Washington, DC: The White House will sponsor regional summits this spring to encourage middle and high-school officials to enact random, student drug testing in public schools. The taxpayer-funded summits will take place in Dallas, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Portland. The announcement of the summits comes just weeks after the White Houses’ 2005 “National Drug Control Strategy” proposed increasing federal funding for student drug testing by more than 150 percent to a record $25.4 million annually.
NORML Director Allen St. Pierre criticized the White Houses’ push for the expanded use of suspicionless, student drug testing. “Random drug testing of students is a humiliating, invasive practice that runs contrary to the principles of due process,” St. Pierre said. “It compels teens to submit evidence against themselves and forfeit their privacy rights as a necessary requirement for attending school. Rather than presuming our school children innocent of illicit activity, suspicionless drug testing presumes them guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Is this truly the message the Bush administration wishes to send America’s young people?”
St. Pierre added that the only federally commissioned review examining the effectiveness of student drug testing programs found the policy to have no discernible impact on youth drug use. The 2003 study of 76,000 students by the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, concluded, “At each grade level – 8, 10, and 12 – the investigators found virtually identical rates of drug use” in schools that drug tested versus those that did not.
Most recently, a 2005 study by the British Joseph Roundtree Foundation concluded, “Very few independent and rigorous evaluations have been conducted to identify the impact of drug testing programs in school.” Among those studies that have taken place, “The evidence that programs lead to a reduction in use is far from conclusive.”
For more information, please contact either Allen St. Pierre or Paul Armentano of NORML at (202) 483-5500. Summit registration and sign up information is available online at:
http://www.cmpinc.net/dts/