Posted on 10/08/2002 4:35:09 AM PDT by Wolfie
New Frontier in Random Drug Testing: Checking High Schoolers for Tobacco
Breath mints won't cut it anymore for students who have been smoking in the bathroom -- some schools around the country are administering urine tests to teenagers to find out whether they have been using tobacco.
Opponents say such testing violates students' rights and can keep them out of the extracurricular activities they need to stay on track. But some advocates say smoking in the boys' room is a ticket to more serious drug use.
"Some addicted drug users look back to cigarettes as the start of it all," said Jeff McAlpin, director of marketing for EDPM, a Birmingham drug-testing company.
Short of catching them in the act, school officials previously had no way of proving students had been smoking.
Testing students for drugs has spread in recent years and was given a boost in June when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed random testing of those in extracurricular activities. Tobacco can easily be added to the usual battery of tests.
"I agree with it," said 16-year-old Vestavia Hills High School junior Rosemary Stafford, a member of the marching band. "It's illegal, it's addictive. Maybe the punishment shouldn't be as severe, but they should test for it."
In Alabama, where the legal age for purchasing and smoking tobacco products is 19, about a dozen districts, mostly in the Birmingham area, test for nicotine along with alcohol and several illegal drugs, including marijuana.
In most cases, the penalties for testing positive for cotinine -- a metabolic byproduct that remains in the body after smoking or chewing tobacco -- are the same as those for illegal drugs: The student's parents are notified and he or she is usually placed on school probation and briefly suspended from sports or other activities.
Alabama's Hoover school system randomly tested 679 of its 1,500 athletes for drug use this past school year. Fourteen high school students tested positive, 12 of them for tobacco.
Elsewhere around the country, schools in Blackford County, Ind., test for tobacco use in athletes, participants in other extracurricular activities, and students who take driver's education or apply for parking permits.
In Lockney, Texas, a federal judge recently struck down the district's testing of all students for the use of drugs, alcohol and tobacco.
In Columbia County, Fla., the school board will vote Tuesday on a testing policy that would include tobacco. Teenagers who take part in extracurricular activities or apply for permits to drive to school would be screened.
"Tobacco does and will affect a larger majority of the students than alcohol or drugs," said Gloria Spizey, the county's coordinator for Safe and Drug-Free Schools. "Tobacco use can be devastating. We felt it needed to stand with the other drugs."
Screenings can detect cotinine for up to 10 days in regular smokers of about a half a pack, or 10 cigarettes, a day, McAlpin said. Experts say it is unlikely that cotinine would collect in people exposed to secondhand smoke.
"Tobacco is illegal for them to have -- it's also a health and safety issue," said Phil Hastings, supervisor of safety and alternative education for schools in Decatur, which recently adopted a testing program that includes tobacco. "We've got a responsibility to let the kids know the dangers of tobacco use."
While random drug testing overall is being fought by the American Civil Liberties Union and students' rights groups, the addition of nicotine testing has drawn little opposition.
Guidelines published last month by the White House drug office do not specifically address tobacco testing.
"On tobacco, we have the same policy as on testing for drugs -- it may not be right for every school and community," said Jennifer de Vallance, press secretary for the office. "We encourage parents and officials to assess the extent and nature of the tobacco problem."
Shawn Heller, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy in Washington, said tobacco use by teen-agers is a major problem, but testing for it is just another step in the invasion of students' privacy.
"We're making schools like prisons," he said.
"Find a single authority or court decision that holds that illicit drug use is an unemumerated right under the Ninth Amendment."
"Play" being the operative word. It's a rhetorical Catch-22. You seem to think constitutional law is little more than semantic manipulation.
The 9th Amendment-like language included in most of our state constitutions in 1776 (15 years before the federal 9th Amendment) declares the libertarian theory that constitutions delegate a few specific enumerated powers to the state and all other rights are retained by the people.
But right from the start, at the same time that the libertarians were declaring that they didn't have to enumerate any of their rights, Torries in the judiciary ignored the libertarian theory of constitutional government proclaimed in the state bills of rights in 1776.
For example, according to Lysander Spooner, John Marshall--chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835--never declared ONE single federal or state statute unconstitutional on account of the statute's injustice, or its violation of men's natural rights.
So, from the beginning, Roscoe-like creatures have controlled the judiciary and treated the plain language of our bills of rights as mere ceremonial language that embarassingly contradicts their absurd authoritarian belief that constitutions are blank checks that allow governments to do whatever the hell they want with the natural rights of the people.
Despite lack of protection of individual rights from the government's judicial officers in the early republics, the people were still able to thwart unconstitutional statutes because back then the people determined their rights vis-a-vis the government, rather than the other way around. As Lysander Spooner pointed out:
The object of this trial “by the country,” or by the people, in preference to a trial by the government, is to guard against every species of oppression by the government. In order to effect this end, it is indispensable that the people, or “the country,” judge of and determine their own liberties against the government; instead of the government’s judging of and determining its own powers over the people.
Even the Torries in the early republics admitted that the American people (not the government) were the final determiner of what rights the people retained and which statute's were constitutional:
It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty...to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." --John Adams
"you [The jury] have a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both [law and fact], and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." --John Jay
Backwards.
Very well, then. You think semantic manipulation is constitutional law. Either way, you see the test of the limits of power and authority of the federal government not as what the people expressly grant and affirm, but whatever they can be made to bear. If the politicians can rationalize it and the judges they appoint agree to it then it must be constitutional, and if we aren't ready to go to war over it then it must be what we want.
"Find a single authority or court decision that holds that illicit drug use is an unemumerated right under the Ninth Amendment."
I haven't played that game once---it's rendered moot by the unconstitutionality of the Controlled Substances Act.
Wrong. I'm not a Libertarian.
Back to bluffing already?
Back to bluffing already?
No bluff---see post 174.
In most cases, the penalties for testing positive for cotinine -- a metabolic byproduct that remains in the body after smoking or chewing tobacco --People who are around cigarette smoke might also test positive, depending on test sensitivity.Hold it, hold it.
Stupid Science Alert.
This means that people who are quitting smoking with Nicorette gum or the Patch will flunk the test.
Idiots.
It's none of a public school's business what students do outside of its environs.
-Eric
Another losing hand.
Back to bluffing already?
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