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| The Supreme Court Vs Teens |
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Posted by CN Staff on May 18, 2002 at 20:52:32 PT By Mark Boal Source: Rolling Stone 
Hard-line Judges Are About To Give A Thumbs-Up To Drug Tests In Schools Across The Nation.After twenty years of prayer and hard lobbying, drug warriors are on the verge of succeeding in their effort to institute random drug testing of high school students. Sometime in June, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision in favor of an Oklahoma school with an aggressive anti-drug program. The ruling will loosen the standard for acceptable drug testing of students: About 500 schools currently test kids, most of them athletes, but soon any students involved in other school activities might be subject to the involuntary tests, and students and parents will have not higher authority to whom they can protest. "I think saying that this ruling applies to the 27 million kids in grades six to twelve is not an exaggeration, even if the court doesn't go so far as to say it literally does," say Graham Boyd, the American civil Liberties Union lawyer who brought the case against Tecumseh High, a tiny school of 600 that conducts random tests on students who participate in clubs. The ACLU and a school choir member named Lindsay Earls challenged the school's authority to invade Earls' privacy after she was forced to pee in a cup while teachers listened outside the bathroom stall. "Thanks be to almighty God, who has guided us, protected us and comforted us in this effort," says DeForest Rathbone of the Supreme Court hearing, which occurred in March. By "us", Rathbone means his group, the National Institute of Citizen Anti-Drug Policy, and those it is aligned with including the Drug Free America Foundation, Drug Free Kids, and the Alcohol and Drug Testing Industry Association which organized the legal briefs and now have even secured funding to push testing to the front of the Drug War. Last year, Rathbone and his allies sneaked a clause into President Bush's education bill authorizing the government to pay for testing at public schools. As a result, billions in block grants will soon be available to schools that want to test. According to Julie Underwood, counsel for the Ntional School Boards Association, many of her members are just waiting for the court to give its constitutional green light. Says Rathbone, "People don't realize how far along we are with this thing. It's a done deal." None of this would have been conceivable four or five years ago, when student drug testing was a marginal issue in Washington. But legal and financial backing has transformed a loser into a political winner. In the early Eighties, soldiers were the only people in America who were tested. Gradually, anti-drug groups pushed testing beyond the military and into civilian and corporate life. In 1987, twenty percent of businesses in the American Management Association tested their employees, but now, after a steady campaign supported by the federal government, testing is the norm in seventy-one percent of its members. Many expect this pattern to repeat in schools. If the court's majority holds up Tecumseh as a model, then going to high school in America will soon be an experience straight out of Orwell's 1984. At Tecumseh, urine testing is only part of a larger control paradigm that includes cops at the front door, cameras in the hallways, drug-sniffing dogs performing locker checks and teachers who are trained to interrogate suspicious-looking students. Bottom line: 2002 may go down as the year when the right wing opened a new front in the Drug war. The irony here is that it was the ACLU that enabled this giant new opportunity for drug testing. Seven years ago, after the ACLU lost a Supreme Court case permitting testing of student athletes, the ACLU's Boyd decided to prepare for the next schools that would push further. "I knew inevitably this was going to crop up around the courts and end up in the Supreme Court," he says. "I made a plan, back in '99, to try and bring this forward and present it in a way that would be favorable to the ACLU." Eventually he found his "ideal plaintiff," as he puts it, in Lindsay Earls. She was a choir girl, and a folk singer, pretty In overalls, and Ivy League material. She didn't do drugs, ever, and was humiliated by the test. When Boyd met her the first time, she said she was willing to go the long haul up the court system. So the ACLU and the school squared off. The ACLU triumphed in appeals court, but at the Supreme Court hearing in March, several judges openly mocked Boyd. Glowering down from the bench, Justice Antonin Scalia at one point chastised him, "What I seem to miss in your argument is any recognition of the fact that we are dealing with minors," as if Boyd didn't know his own client's age. Then Scalia demanded, "Do you think life and death is really not involved the fight against drugs?" "It absolutely is," Boyd stammered, "and where there's " "Let's not minimize that," Scalia said, sharply cutting him off. Boyd recovered and moved on, but the damage was already done. In fact, it had been done a long time ago, when organizers of the campaign to moderate harsh drug laws ceded the moral high ground of helping kids. "When you have kids involved, that's a battlefield that's going to favor conservative, parent-type groups," says William D. McColl, director of national affairs for the nation's leading reform group, the Drug Policy Alliance. "We do much better with adult liberties, where there are infringements with racially tinged outcomes." Ultimately, the right wing outwitted the left on this issue by stealing the left's rhetoric. For years, drug-law reformers have said drugs ought to be considered a health problem, not a criminal-justice matter. Now the right is arguing that the constitutionality of testing students turns on whether drugs are, indeed, conceived of as a health epidemic. The Drug Free America Foundation, a group that helped underwrite an amicus brief for Tecumseh, peddles this argument extremely well. Calvina Fay, the group's executive director, says, "We had an outbreak of head lice in my daughter's school, and they did a search they didn't ask for my permission. You were sent home if you had it, and you couldn't come back until you'd been treated for head lice. I didn't hear any parents screaming then about privacy rights, and head lice is nowhere the deadly situation that drugs are." Indeed, the more drug-law reformers fight student drug testing, the more they're seen as dopeheads who want to help kids get stoned. So they are letting the issue slide, rather than waste political capital. "Fighting school drug testing is like Pickett's charge," says McColl. "You are standing in withering fire and have to cross a field two miles long." Plus, he says, "It's not an issue we have activists going out on the street for." Newshawk: ekim ACLU CannabisNews Drug Testing Archives Home Comment Email Register Recent Comments Help |
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| Comment #1 posted by FoM on May 18, 2002 at 21:23:07 PT |
| Hi Everyone, I made a mistake and didn't get the complete article on the one above so I archived the corrected copy and am posting it here. Just click the link if you want to read the complete article. Sorry Folks, One of my Oops again! The Supreme Court Vs Teens [ Post Comment ] |
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