Child Casualties of the Drug War

by Steve Chapman

Lockney appears to be one of only two school districts in the country (the other is in nearby Sundown) that have instituted mandatory drug testing for all students. While some schools require such tests for kids who play on athletic teams or participate in extracurricular activities, Lockney does it for every single youngster -- and not just in high school but in junior high. Anyone enrolled, from the sixth grade on, has to submit to a urinalysis for drugs, and is subject to random tests afterward.

This was fine with nearly all parents in Lockney, but not with Larry Tannahill, a 35-year-old farmhand who somewhere acquired the weird notion that Americans should not have to prove their innocence at the whim of government officials. He refused to allow his son Brady to be tested, filed a lawsuit with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union and is hoping the courts will find that the Constitution applies even in public schools.

That hope may not be realized. In the continuing national hysteria known as the drug war, niceties like the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures") have often been cast aside. In their never-ending quest for a drug-free society, many government officials and ordinary Americans have come to believe that showing respect for individual rights amounts to giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The Lockney policy is extreme, but it may be the wave of the future. Most Americans may agree that the survival of the republic depends on treating 12-year-olds as perpetual suspects. We may have so little regard for the privacy of ourselves and our children that we think the government should be empowered to commandeer the citizenry's bodily secretions at any moment for close inspection.

Brady Tannahill's punishment is on hold while the policy is being challenged. But under the district's regulations, merely declining to take part in the drug test is treated the same as testing positive -- actual guilt being irrelevant. Besides the three-day suspension, Brady would have been barred from extracurricular activities for 21 days and would have had to undergo substance-abuse counseling, even though no one claims he has actually used any forbidden substance. He also would have to take monthly drug tests, with ever-increasing penalties for each refusal.

This is a relatively new issue for the judiciary, since American schools survived for several hundred years without heavy reliance on urinalysis. But in 1995, the Supreme Court upheld an Oregon school district's policy of drug testing all student athletes, dismissing privacy concerns with the airy assertion that "school sports are not for the bashful." At the same time, the justices said they would not necessarily approve other mass drug testing programs.

But it's hard to be optimistic about this case. The Supreme Court said the Oregon program was permissible because drugs are so disruptive to the educational process, and because when schoolchildren are involved, the government has the right to conduct any search "that a reasonable guardian and tutor might undertake." Those excuses will work just fine in Lockney.

In that case, the court nonchalantly discarded the most important check on government searches: the requirement that they be carried out only when there are grounds to think a specific person has done something wrong. We expect police to live by that rule in combating murder, rape and robbery -- but somehow it's too burdensome for school principals trying to control and educate 12-year-olds.

If Lockney or any other town has a drug problem at the middle school, it could simply test students whose behavior suggests a chemically altered state. Either drugs cause serious misbehavior or they don't. If they do, schools should be able to combat drug use by testing the kids who cause trouble. If not, then maybe drugs are not as destructive as we have been told, and maybe it's not worth giving up our right to privacy to stamp them out.

But maybe it's a mistake to think anti-drug crusaders prefer a tough approach only because they think it will work -- or that they can be dissuaded by evidence to the contrary. Sometimes, the only point of abusing people's rights is to abuse people's rights.