Friday 4:20
Welcome to this weeks’ greatly anticipated edition of the Friday 4:20. This week I bring you two sordid links to concerned parents that want to bring random, compulsory drug testing into the school system. The phrase “Won’t Somebody Please Think of The Children” will come to mind as you read these letters. You will come to realize that these people really believe that forcing students to hand over their pee is in their own best interests. They may not have thought of the implications of false positives, false negatives and the way that these programs help justify the war on drugs. Instead of teaching students that responsible drug use is in their own best interests, we wish to impose punitive “gotcha” measures to bully students into doing what we think is best for them. I wonder if these parents engaged their children in discussions about responsible drug use before their kids became troubled. You will also be disturbed by the frequent war imagery. They looked at the drug problem and “attacked it head on”. Not only that, but apparently opposing drug testing in the schools makes you a liberal. I really wish that people would quit using that word as an insult.
The first letter is all about how the Drug Policy Makes Sense and the second letter is from a father grieving the tragic loss of his son. It depresses me to realize how little people really understand why people use drugs in the first place and that continuing the same, punitive approaches will result in more people in jail, more wealthy drug peddlers and more drug addicted students. The fact remains that the US has the highest prison population in the world, thanks to their punitive drug policies and the highest number of drug users. Sadly, opposition to drug prohibition still seems relegated to the fringes.
These advocates of drug testing remind me of something that Alfie Kohn said. “Our schools are great places to prepare you for the real world, if you wish to live in a totalitarian society.” So yes indeed, using the excuse that drug testing is a condition of employment in many cases is a great excuse. We want to train them to hand over their pee and all their medical information, without a complaint, and what better way to do it but to start them young.
