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MID-PACIFIC INSTITUTE DRUG TESTING

School takes bold
step into Dark Ages

When The Mid- Pacific Institute revealed that it would implement a voluntary drug-testing program last March, Lt. Gov. Duke Aiona praised the school for taking a bold step by implementing this program. Similarly, when John Walters, the Bush administration's drug czar, visited Honolulu in late July, he congratulated the school for being the first in Hawaii to implement this program.

School-based drug testing, voluntary or otherwise, is most certainly a very bold step. It is, however, a step in the wrong direction. Drug-testing programs have considerable political cache within the Bush administration, made evident by the fact that the drug czar has been pushing this program around the country. But there is absolutely no evidence that such programs effectively prevent adolescent drug use. In fact, drug testing might be considerably harmful and an invasion of students' privacy.

A quick review of the literature on effective drug prevention strategies reveals that drug testing, as a prevention technique, stands in stark contrast to the national trend to implement proven and effective drug prevention programs. In the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, parents vociferously denounced the U.S. government for not doing more to protect youths from drugs. Researchers, the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Office of National Drug Control and Prevention took parents seriously and launched several research projects to design and evaluate drug prevention programs.

More than 20 years of careful science have paid off because we now have numerous drug prevention programs that have excelled in every experimental research trial. These strategies are often called "best practices" or "model programs" and include such interventions as Life Skills Training, Project SUCCESS and or Too Good for Drugs, to name just a few. These programs boast such positive effects as significant reductions in alcohol, cigarette, marijuana and poly-drug use, and decreased associations with drug-using peers.

In contrast to these programs, school-based drug testing has not been rigorously evaluated. To date, there is some anecdotal evidence that drug-testing programs work, but the results of these preliminary studies have relied on very flimsy science and have failed to pass peer review standards. There are a few published studies concluding that drug testing does not work and might even increase drug use later in students' lives. The truth is that none of the studies were conducted using generally accepted standards to claim program effectiveness. Given this, drug testing is a highly experimental program. As many of us know, experimental programs can have negative and unintended side effects.

Indeed, there is good reason to believe that drug testing will have many detrimental side effects. For example, in a recent statement on the topic, the American Academy of Pediatrics has denounced drug testing (including voluntary programs) because "those who refuse may be stigmatized to a such a degree that they feel forced into submitting." Drug testing is supposedly confidential, but not anonymous, meaning that private information about the student, including information about the use of prescription drugs that might interfere with the test, is collected by testing personnel. What would happen if information about conditions such as depression, HIV or sexually transmitted diseases is accidentally revealed? In fact, this has happened at other drug-testing sites and has caused serious scandal and stigma. Mid-Pac administrators assure that information will be shared only among parent, child and the drug-testing agency. The school won't even know who is enrolled in the program. How can school administrators promise this when students will produce and turn in urine samples on school grounds?

Concerned parents in other schools implementing drug-testing programs also have worried that such programs create a negative campus atmosphere of "law and order" and fear of detection. According to the adolescent development literature, feeling connected to, welcomed by and safe within schools leads to higher GPAs and lower drug-use rates among adolescents. Will drug testing turn students off from school and make them feel untrusted and unwelcome? Mid-Pac administrators argue that their program will avoid these snarls because both students and parents must volunteer for the program.

There are lingering questions, however, about whether children can really say "no" to a program when their parents say "yes." And what if a parent takes an extreme response to a positive test and physically abuses his or her child, permanently removes the student from extra-curricular activities or kicks the child out of the home? Also, students might quickly learn that these urine tests do not detect alcohol or tobacco and do a poor job of detecting methamphetamine use. Will this encourage them to say "no" to marijuana, but "yes" to alcohol, cigarettes and maybe even meth? Are we prepared for these possible outcomes?

Government officials, parents and school administrators have enthusiastically embraced drug testing, not seeming to care that it is entirely unproven, and downplayed its potential risks, all because they like its simplistic and unsubstantiated logic. The argument is that it will give students an "excuse" to say no to drugs. This is an attractive, "silver bullet" argument, suggesting that adolescent drug use has a single cause (peer pressure) and a very simple, sure-fire cure (give them an excuse to say no). But this logic fails on two fronts. First, it doesn't pass the concerned-parent test. Parents want their children to refuse drugs for better reasons than fear of a random test. We want them to develop deeper, internal reasons to resist drugs, alcohol and cigarettes, ones that will stay with them during summers when school is out of session, and when they graduate and go on to college.

Second, the logic of drug testing ignores decades of research on the causes and correlates of drug use, which tells us that drug abuse has multiple causes and requires complex solutions. There is no magic silver bullet. Twenty years ago, researchers realized this and used the available theories to create multifaceted programs. These are the types of programs that pass the parent test by giving children skills that last through early adulthood. While it is not a simple or easy task, aren't our children worth the effort?

In summary, drug testing is an experimental program, based on faulty logic, and has unknown and potentially disastrous consequences. By implementing this program, Mid-Pac has taken a bold step. It has boldly stepped out of the 21st century and back into the Dark Ages when scientific proof, rights to privacy and legal protection from harm did not exist.

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