Drug testing, “the New McCarthyism”

By Ben Donovan

“Are you now, or have you ever been, a marijuana user?”

Sound familiar? It should; during the 1950s, the United States lived in fear of the witch-hunt for communists led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Today, he is dead, communism is no longer a terror, and the country has moved on. We’ve found a new monster: drugs.

As part of his 2007 budget proposal, President Bush proposed setting aside $15 million for random drug testing in schools as a condition of participating in any after-school activities.

Yes, that President Bush, the former alcoholic and coke-head with three DUI’s under his belt. Apparently cowboys don’t get irony. Drug testing would be mandatory and unannounced, and schools that did not require the tests would not be eligible for federal funds.

Problems with required testing

One main problem is what to do with students who test positive. Do they simply punish everyone who tests positive for THC, regardless of whether or not they ever possessed marijuana on school grounds?

This is the flaw in drug testing: since THC stays in the body for about one month, anyone who has smoked marijuana at any time in the month before their drug test will test positive. Students who test positive may have never been high at school or any school-sponsored activities, yet presumably they will still be punished.

Another problem is this federally-mandated drug testing will only be required for clubs and after-school activities. Yeah, we’ve all heard about the sketchy stuff that goes down at those Key Club meetings.

Seriously, doesn’t this just seem pointless? Most of the stoners at McLean are out engaging in their own “extra-curriculars,” as one alumnus recently put it, not at club meetings.

Culture of fear

Drug testing is just the latest manifestation of the culture of fear that we have built up. Where McCarthy once told us that Hollywood was rife with communists, President Bush now tells us that our after-school clubs are full of pot-heads.

We have laws that put people who smoke pot behind bars for the same amount of time as people who commit rape or armed robbery.

Commercials on TV tell us that marijuana is a menace and that your pot money supports terrorism. In a country where the alcohol and tobacco industries are not only condoned, but subsidized by the government, the war against drugs has somehow become a moral crusade.

The war on drugs has become a witch-hunt, in the tradition of Puritan New England and the anti-communist hysteria of the ‘50s. When it comes to our policy on drugs, America, as social critic Eric Schlosser put it in his book Reefer Madness, “is caught in the grip of a deep psychosis.”

Prevalence of drug use

Let’s be honest. There are marijuana users among us. More than suburban America would like to admit. A Highlander poll last year showed that 60 percent of McLean students had tried marijuana at least once by their junior year.

But the parents of middle-class America would rather stick their heads in the sand and pretend that all these pot-smokers who have infiltrated our after-school clubs are somebody else’s kids.

And so they forgo the moral outrage whenever someone gets put in jail with murderers and rapists for getting high. Hey, it’s not your kid, right? Well, judging by the numbers, it is your kid. Perhaps the baby-boomer generation should try talking to their children once in a while instead of incarcerating them.

Privacy of students

Do some students who participate in extra-curricular activities smoke pot? Yes. More than the parents and teachers at McLean will ever know. As a student at McLean who knows a pretty good amount of people, I could sit here and rattle off a list of dozens of seemingly “good” kids who get high on occasion.

Students in the chorus or the band or the French honor society, or even the student government. I won’t, because unlike the Fascists behind this anti-drug hysteria, I respect others’ privacy.

But rest assured, among the students who contribute a lot to this school, there are some who might fail these drug tests, who might be forced to give up their after-school activities for fear of being caught. Students who use marijuana recreationally, perhaps only once a month or less, will be further marginalized and lumped in with stoners who toke up every day.

Standards for drug testing

There is some legal precedent for such action. In Vernonia School District 47Jv. Action, 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that schools could perform “suspicionless drug tests as a condition of athletic participation.” This is a little more understandable; athletes need to keep their bodies healthy and free of all illegal substances. But drug tests for after-school clubs?

Drug doesn’t mean evil

No one is arguing that smoking pot is a good thing. Obviously, it’s unhealthy; you are essentially burning a plant made out of poison and inhaling it.

But it doesn’t make a person evil, and what a person does outside of school, so long as it does not cause trouble which directly affects the school, should not be grounds for denying them the right to enrich their high-school experience by participating in extra-curricular activities.

On second thought, maybe we should test the Environmental Club. You never know what kind of “organic crops” those hippies might be growing...