STRIPPING STUDENT RIGHTS

Anyone who has seen Reefer Madness might have wondered Monday whether some
Supreme Court justices were recreating scenes.

The over-the-top 1936 anti-drug film recommended that anyone using
marijuana be considered mentally ill. The issue before the court this week
was whether a school district near Oklahoma City could maintain a policy of
mandatory random drug tests for any high school student taking part in
interscholastic competition, from the football team to the choir, even if
there was no suspicion of drug use.

When Lindsay Earls was a student at Tecumseh High School, she was on the
band, two choirs and the Academic Team. She challenged the policy on the
grounds that it violated her Fourth Amendment protection against
unreasonable search. The trial court upheld the policy, but an appellate
court reversed the decision.

Ms. Earls passed her drug test and is a freshman at Dartmouth College. Yet
Justice Anthony Kennedy belittled not only the lawsuit but Ms. Earls and
her family. "No parent would send their child to a 'druggie' school, except
perhaps your client," Justice Kennedy fumed to Ms. Earls' attorney. Not
only was he out of line, he was off the mark in assuming that drug use
would be rampant at schools that didn't enact such policies.

In 1995, the court ruled that an Oregon school district could require drug
tests for extracurricular activities. Writing for the majority, Justice
Antonin Scalia said testing was necessary to avoid "getting used to a drug
culture." That's a long and dubious legal stretch, but at least in that
case there was suspicion of a serious drug problem with athletes as the
culprits.

As legal scholars have noted, courts for more than a decade have been
stripping away minors' constitutional rights. Still, the students at
Tecumseh High are not train engineers who deliver hazardous material, so
there is no public-safety issue. Nor is the district seeking, for example,
to test athletes for performance-enhancing drugs that could be harmful to
them. Absent probable cause, the drug tests amount to an illegal search and
a lesson to children that constitutional rights are negotiable.

Besides, there are better ways to respond. This week, the St. Lucie County
Sheriff's Office arrested 16 students at Port St. Lucie and Centennial high
schools on drug charges. The school district asked for help because it had
something Justice Kennedy didn't seem to consider important: evidence. The
sting operation caught the guilty without involving the innocent. What a
concept.