INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA — Random drug testing of students is “an enormously powerful prevention tool” that more communities and school districts should embrace, the country’s drug czar told educators at a regional summit Tuesday.
“The most striking thing I hear in talking to students is that the kids feel safer,” said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
In addition to helping in the early identification of students with drug problems, which improves the chances for successful treatment, he said the threat of testing makes it easier for students to decline drugs offered by their peers.
“Testing provides a nonarguable reason to say no,” said Walters, who has served as the president’s top anti-drug official since 2001. “The testing is another reason I can say to my friends, when I get tempted, ‘I can’t because I could be tested.’ “
The biggest obstacle to starting drug-testing programs is overcoming the denial among parents, school officials and students, Walters said. While student use of illegal drugs has declined by 24 percent since 2001, Walters said national research shows more than half of high school students have used an illegal drug.
Maureen Belch, director of student assistance for the Hendricks County school corporation, said Brownsburg tests students in Grades 6-12 who are involved in sports or other extracurricular activities, those who drive to school and students whose parents request that they be involved in the testing program. About 3,500 students are eligible for the testing program, she said, and about half of them are actually tested.
“The number of positives have gone down tremendously since we started,” said Belch, who talked about the Brownsburg program with those attending the summit.
In the early years of the program, Belch said, about 5 percent to 8 percent of those tested were positive for one of the 10 drugs the tests can identify — most often marijuana. Since the testing program was expanded under the federal grant, she said, the positive rate has fallen to 1 percent to 2 percent.
The only success these people can point to is the decrease in the positive test rates. What they don’t consider is that kids aren’t stupid. They know that marijuana will show up on a test for up to thirty days, while ecstasy, cocaine, meth, inhalants, mushrooms, LSD, and alcohol will flush from their systems relatively quickly. Urine testing may instead be diverting at-risk teens toward more dangerous drugs.
Furthermore, when we urine-test the kids in sports and extra-curricular activities, we divert the at-risk teens from the very institutions and support structures that would more likely provide them healthier activities and more responsible peers.
Urine testing does nothing for these kids but get them accustomed to surrendering their Fourth Amendment rights to authority figures.
