Marijuana Policy Project

Recently the Scott County public schools were embarrassed by a high-profile drug case involving a high school basketball star trafficking in cocaine. The embarrassment added momentum to a half-baked plan by the school board to launch a random drug-testing program. This plan is a bad idea.

The central mission of the public schools is to educate children. Kentucky is already ranked near the bottom nationally in education. Although Scott County is one of the better school systems in the state, it is still doing only an adequate job at best.

Implementing an expensive and underfunded drug-testing program is an unneeded distraction that adds financial and management strain to an already stressed system.

The argument for drug testing goes like this: Drugs are bad for kids. Some kids take drugs. We should stop kids from taking drugs by testing.

You could make exactly the same argument about a myriad of other problems, such as: Obesity is bad for kids. Some kids are obese. We should stop kids from being obese by monitoring food intake.

The "we should protect kids" argument is often used as a crude emotional distraction to keep you from thinking critically about both the problem and the solution.

Anytime an argument is based on the premise that the government should protect you or your kids, you should be very wary. The government is at best a weak backstop to parents. More likely, it is a heavy-handed, ineffective and expensive substitute for parenting. Parents need to parent, and the government (schools) need to educate.

As currently defined, the Scott drug program is critically underfunded. Achieving the desired results would require much more and more expensive testing than now defined. In addition, the school system has no long-term financing plan but is hoping to receive a three-year grant from the federal government.

Given that the schools are already chronically underfunded, it is an error to launch a new program. More seriously, the plan is to focus on testing while almost completely neglecting treatment.

Another problem with a random drug-testing plan is that it has been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of the First Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

The schools have danced around this problem by doing only random testing of students who give their implied consent by participating in extracurricular activities — including driving to school.

I guess things have changed since I was in school. Back then, the uninvolved kids were the druggies. I guess the Beta Club is now a hotbed of hard-core drug use?

In all of the discussion, there has been almost zero thought given to the impact on the kids. In 1987, my wife, Jill, was the valedictorian at Scott County High School. During her high school years, she built the perfect resume by getting straight As, running track and cross country and being involved in every imaginable club.

As a result of her hard work, she received a full T.J. Watson Scholarship and was offered entry into many great colleges. She is also a very private person who absolutely hates being poked and prodded. If this policy had been in place when she was a student, I guarantee that she would not have participated in all those activities. How many kids will be less involved as a result of this policy?

The bottom line is that drug testing in the schools is a great idea except for the fact that it is based on faulty logic, it's not effective, it's unconstitutional, it's too expensive to cary out correctly, it's not the role of the government, it's a distraction from the schools' mission, it's bad for the kids and it omits treatment.