Many years ago, when I was a very young soldier stationed in West Germany, I was awakened at oh-dark-thirty every third Tuesday of the month by the sound of a fist pounding on my barracks room door and the words, "ALERT AND ADVANCE!" Any other day of the month and it would have meant that within minutes of being awakened I would be running to the motor pool with a .50-caliber machine gun and the driver's log for my M113 Armored Personnel Carrier. But because this was the third Tuesday of the month it meant that my platoon sergeant would watch me pee in a cup, and my squad leader would have me blow into a breathalyzer.
In two years of this piss and blow test, I only know of one soldier in the entire battalion who ever got caught with anything in his system. In some ways it became a running joke with us. After all, we knew it was coming. One night we stayed up playing cards and when we heard the CQ, charge of quarters, knocking on doors we were already dressed and ready for duty, and we opened the door just as he was going to knock and scared the crap out of him.
I don't know how much money the Army wasted on the exercise in futility. It never stopped the guys who smoked pot or those who were alcoholics from doing their thing. The drinkers just made sure not to drink on Monday night. I am not sure what the pot smokers did to get around the test, but they did. It made no sense to me when I was between the ages of 18 and 20, and at 48 it makes even less sense to me.
Sadly, this 30-year-old story I'm telling is relevant today. This week while perusing the news I ran across a story out of Crivitz, Wisconsin (population 984). Evidently, in Marinette County, where Crivitz is located, there is a burgeoning drug problem. To combat this issue with drugs, athletic director and varsity football coach Jeff Dorschner said his response was to protect the school’s best asset: students.
“We have a growing drug problem in Marinette County and in talking with the police force and talking with school administrators and other conference athletic directors, I just felt that as a school we could do something to try to deter students,” said Dorschner.
Crivitz has such a small school district that in years past it has received what is called
sparsity aid, which is targeted at...
...small, rural districts that have a hard time making ends meet because of their limited enrollments. A district must have no more than 725 student and fewer than 10 students per square mile to be eligible.
Crivitz High School has around 215 students enrolled. So this is a very small high school that brings in students from around a sparsely populated county in northeastern Wisconsin. So how is Coach Dorschner going to protect these kids from the evil scourge of drugs?
This fall, the Crivitz school district will begin randomly drug testing high school students. Because of regulations, the school will only drug test students involved in any extracurricular activities or students who buy passes to park on school property.
So any kid who participates in a sport, is in band, is in a club, or drives to school can be drug tested.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on this in 1995 in
Vernonia School District v. Acton and in 2002 in
Board of Education v. Earls:
The drug-testing policy, which required students to provide a urine sample, involved only a limited invasion of privacy, according to the Justices: "Students who voluntarily participate in school athletics have reason to expect intrusions upon normal rights and privileges, including privacy." More recently, the Court has ruled in favor of school policies requiring random drug testing for all extracurricular activities.
The Supreme Court, frankly, got this wrong. Just because you are under 18 in high school and participate in extracurricular activities does not mean you should give up your Fourth Amendment rights against illegal search and seizure. These young men and women have done nothing to give probable cause. There is no reason to search them. Yes, the schools will claim this is a liability issue, that they are afraid of a young child hopped up on whatever drug the administration is afraid of that week will hurt themselves during a school activity. That is just an excuse to carry on the war on drugs to our children. If it were about safety, then why are they not testing every kid who is in gym class? Or chemistry? I would be willing to bet both of those classes are more dangerous for someone on drugs than band is.
Drug testing is also expensive. According to the ACLU:
The average cost of a drug test is about $42 per person tested,[8] not including the costs of hiring personnel to administer the tests, to ensure confidentiality of results and to run confirmatory tests to guard against false positives resulting from passive drug exposure, cross-identification with legal, prescription drugs such as codeine and legal substances such as poppy seeds.
Another way to measure the cost is by counting what it costs to “catch” each drug user. Drug testing is not used by many private employers because of the exorbitant cost of catching each person who tests positive. One electronics manufacturer, for example, estimated that the cost of finding each person who tested positive was $20,000, since after testing 10,000 employees, only 49 tested positive. A congressional committee also estimated that the cost of each positive drug test of government employees was $77,000, because the positive rate was only 0.5%.
I do not know what the budget situation is for the high school in Crivitz. But if it is like any other school district in Wisconsin, it is struggling. And I am pretty sure that the money spent for five random drug tests each month, which comes to $210 a month or $1,890 per nine-month school year, could have gone to put books in the library, purchase textbooks, paid for field trips, or teach a unit on drug abuse prevention in health class.
Just because the Supreme Court says something is legal does not mean that school districts must implement programs that are ethically questionable (Seriously, you are making a child who has done nothing wrong pee in a cup?), programs that do nothing but enrich companies that sell drug tests. It was a waste of time and money 30 years ago when I was in the Army, and it is a waste of time and money today.