The public schools in Putnam County - the betwixt Charleston and Huntington 'burbs where The Ranch is located - are considering a new voluntary plan to drug test students. The plan is to offer kids "incentives such as movie discounts, store coupons and restaurant gift certificates" to piss in a cup and have it tested - sent off to a Federal credentialed lab, no less. Just like our clients on probation and supervised release have to!
It's labeled as "voluntary," but you can be sure that kids who dare to resist - maybe they've heard of the Fourth Amendment from some scuzzy guy with a copy of the Constitution in his pocket - will draw suspicion. Which will probably result in mandatory tests for them. Hell - let's have drug tests for everybody K-12!
At least we know that these programs have produced results when they've been rolled out in the rest of the country, right?
Three studies have been done on the effectiveness of student drug testing, and they showed mixed results, Madras said.Translation - the facts don't back up my position, but I hope someday they will. Sort of like with the abstinence only "education" crowd, and all know how well that turned out.
'The [scientific] literature is not as mature as I would like it to be,' she said.
4 comments:
Maybe they could have an exchange instead of payoff.
For every kid who pees in a cup- five politicians and three police officers- picked at random- will be forced to do the same.
Maybe that way, we could find out where the real drug problem lies.
Oddly ... I'm thinking that the same argument advanced by Justice Kennedy about prayer in public school gatherings would apply to "voluntarily" pissing in a cup where peer pressure makes it hard not to "go with the flow" so to speak.
Excellent point, jedi. Is that a Kennedy original, or did he dig that up from an older case? Either way, it's particularly insightful in an on-the-ground way for one of the Supremes.
It was a Kennedy original from my recollection. It was Lee v. Weisman (1992) followed up in 2000 with Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Doe. It was a new standard that took the Establishment Clause cases beyond the Lemon Test or O'Connor's Endorsement Test establishing a coercion standard for compulsory participation in religious ceremonies (blowing away arguments like "the students voted for it").
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