Pubdate: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 Source: Lodi News-Sentinel (CA) Copyright: 2002 Lodi News-Sentinel Contact: http://www.lodinews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1419 Author: Charlie Hammond Note: Charlie Hammond is an Acampo resident and a regular News- Sentinel columnist. 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart