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Supreme Court Rules in Student Drug Testing Case
(Richard Glen Boire, Alchemind Society, July 2, 2002)
the Fourth Amendment has become a historical artifact, a quaint relic from bygone days when our country honored the “scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual.” . . . The Court’s ruling turns logic on its head, giving the insides of students’ bodies less protection than the insides of their backpacks, the contents of their bodily fluids less protection than the contents of their telephone calls. The decision elevates the myopic hysteria of a preposterous “zero-tolerance” drug war, over basic values such as respect and dignity for our nation’s young people. . . . The federal government has tried everything from threatening imprisonment to yanking student loans, to spending hundreds of millions of dollars on “just say no” advertisements, and still, some students continue to experiment with marijuana and other drugs. Like it or not, some students will use illegal drugs before graduating from high school, just as some students will have sex. Perhaps it’s time to rethink the wisdom of declaring a “war on drugs” and adopt instead a realistic and effective strategy more akin to safe-sex education. . . .
Aside from eviscerating the Fourth Amendment rights of the nation’s 23 million public school students and imposing a punishment that harms society as much at it harms students, the decision foreshadows a constitutional Dark Ages. When a young person is told to urinate in a cup within earshot of an intently listening school authority, and then ordered to turn over her urine for chemical examination, what “reasonable expectation of privacy” remains? When today’s students graduate and walk out from behind the schoolhouse gates, what will become of society’s “reasonable expectation of privacy?” . . . And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of last Thursday’s ruling. The decision not only victimizes our children, it makes them the enemy. Being a public school student is now synonymous with being a criminal suspect or a prisoner. The values of trust and respect have been chased from the schoolyards and replaced with baseless suspicion and omnipresent policing. The lesson for America’s students as they stand in line with urine bottles in hand, is that the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee is a broken promise, yesterday’s dusty trophy, worthy only of lip service.. . . The lesson for the rest of us is that the so-called “war on drugs” desperately needs rethinking.

posted by LoZo 1:51 PM