Editor, The Rio Rancho Public Schools Board of Education needs to educate itself on the downside of student drug testing. Student involvement in after-school activities, like sports, has been shown to reduce drug use. They keep kids busy during the hours they are most likely to get into trouble. Forcing students to undergo degrading urine tests as a prerequisite will only discourage participation in extracurricular programs. Drug testing may compel marijuana users to switch to more dangerous prescription narcotics to avoid testing positive. This is one of the reasons the American Academy of Pediatrics opposes student drug testing. Despite a short-lived high, marijuana is the only drug that stays in the human body long enough to make urinalysis a deterrent. [continues 159 words]
We applaud the Rio Rancho Public Schools Board of Education for adopting the area's first random drug-testing policy for student athletes. Hopefully, it will go a long way toward making a student who elects to go out for a sports team think twice about using alcohol, marijuana, amphetamines, opiates and other substances the contractor selected to handle the program will test for. We are disappointed, though, that the program will omit steroid tests. While district policy prohibits steroid use, the board was informed that testing for them would be too costly to include in the program. [continues 226 words]
"The only justification is always in terms of the existence of innocent victims. In the case of drugs, the major effect of drug prohibition is to multiply the number of innocent victims, not to reduce it." - Milton Friedman, 1991 The prohibition against alcohol took most of a hundred years to reach its final stage in the 1930s. Then, society gave up on prohibition and settled for alcohol regulation. A surprising thing happened when the same forces of the society who pushed alcohol prohibition applied the same prohibition logic to recreational drugs. Sadly they have gotten the same result from drug prohibition as they did from alcohol prohibition. Albert Einstein contended the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. So how long do we intend to be insane? [continues 566 words]
