It seems like common sense that if students are warned they could be caught getting high any day in school, they'd be less likely to risk it. And principals and the drug czar's office argue that this random chance "gives kids a reason to say no." But teens are notorious for assuming that nothing bad will happen to them. Sure, some people get caught, but not me. In addition, a student who chooses to do drugs already has more than a random chance of getting caught—adults are everywhere in this world. Someone could see her, smell smoke, see her bloodshot eyes, or wonder what the hell is so funny. And since most schools test only students who do something more than just show up for class—like join an after-school club, park on campus, or play a sport—kids can avoid the activities rather than quit puffing. Testing may not change much more of the equation than that.

Such are the findings of two major studies. The first study, published in early 2003, looked at 76,000 students in eighth, 10th, and 12th grades in hundreds of schools, between the years 1998 and 2001. It was conducted by Ryoko Yamaguchi, Lloyd Johnston, and Patrick O'Malley out of the University of Michigan, which also produces Monitoring the Future, the university's highly regarded annual survey of student drug use, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and whose numbers the White House regularly cites.

The early 2003 Michigan study compared the rates of drug use, as measured by Monitoring the Future, in schools that did some type of drug testing to schools that did not. The researchers controlled for various demographic differences and found across the board that drug testing was ineffective; there was no statistically significant difference in the number of users at a school that tested for drugs and a similar school that didn't.

The White House criticized the Michigan study for failing to look at the efficacy of random testing. So, Yamaguchi, Johnston, and O'Malley added the random element and ran their study again, this time adding data for the year 2002. The follow-up study, published later in 2003, tracked 94,000 middle- and high-school students. It reached the same results as its precursor. Even if drug testing is done randomly and without suspicion, it's not associated with a change in the number of students who use drugs in any category. The Michigan follow-up found one exception: In schools that randomly tested students, 12th-graders were more likely to smoke marijuana.

Results like these would mean budget cuts or death for some government programs. The White House has devised its own rating system, known as the Program Assessment Rating Tool, to help it cull failed initiatives. (These generally turn out to be the type of programs you wouldn't expect a Republican administration to like, but that's another story.) In 2002, PART deemed "ineffective" the Safe and Drug Free Schools State Grants program, the umbrella for school drug testing. The Office of Management and Budget, which runs the PART evaluations, writes on its Web site, "The program has failed to demonstrate effectiveness in reducing youth drug use, violence, and crime." The PART evaluation did not single out drug testing, which is a small part of the overall state grants program. Still, combined with the Michigan studies, what we have here is a bureaucratic pounding. That hasn't stopped President Bush from sounding an upbeat note. In his 2004 State of the Union, he said, "I proposed new funding to continue our aggressive, community-based strategy to reduce demand for illegal drugs. Drug testing in our schools has proven to be an effective part of this effort."

Pressed for evidence to support the administration's bid to increase funds for testing, drug officials challenge the Michigan study's methodology. Drug czar John Walters has called for "detailed pre- and post-random testing data"—that is, a study of the rate of drug use at a school before a random testing program was initiated and then again afterward. Such a study is currently under way with federal funds, but it comes with a built-in flaw. Drug-use rates are obtained in questionnaires that school administrators give to students. If the administrators are asking students about their drug-use habits while they have the power to randomly test them, how honest can we expect the students to be, no matter what anonymity they're promised?

Like Walters, the $766 million drug-testing industry isn't ready to give up on testing students, for which it charges between $14 and $30 a cupful of pee. Melissa Moskal, executive director of the 1,300-member Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association, pointed me to a preliminary study that she likes better than Michigan's and that Walters also frequently references. The study is funded by the Department of Education and produced by the Institute for Behavior and Health, and its lead author is Robert DuPont, a former White House drug official. DuPont is also a partner at Bensinger, DuPont & Associates. DuPont says that Bensinger "doesn't have anything to do with drug testing." But the company's Web site states: "BDA offers a range of products designed to help employers establish and manage workplace drug and alcohol testing programs."

DuPont's study, which he calls "descriptive," chose nine schools that met certain criteria, the first of which was, "The student drug testing program's apparent success." The study's methodology appears to add to the slant. Rather than gathering information from students and analyzing it, DuPont relies on a questionnaire that asks how effective administrators think their random drug-testing program is. He doesn't claim neutrality. "I can't quite get the argument that [drug testing] wouldn't work," he says. He's now working on an evaluation of eight schools. The results won't be ready soon, but let's venture a prediction: Random drug testing will come out looking good.

Related in Slate

In 2002, Dahlia Lithwick filed two dispatches from the Supreme Court on the controversial decision to allow drug testing of high-school students who participate in extracurriculars: "The holding in Board of Education of Pottawatomie County v. Earls shouldn't just enrage students and parents unwilling to see their kids shamed just for joining the band. It should terrify any of us who fear that in promoting a War on Something, the court might be prepared to suspend all rules of constitutional interpretation based on the preposterous legal theory that 'Heck, we oughtta try something.' " In 2003, Maia Szalavitz discussed how putting your teen in drug treatment actually could make them more prone to future addiction.

Ryan Grim writes for the Washington City Paper.

Note: Why random drug testing doesn't reduce student drug use.

URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2138399/

Source: Slate (US Web)
Author: Ryan Grim
Published: Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Copyright: 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Contact: letters@slate.com
Website: http://www.slate.com/

It might be spiteful and appeal to someone's sense of humor...but it's not right. It doesn't help us get saner as a people at all.

Now there is only going to be like bottled sealed controlled public food.

Dang. That doesn't sound like fun to me.

No...perhaps they don't "respect" you.

He, Snowy, greeted me this morning, right out of bed....not even out of bed yet....chewing the beads off a favorite, very wet shoe this morning.

He'd obviously been "laying for me" and saved removing the beads for a best effect(sound wise) time....when he was sure I was awake.

That'll teach me!

Sarpy County Sheriff's Deputies Poisoned

Two Sarpy County Sheriff's Deputies were apparently intentionally poisoned with methamphetamine in their food. Sarpy County Sheriff Jeff Davis tells KPTM that the deputies became sick after eating food at an area restaurant last week. He also says that one tested positive for methamphetamine today. Three deputies were eating at that restaurant, two of the deputies were in uniform at the time.

Comment 51. That is interesting. I wonder if the offspring of offical authorities are being arrested too.

Just wondering.

Have a good day everybody.

SAN ANTONIO, Texas (Reuters) - Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said on Wednesday.

The first sting operation was conducted recently in a Dallas suburb where agents infiltrated 36 bars and arrested 30 people for public intoxication, said the commission's Carolyn Beck.

Being in a bar does not exempt one from the state laws against public drunkenness, Beck said.

Antidepressants fail to cure the symptoms of major depression in half of all patients with the disease even if they receive the best possible care, according to a definitive government study released yesterday.

Significant numbers of patients continue to experience symptoms such as sadness, low energy and hopelessness after intensive treatment, even as about an equal number report an end to such problems -- a result that quickly lent itself to interpretations that the glass was either half empty or half full.

In January 1997, Donald Rumsfeld, a Board member since 1988, was appointed Chairman of the company. He stood down from the Board in January 2001 when appointed Secretary of Defense at the start of George W. Bush's first term as President. Rumsfeld remains the major stockholder.

The irony of not supporting him in his desire to play drums.

One of the cadre of excuses that I had to resist it was...I didn't want him playing drums in some sleazy, dark dive of a honky tonk for extra money when he was seventeen years old like my dear, beautiful, late cousin. (They had only just begun to use drums in main stream churches at that time and they didn't in our church, except for some extravaganza of some kind.

I always played with my son...every day. We ran. We romped. We played hiding seek. We danced and wondered at the amzazing discoveries of nature together. We went fishing. We danced and played games. We read stories. We memorized and learned things.

When I went to work again, fulltime, after being with him most of the time in his early years, he worried me in that he was losing something special that he had had before I started spending so much time away from him.

An elderly, sweet, dear, caring, loving, cooking lady stayed with him and his sister while I worked and he became more sedentary. Watched more TVand ate more, causing him to put on a little weight, which worried me, because I had to be careful to keep from getting "surprisingly" plump, myself.

I'm a little bit athletic myself so I encouraged him to be athletic. He was amazing. Not in that glorious Adonis looking natural athlete looking kid that could throw a ball astoundingly well, time after time. But he was an amazing athlete.

He was a wonderful athlete in that he was not an all that much natural athlete guy like can be fairly prominent in the sports world, but in the "I can't believe that kid just did that!", "Did you just see what that kid did?" kind of athlete. The "Oh, my gosh!" kind of athlete that could make tears spring from your eyes at the beauty of it.

And consistently, too.

It's truly, "magnificent" to see your child master his first bicycle. And that's just the little stuff.

Nobody can grieve you like your child...and nobody can give you greater joy in this life than what they can.

If you don't have a child...there is likely someone in your life, if you are blessed, that has the same effect on you.

When they are a twenty one year old, and three hundred pounds of muscle as college linebacker working as a bouncer at an all night club in an area of a just across a border lawless no man's land, nine hundred miles away from you, knowledge of that situation is right there with you.

Football was hard on me as a mother. "Clothesline" lingered in the back of mind like "crib death" did during the first few years.

And there's no gaps of being carefree in between. It's illness...teeth...eyes...cars...growing up. It's beautiful, though...or we wouldn't be able to bear it.

The club he worked in was an old one and a very popular one. There were tales of Al Capone and prohibition, and later...vending machines and on and on. Lot's of praying involved in that.

Later, it's their jobs, their bills, their children, their pressures, their gains and losses.

Wasn't there something about a goat and a dam in the Rubber Tree song?

***

March 22 (Bloomberg) -- The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit seeking to overturn a U.S. law that makes students ineligible for federally backed college loans once they have been convicted on a drug charge.

The suit, filed today in U.S. District Court in South Dakota, contends the law enacted in 1998 violates due-process and double-jeopardy provisions of the U.S. Constitution. It names U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings as the defendant. The department has no comment on the case, spokesman Chad Colby said.

The law discriminates against poorer students who rely on federal aid to pay tuition, said South Dakota college senior Kraig Selken, one of three plaintiffs in the case. Selken, who lost his student aid after a marijuana conviction, said students have a harder time improving their lives because of the law.

``The thing that it ends up being aimed at is just to deter education,'' Selken, a 21-year-old history major at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota, said in an interview. ``It's not about deterring drug use.''

The federal government spends more than $78 billion a year on student financial aid. Nearly two-thirds of the nation's 19 million undergraduate students receive some type of assistance, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Students Using Drugs

The suit, filed by the New York-based ACLU on behalf of Selken and other students, asks the court to suspend enforcement of the law. The law affects ``thousands'' of students, the ACLU said, without being more specific.

The author of the law, Representative Mark Souder, a Republican of Indiana, said U.S. taxpayers shouldn't subsidize students ``who are frittering away their educations by dealing or using drugs.''

``If students want to pay for their educations themselves and use drugs while doing so, that's one thing,'' Souder said in a written response to a request for comment. ``If they expect to receive taxpayer funds while using drugs, that's something else.''

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson said the law is part of a misguided policy that emphasizes punishment over treatment. The approach produces more violence and drives addicts to lower- cost, dangerous narcotics like methamphetamines, he said.

What Is Dangerous?

``There needs to be an understanding of what is dangerous regarding these drugs, and what is dangerous nine out of 10 times has to do with prohibition,'' Johnson said in an interview. A Republican, he is on the board of Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington-based advocacy group and one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit.

Selken, who has a grade-point average better than 3.0, pleaded guilty in October 2005 to a misdemeanor possession charge after police found a ``small amount'' of marijuana in a house he shared with two other students, the ACLU said in its complaint.

He was sentenced to 60 days in jail, with 57 days suspended on condition of treatment, and fined $250 plus $147 in lab costs, Selken said. He was required to attend a drug-treatment course.

The law allows students to resume receiving financial aid if they attend a treatment program that includes two random drug tests. Selken said his court-ordered punishment didn't require the random tests, and he now must pay $2,600 to re-take the course with the random tests, to keep his student loan.

Tuition

Tuition at Northern State University costs about $1,500 a semester, most of which Selken covered with federal aid, supplemented by his job as a restaurant waiter. Losing that aid will delay his plans to become a teacher or a lawyer, he said.

The treatment exemption is of little value to many students, said Wolf, the ACLU's lead attorney in the case.

``Many of them can't even get into such a program because the waiting lists are so long,'' Wolf said.

The law was applied by the Department of Education to cover students with prior convictions. Under that policy, the law affected 35,000 students, Wolf said. Congress last month revised the law, saying it applies only to convictions occurring while the student is in school.

The case is Students For Sensible Drug Policy Foundation v. Spellings, CIV. 06-3007, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of South Dakota.

Copyright: 2006 Bloomberg L.P.

To contact the reporter on this story: Paul Basken in Washington at pbasken@bloomberg.net

URL: http://tinyurl.com/z88w2

I rembemer it vividly.

Boy was I wrong.

There is no eighteen year finish line.

That focused attention keeps them out of trouble. It develops their personalities and character. They learn. You learn. It keeps them from chewing up your best shoes, among other things.

They learn to understand you better...which is a mutual gift between humans and pets, and it should be between humans and their offspring.

It was dim to them because their eyes were filled with the latest Red Hot Daddy or Red Hot Mama or sparkly new car.

I think they call it, "Piling it on."

They throw so many extra punishment weights on you that it's like a witch pressing.

They pile on the punishments and offenses...then if you give them something they want...they take a punishment...or "stone"...off the pressing board.

It's hard on a person being pressed to death.

The should feel very glad that that non-imaginary God is about love and not about the hate they excrete and wallow in.

http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=local&id=4011125

Double jeopardy does not preclude multiple punishments for the same act. A conviction could result in both a fine and imprisonment, for instance, without being double jeopardy. What the term refers to is the fifth amendment right not to be twice prosecuted criminally for the same offense, thus if one is acquitted the state cannot simply refile charges and try again.

Due process, in the same context, means that a mere accusation of possession should not be sufficient to impute punishment. However, a criminal conviction is presumed to meet due process (unless overturned).

We should not be encouraging legal gymnastics which twist the meanings of constitutional provisions. Let's not play games with the system. The equal protection argument might have merit if it can be properly put but even this seems like a thin reed.

Lawsuit!

The ACLU and Students for Sensible Drug Policy are filing a federal lawsuit today against the Department of Education and Secretary Margaret Spellings. The suit challenges the constitutionality of the law that strips college financial aid from students with drug convictions. See New York Times article today. More info on the lawsuit is available here. This is being covered over at the DARE Generation Blog, where they are also seeking students who have been denied financial aid to be part of the class action suit. If you're on a campus and would like to help out, go to the lawsuit page and print out some fliers to put up around campus to help them find plaintiffs.

As the article makes abundantly clear, perhaps his inability to understand that the process he favors doesn't work is because his meal ticket is being threatened by admitting as much...and that's just for starters.

“If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” - Upton Sinclair

Mr. Sinclair has had every single DrugWarrior pegged long before any of them were born.

But there's a problem looming on the horizon for the DrugWarriors. Despite the recent raising of the National Debt ceiling, the sad fact is the Fed'rul Gub'mint is B-R-O-K-E, broke.

Sooner or later, the budgetary knives, which have already been used on DrugWar programs BY REPUBLICANS, will be unsheathed again. ONDCP has already been cut once before; the precedent has been set. Raise the matter of the studies that deny drug usage is affected by random tests, and some of those eager to point to their home constituencies and say they've 'cut waste in Washington' might turn their eyes once more to the previously sacred - and now profane - cow of the DrugWar.