Why drug tests flunk

If the Supreme Court rules in favor of drug testing in public schools, will students come clean? Kids at schools in Indiana, where drug tests rule, say no way.

By Janelle Brown

April 22, 2002 | RUSHVILLE, Ind. -- According to the students at rural Rushville Consolidated High School, there are a dozen ways to pass a drug test. You can march down to the local video store and buy a packet of "Karma" urine-cleansing powder. You can toss salt in your urine sample or drop in a strand of hair coated with hairspray. More often than not, it's simply a matter of choosing the right kinds of drugs, say the teens -- Ecstasy and alcohol disappear from your system within hours; marijuana can take up to 30 days.

Some of these methods -- such as the hairspray and the salt -- sound more mythic than magic, but whatever the kids are doing, it seems to work. The drug testing vans roll up to the Rushville campus every few weeks, and 25 students are randomly asked to produce a urine sample; yet hardly anybody is ever caught with drugs in their system. And it's not because they aren't doing drugs.

"I'd guess 75 percent of my class has tried marijuana," senior Adam Sadler says, sitting outside the cafeteria during a sunny lunchtime in April; his friends, perhaps trying to impress, estimate even higher. "A lot of kids do drugs at this school; though it kind of depends on who you are," one says. "The thing is to just make sure you pass the tests."

For six years, Rushville Consolidated has required random drug tests from between 75 to 90 percent of its 900 or so students, including anyone who participates in extracurricular activities or plays sports. Cheerleaders get tested; so does everyone who drives a car to school. Students must "volunteer" to pee in a cup in order to attend the senior prom. If they get caught with drugs, alcohol or tobacco in their systems, they are denied participation in these activities until they can prove they're clean.

It is an aggressive routine that is nearly identical to that of Tecumseh High School in Oklahoma, a program that attracted intense national scrutiny last month as the focus of spirited (some would say divisive) Supreme Court arguments on the constitutionality of student drug testing. Facing what turned out to be a fairly hostile panel of justices, Graham Boyd of the ACLU argued on behalf of Tecumseh student Lindsay Earls that random drug testing of all students in extracurricular activities is a violation of a student's Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. Judging by comments made by the justices -- including several sneering references by Justice Anthony Kennedy to "druggies" and "druggie schools" -- the odds are good that they'll reject Boyd's arguments to rule in favor of drug testing in school.

In anticipation of a ruling, perhaps in the next few weeks, many high schools are preparing to launch programs similar to the ones in Rushville and Tecumseh. Drug tests are an easy fix for school administrators who feel that they must take a public stand on drugs, but have had little success with drug education programs like DARE. They are banking on the theory that the fear of getting caught with tainted urine will compel students not to smoke pot or sniff coke.

But there is little evidence that drug testing programs -- which can be extremely costly -- have had any measurable impact on substance abuse in the schools that use them. So far, statistics reflect almost no change in student drug use in testing schools. And it is quite possible that, as students see drug testing more as a challenge than a deterrent, drug use actually increases with testing.

Meanwhile, say critics of the programs, students are being raised with an eroding idea of personal privacy, an adversarial relationship with authorities and a skewed education on why they shouldn't do drugs -- or, at least, why they shouldn't do certain drugs.

At Rushville, certainly, the kids say that they continue to smoke and sniff and sip to their hearts' content. "Drug testing is costing a lot of taxpayer money; but anything that's going on around here would be out of your system by the time you're tested," says one anonymous Rushville student. "I don't know anyone who is denied right now, but there are drugs everywhere."

The United States Supreme Court first cleared the way for drug testing of student athletes in 1995, in a case called Vernonia School District vs. Acton. In the Vernonia case, an Oregon high school football team was known to be rampantly using and dealing drugs, and authorities wanted to test them. The Supreme Court decision ruled that testing was permissible in this case because there was reasonable suspicion of drug use, and because athletes who got naked in locker rooms had lowered expectations of privacy as well as heightened requirements for safety on the field.

The court's decision didn't specify whether routine testing of all student athletes everywhere was constitutional, but many schools interpreted the ruling as permission to go ahead and test. In the years since the Vernonia ruling, an increasing number of schools have snuck in additional testing programs -- for teens who drive to school, sign up for extracurricular activities, participate in the school band. Currently, the random drug testing of athletes and students in extracurricular activities mainly takes place in a dozen or so conservative, Bible Belt and Southern states -- including Texas, Wyoming, Idaho, Alabama, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Florida and Indiana. (Wisconsin also has drug testing in its public schools).

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