Monitoring the Future study of about 45,000 students from more than
400 schools nationwide. The survey found that, in 2000, 15 percent of
eighth-graders, 24 percent of 10th-graders and 31 percent of 12th-graders
reported smoking at least one cigarette in the past 30 days.

As troubling as these numbers are, they are a healthy decline from the mid
1990s: In 1996, 21 percent of eighth-graders, 30.4 percent of 10th-graders
and 36.5 percent of 12th-graders admitted to what the study calls "current
smoking."

What does this show? Students have been getting good advice about the
dangers of smoking, either from their parents, peers or teachers, and are
able to act on it. Testing for tobacco only undermines any trust that has
been built between teens and the people who influence them most, while
tearing down their often fragile self-esteem.

Shawn Heller, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy in
Washington, said of the testing: "We're making schools like prisons." Well,
not quite. Even prisoners are not subjected to such draconian measures.