ROBBINSVILLE, N.C. — Teachers in this small rural town’s school district are awaiting a state appeals court ruling to see whether they’ll be required to submit to random tests for drugs and alcohol.

Graham County, N.C., which has fewer than 1,200 students, is one of a small group of school districts in the nation attempting to establish random drug tests of teachers and other employees.

The district would be among the “very, very few” to randomly test teachers, American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Adam Wolf says.

School districts in at least four Kentucky counties — Knott, Montgomery, Letcher and Floyd — do random testing, the Kentucky Education Association’s Tim Southern said.

Teachers in Kanawha County, W.Va., came close to being subjected to such testing, but three days before its Jan. 1 start, a federal district court stopped it. The idea is also on hold in Hawaii, awaiting a state board’s ruling.

“It would be in our view a waste of money, because there is no problem that a drug-testing program can address,” said Michael Simpson, assistant general counsel with the National Education Association.

In North Carolina, a lawsuit by the state teachers’ association prevented a 2007 start for random drug testing in Graham County schools.

Former county school board chairman Mitch Colvard says he saw a worsening local drug problem in his job as a paramedic. He pushed for the policy in 2006.

“I think when I put my kids in their hands, they lose their rights,” Colvard says. “My rights are more important.”

via USATODAY.com.

Mr. Colvard, what right of yours is it that we’re protecting with random teacher drug testing?  Your right to invade the bodily integrity of your children’s instructor?

First of all, you must acknowledge that random urine screening is not an exact science.  There are medications and conditions that can create a false positive test.  There are adulterants and supplements that can create a false negative test.  Most drug screening doesn’t bother to detect those who abuse alcohol.  Most of all, urine screening disproportionately detects those who use cannabis over those who use meth, cocaine, heroin, and hallucinogens, as those substances flush out of the system within a couple of days.  

So if your goal is to insure your children are never in a classroom with a drug-addled teacher, then random drug testing is not a good method to achieve that goal.  The tests wouldn’t catch a drunk teacher or a teacher stoned on Vicodin, and those teachers who would fail for meth, cocaine, heroin, or hallucinogens should be so easily detected by observation that a test is unnecessary.  Truly the random drug test exists solely to catch marijuana smokers because without it, there is no obvious signs of marijuana use to detect.

So if the problem then is teachers who use marijuana teaching your children, but in practice you can’t determine their past marijuana use by simple observation, what exactly is it that you’re intending to protect your children from?  What harm from marijuana is going to befall your children when the harm from marijuana to the instructor is so slight you have to confiscate his urine to even determine if he uses marijuana?

Here’s an idea: why don’t you take the money you were going to spend on getting hard-working underpaid teachers to pee in a cup and spend it instead on, oh I don’t know, up-to-date history books, pencils, globes, microscopes, paper, and some teaching assistants?  Unless you think your kids are more interested in the metabolites in the teacher’s pee than the lessons in the teacher’s head.

San Diego County filed papers this week asking the U.S. Supreme Court to erase California’s medical marijuana law, arguing that federal prohibitions outlawing the substance supersede California’s law allowing sick people to use it.

County officials sued the state in 2006, arguing that federal law that makes marijuana illegal should trump the 1996 passage of state Proposition 215, which legalized it for patients to use with a prescription. Patients who use marijuana say it helps them treat chronic pain.

In July, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal handed medical marijuana users a victory when it rejected the county’s contention that the state law flies in the face of federal pot prohibitions. The appellate court found that the purpose of the federal law “is to combat recreational drug use, not to regulate a state’s medical practices.”

In October, the California Supreme Court rejected the county’s request that it review the ruling. That left the county with the option of asking the nation’s highest court to step in.

San Diego Deputy County Counsel Tom Bunton said the U.S. Supreme Court might decide by June if it will take the case.

The county’s filing was met with a thumbs down but no surprise from Adam Wolf, the lead attorney for medical marijuana patients opposed to the challenge. Wolf on Friday called the county’s request “a waste” of taxpayers’ money.

Wolf, with the American Civil Liberties Union, represents the San Diego chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. NORML is a defendant in the county’s suit.

via REGION: County asks U.S. Supreme Court to erase state’s medical marijuana law : North County Times – Californian 01-17-2009.

How weird is it that the people of California came up with medical marijuana, the people of California voted for medical marijuana, the California legislature has amended medical marijuana, and the California courts have supported medical marijuana, but since five county supervisors in one county don’t like medical marijuana they want five judges in Washington DC to declare the will of the people null and void?