SUPREME COURT'S SCHOOL DRUG TESTING DECISION IRRATIONAL

No sane person wants children using illicit drugs. But, all the same, there
is something fundamentally worrisome about a Supreme Court ruling that
sanctions suspicionless drug testing of students.

The decision, ironically reached just hours before the nation celebrated
Independence Day, said that an expansive drug testing policy instituted in
Pottawatomie County, Okla., passes constitutional muster. That policy
requires all middle and high school students who participate in competitive
extracurricular activities to submit to drug testing.

The high court ruled in 1995 that public schools had the power to require
students who participated in athletics and certain other activities to
agree to random, suspicionless drug tests.

But this latest ruling by the court essentially expands that universe of
students enormously.

Now, students participating in any school-sanctioned extracurricular
activity, from football to the Future Homemakers of America, baseball to
band, even the academic club and choir, can be tested for drugs, the court
has determined.

And what was the level of drug use that sparked such a decision?

It turns out that in Pottawatomie County, of 797 students subject to the
existing policy, an underwhelming total of just three students tested
positive for some sort of drug. That's a rate which is very likely less
than that of the general adult population.

But Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who delivered the 5-4 opinion,
has an answer for that, though hardly a convincing one. "...The need to
prevent and deter ... drug use provides the necessary immediacy for a
school testing policy. Indeed, it would make little sense to require a
school district to wait for a substantial portion of its students to begin
using drugs before it was allowed to institute a drug testing program
designed to deter drug use.''

What makes little sense, as Judge Thomas would put it, is to spend a small
fortune testing hundreds, perhaps even thousands of students at a school
when the existing testing regime strongly suggests that drug use there is
statistically negligible.

Illegal drug use in American society is undoubtedly a major problem.

But making the class computer nerd give a urine specimen before he can
enter his latest invention in the school science fair does relatively
little to address that problem. Indeed, if schools rush to embrace such a
testing program, they might well make student drug use worse than it is.

That's because a whole host of studies show that students are less likely -
not more likely - to do drugs if they are engaged in extracurricular
activities.

Participation in school athletics and extracurricular activities is what
researchers call a ''protective factor'' that reduces the likelihood that a
youth will use alcohol, tobacco or other drugs.

Conversely, kids inclined to do drugs will merely have to skirt
participation in extracurricular activities to escape drug testing.

School used to be a place where students were prepared for the
responsibilities of citizenship. Treating the most highly involved and
motivated middle and high school students like possible drug addicts is a
lousy way to go about that job. Then again, given enough hall monitors,
drug-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, urine tests and police patrols, we
might eventually succeed in making them all non-motivated, uninvolved - but
careful - criminals.