It works for the military in Guantanamo Bay!
Carroll County, Georgia has decided to randomly
drug test its student body.
“It was done as more of a deterrent,” said Assistant Superintendent Terry Jones of the unanimous Board of Education decision.
The board has been studying this issue since last September. It will include students in grades nine through 12, or roughly around 4,000 students.
Like many school drug testing programs across the nation, this one will target students participating in athletic and non-athletic activities. Supreme Court Judge Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion on the
Board of Education v. Earls case in 2002, saying in essence, that since athletes and kids doing extracurricular activities already have certain levels of "intrusion" into their lives, urine testing was "negligible." It's too bad they don't make Judge Clarence Thomas and his fellow Judges pee in cups at random, since they
do make very important decisions effecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
Unfortunately for the students of Carroll County, Georgia, this won't deter anyone from doing drugs and will most likely lead to a more thoughtless punishment system for those who do test positive for some banned substance. As has been researched and pointed out, random drug testing appears to do none of the things its proponents claim it will do.
- Some 16 percent of students subject to drug testing reported using substances covered by their district's testing in the past 30 days, compared with 22 percent of comparable students in schools without the program. Similar patterns were observed for other measures of student-reported substance use, but those differences were not statistically significant.
- In the one-year period studied, there was no evidence of any "spillover effects" to students who were not subject to testing—the percentage who reported using substances in the past month was the same at both treatment and control schools.
- There was no effect on any group of students' reported intentions to use substances in the future. Of the students subject to drug testing, 34 percent reported that they "definitely will" or "probably will" use substances in the next 12 months, compared with 33 percent of comparable students in schools without the program.
- There was no evidence that the drug testing reduced students' participation in extracurricular activities or affected their connection to school.
- Researchers also examined whether students in schools with drug testing , perhaps because they were more aware of the consequences of substance use, might be underreporting such use. However, there were no differences between the treatment and control groups in students' reports of how honest they were in completing the surveys or in how often students didn't respond to particular questions. Also, there were no inconsistencies in reports of lifetime use between the surveys they completed before knowing whether their school required drug testing and afterwards.
So no benefit, waste of money, invasion of privacy, targets a group of people who are not even allowed to vote. Sounds like a winner of a plan. As far as I can tell the only benefit to drug testing in the United States seems to be
helping Florida Governor Rick Scott's wife's business.