Pubdate: Sat, 29 Jun 2002
Source: Arizona Daily Star (AZ)
Copyright: 2002 Pulitzer Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.azstarnet.com/star/today/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/23
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)

PERVERSE DRUG TESTING

High school choirs and chess clubs aren't exactly hotbeds of teen-age junkies.

Nonetheless, Tecumseh High School in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma 
established a policy that students who wanted to participate in 
extracurricular activities such as choir must submit to a drug test.

Student Lindsay Earls was forced to take such a test; she found it 
accusatory and humiliating even though her test proved negative. She sued 
the school board, arguing that the policy intruded on her privacy rights 
and amounted under the Fourth Amendment to an unreasonable search. The 
nation's high court Thursday ruled that Tecumseh High's policy was 
constitutional, a decision that unwisely permits arbitrary and capricious 
drug testing.

The issue in this case is not drug testing per se. It's unfortunate but 
necessary that drug testing is widely recognized as serving the public's 
interest, and that interest outweighs any claim to the right of privacy.

Writing for the five justices in the majority, Clarence Thomas said testing 
was an effective means of "addressing the school district's legitimate 
concerns in preventing, deterring and detecting drug use."

It is telling that while the district employed testing - the practice was 
halted until the disposition of Earls' case - that only three of 505 
students tested positive. It's also telling that those three students were 
athletes. The court previously ruled that testing student athletes was 
constitutional, so knuckle-scrapping jocks aren't the issue here.

Thomas also argued that students "who participate in competitive 
extracurricular activities voluntarily subject themselves to many of the 
same intrusions on their privacy as do athletes."

But it doesn't necessarily follow that a voluntary intrusion must include a 
drug test. If a student acts in a strange manner, has diluted pupils and 
slurs his or her words, then school supervisors have good reason to require 
a drug test.

But to make the test a condition of participation is, as Justice Ruth Bader 
Ginsburg said, "not reasonable, it is capricious, even perverse: 
Petitioner's policy targets for testing a student population least likely 
to be at risk from illicit drugs and their damaging effects."

The federal 10th Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of Earls because 
the district failed to show that the school had a drug problem for which 
testing was the solution. Indeed, the school district could not prove 
Tecumseh had even an itty-bitty problem, given its record of three positive 
tests among 505 students. That school board isn't just cautious about 
drugs; it's paranoiac.

And about half stupid. The district argued that safety was its paramount 
interest in requiring the tests. After all, the district said, 
extracurricular activities entail dangerous hazards. Future homemakers have 
to handle sharp utensils. Future farmers have to mess with large critters. 
And band members have to march with heavy tubas. To this argument, Ginsburg 
responded:

"Notwithstanding nightmarish images of out-of-control flatware, livestock 
run amok, and colliding tubas disturbing the peace and quiet of Tecumseh, 
the great majority of students the School District seeks to test in truth 
are engaged in activities that are not safety sensitive to an unusual degree."

We live in a time, it seems, of extremes. Greed is so extreme on Wall 
Street that we can doubt that we'll ever see the end of it. We have fire, 
drought and global warming as rarely, if ever, before. To that, thanks to 
the Supreme Court, we now can add state-sanctioned caprice.
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MAP posted-by: Beth