The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) filed a friend of the court brief Wednesday in the U.S. Supreme Court in support of a student’s right to participate in non-athletic, extracurricular activities without being subjected to random drug testing.
“The primary goal of schools should be educating students, not policing them,” said Donna Shea, Legal Director of The NORML Foundation. “Voluntary participation in extracurricular activities alone should not reduce a student’s expectation of privacy nor forfeit his or her Fourth Amendment guarantees to be free from unreasonable searches.”
NORML joins the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the CATO Institute, and Common Sense for Drug Policy in urging the Court to affirm a decision rendered last year by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals striking down an Oklahoma county school district’s student drug testing policy as unconstitutional. The outcome of the case, Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie County [OK], et al. v. Lindsay Earls, et al. will likely determine whether drug testing can be expanded beyond the Court’s previously defined limits which allow for the testing of student athletes as described in Vernonia School District 47J v. Acton (1995).
In its brief, NORML argues that drug testing non-athlete students without cause does not fit within the closely guarded category of constitutionally-permitted warrantless searches. The brief states: “Individualized suspicion of wrongdoing is normally required before a search may be conducted. Special needs may justify dispensing with individualized suspicion in narrowly drawn situations, if the privacy interest is minimal and the means of achieving it serves those ends.”
However, according to NORML’s Donna Shea: “This is not one of those special needs cases. The school set up a pretext for casting a wide net to drug test its students in a school that had no drug problem. As the Court of Appeals pointed out, if it permitted this drug testing policy, schools could test all of their students simply as a condition of attending school.”
Oral argument in the case is scheduled for March 19, 2002.
For more information, please contact Donna Shea, NORML Foundation Legal Director, at (202) 483-8751. NORML’s brief is available online at the NORML Legal Committee Brief Bank at: http://www.norml.org/legal/brief_bank.shtml.