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July 10, 2002
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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July
10, 2002
Dangerous Lesson:
Drug Testing
in Public Schools
by Richard Glen Boire
The Supreme Court's ruling giving public school
authorities the green light to conduct random, suspicionless,
drug testing of all junior and senior high school students wishing
to participate in extra-curricular activities, teaches by example.
The lesson, unfortunately, is that the Fourth Amendment has become
a historical artifact, a quaint relic from bygone days when our
country honored the "scrupulous protection of Constitutional
freedoms of the individual." (See West Virginia State Bd.
of Ed. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 637 (1943)).
The Court's ruling turns logic on its
head, giving the insides of students' bodies less protection
than the insides of their backpacks, the contents of their bodily
fluids less protection than the contents of their telephone calls.
The decision elevates the myopic hysteria of a preposterous "zero-tolerance"
drug war, over basic values such as respect and dignity for our
nation's young people.
The Court's ruling treats America's teenage
students like suspects. If a student seeks to participate in
after school activities his or her urine can be taken and tested
for any reason, or for no reason at all. Gone are any requirements
for individualized suspicion. Trust and respect have been replaced
with a generalized distrust, an accusatory authoritarian demand
that students prove their "innocence" at the whim of
the schoolmaster.
The majority reasoned that requiring
students to yield up their urine for examination as a prerequisite
to participating in extracurricular activities would serve as
a deterrent to drug use. The Court reasoned that students who
seek to join the debate team, write for that the student newspaper,
play in the marching band or participate in any other after school
activities knowing that their urine will be tested for drugs,
would be dissuaded from using drugs.
While some students may indeed be deterred
from using drugs, the conventional wisdom (supported by empirical
data) is that students who participate in extracurricular activities
are some of the least likely to use drugs. Noting this, Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose dissenting opinion was joined by Justices
Stevens, O'Connor and Souter, harshly condemned random testing
of such students as "unreasonable, capricious and even perverse."
Even when applied to students who do
use drugs, the Court's decision merely makes matters worse.
The federal government has tried everything
from threatening imprisonment to yanking student loans, to spending
hundreds of millions of dollars on "just say no" advertisements,
and still, some students continue to experiment with marijuana
and other drugs. Like it or not, some students will use illegal
drugs before graduating from high school, just as some students
will have sex. Perhaps it's time to rethink the wisdom of declaring
a "war on drugs" and adopt instead a realistic and
effective strategy more akin to safe-sex education.
Ultimately, if a student does choose
to experiment with an illegal drug (or a legal drug like alcohol),
I suspect that many parents, like myself, would prefer that their
child be taught the skills necessary to survive the experiment
with as little harm as possible to self or others. The <D.A.R.E>.
program, the nation's primary "drug education" curriculum,
is taught by police officers not drug experts, and is centered
on intimidation and threats of criminal prosecution rather than
on harm reduction. Random, suspicionless, urine testing fits
the same tired mold.
Among the significant gaps in the majority's
reasoning is its failure to consider the individual and social
ramifications of deterring any student (whether they use drugs
or not), from participating in after school activities. Students
who on principle prefer to keep their bodily fluids to themselves,
or who consider urine testing to be a gross invasion of privacy,
will be dissuaded from participating in after-school activities
altogether. Similarly, students who do use drugs and who either
test positive or forego the test for fear of what it might reveal,
will be banned from after-school activities and thus left to
their own devices.
Extracurricular programs are valued for
producing "well-rounded" students. Many adults look
back on their extramural activities as some of the most educational,
enriching, and formative experiences of their young lives. Extracurricular
programs build citizenship, and for many universities participation
in after school clubs and academic teams is a decisive admissions
criterion. Whether a student uses drugs or not, it makes no sense
to bar them from the very activities that build citizenship,
and which help prepare young people for leadership roles in the
workforce, or which help them get into college. In other words,
a policy that deters students or bans them outright from participating
in extracurricular activities is not just bad for students; it's
bad for society.
Aside from eviscerating the Fourth Amendment
rights of the nation's 23 million public school students and
imposing a punishment that harms society as much at it harms
students, the decision foreshadows a constitutional Dark Ages.
When a young person is told to urinate in a cup within earshot
of an intently listening school authority, and then ordered to
turn over her urine for chemical examination, what "reasonable
expectation of privacy" remains? When today's students graduate
and walk out from behind the schoolhouse gates, what will become
of society's "reasonable expectation of privacy?"
Raised with the ever-present specter
of coercion and control, where urine testing is as common as
standardized testing, today's students will have little if any
privacy expectations when they reach adulthood. As a result,
within a single generation, what society presently regards as
a "reasonable expectation of privacy" will be considerably
watered down. Rivers of urine will have eroded the Fourth Amendment,
our nation's strictest restraint on the over-reaching and strong-arm
tendencies of some government police agents. As aptly stated
by Justice Ginsburg and the three other justices who joined her
dissenting opinion: "That [schools] are educating the young
for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional
freedoms of the individual, if we are not to strangle the free
mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles
of our government as mere platitudes."
The US Government has just allocated
another 19 billion dollars to fight the so-called "war on
drugs," yet all we really have to show for it is a tattered
Constitution and the largest prison population in the history
of the world. Fellow Americans have been constructed as "the
enemy" simply because they'd rather have a puff or marijuana
than a shot of bourbon.
And that is perhaps the greatest tragedy
of the Court's ruling. The decision not only victimizes our children,
it makes them the enemy. Being a public school student is now
synonymous with being a criminal suspect or a prisoner. The values
of trust and respect have been chased from the schoolyards and
replaced with baseless suspicion and omnipresent policing. The
lesson for America's students as they stand in line with urine
bottles in hand, is that the Fourth Amendment's guarantee is
a broken promise, yesterday's dusty trophy, worthy only of lip
service.
The lesson for the rest of us is that
the so-called "war on drugs" desperately needs rethinking.
Richard Glen Boire is counsel for the Center
for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics.
He can be reached at: rgboire@cognitiveliberty.org
Today's
Features
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
Europeans
and Bush's Terror War
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