TESTING HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS FOR DRUGS IS A BAD IDEA

Privacy is disappearing from the American lexicon. That old paranoia that
someone is watching you, well, it isn't so paranoid anymore.

Between stop-light cameras, credit card purchase databases and creeps with
handicams gathering footage for America's Funniest Groin Traumas, we
Americans are scrutinized like wild-eyed loners at a gun show.

The most massive affront of this type is a growing movement within high
schools to drug test students, particularly those who participate in
extracurricular activities. Like so many bad ideas, this one sounds good at
first.

Drugs are a problem in the world, in America and in our schools, so the
solution must be to submit our children, with or without pretense, to
handling their own urine.

Granted, I'm no law professor, but it would seem that this blanket offense
violates a fundamental principle of our justice system, which holds that
you're innocent until proved guilty.

If a kid wanders around the football field for five hours, chasing a ground
squirrel when he should be in class, I understand the presumption of drug
use. But if a student excels academically, plays sports and somehow manages
to participate in clubs and charities, as do many teen-agers currently
subjected to screening, common sense tells us we needn't worry.

And if they do use drugs, well, they must take all the right ones.

The justifications for testing that I've heard are stretched thinner than a
Victoria's Secret nightgown on Dolly Parton. A school board member in the
Midwest believed the local high school marching band should be screened
because drug-addled kids could mishandle their tubas and injure other kids.

Bad instrument playing would be the more logical concern, but judging by
the quality of pop music today, this isn't high on our list of drug-related
crimes.

People should not casually be subjected to a drug test. It is an awkward
experience in which you must wait in a doctor's office until your bladder
swells to the size of a beach ball. Then a nurse hands you a ludicrously
tiny plastic cup and instructs you to fill it to a prescribed level. The
mechanics of this act I need not discuss.

At last, you emerge from the bathroom and must present your waste to this
same nurse who gives you an embarrassed grin, as if to say, "Good boy, now
you get a cookie."

I understand testing for people in positions, like heavy-equipment
operation and surgery, to cause immediate, severe physical harm to others.
For my trucking job, I am regularly tested, something I endorse, because if
I snort cocaine off the dashboard, I am just not paying attention to the road.

However, our high school students - provided they avoid driving - are in
jeopardy of harming little but their academic records if they smoke
marijuana behind the gym and flunk a calculus quiz. More to the point, they
go to school to become educated, productive members of a society that
rewards their efforts by infringing upon their most basic rights.

Without moralizing drug use, let us face the uncomfortable truth that kids
experiment to find their own footing, and that drugs, in this days and age,
are a likely part of that process.

Instead of fretting over students' every move, school administrators and
parents should focus on providing their charges with solid intellectual and
moral foundations so they can decide for themselves whether they want to
destroy their lives with substances - like they will every day of their
lives after graduation.

Give high school students the benefit of the doubt. We hope they will act
like adults, so let us begin by treating them as such, respecting the
privacy of those who have earned it, reserving our worry for those who need it.