“It’s a proposal that is raising some eyebrows,” CBS reports from New Jersey, where one school district proposes to start random drug testing of students in middle schools. And some parents think this is a great idea. The district already requires random drug testing at high school if students park on campus or join extracurricular activity groups, but this would apply more universally. School officials in Belvidere want to establish the program as a deterrent (via Radley Balko of Reason):
I get the deterrent value, but at what cost, both literal and figurative? Random drug testing isn’t cheap; I ran programs like this for call centers, and the expense for an entire school will be significant. Worse, though, is the establishment of police-state tactics to challenge students without evidence of wrongdoing. Unlike the high-school regime, where students choose to park on campus or join groups with the drug-test prerequisite, students won’t have any choice in the matter at all in the middle school. Their parents have all the choice in the matter.
If parents want to do random drug testing of their own children, the means already exist. They can take their children to labs which offer those services, or they can buy over-the-counter drug testing kits at their local pharmacy. In fact, they have the choice of using urinalysis or hair analysis for those results. Imposing a drug-testing regime at school for students who have not given any indication of using drugs or alcohol is not just overkill but may serve to create even more alienation from and cynicism about authority, two issues of adolescence that hardly need a boost.
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