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On Nov. 7, 2003, the police of Goose Creek, S.C. engaged
in what was described by the local CBS station as a “commando style raid” on Stratford
High School. Waving their pistols at students and flanked by menacing K-9
drug-sniffing dogs, the gendarmes hauled students out of their classrooms and
forced them to lie on their stomachs in the halls. Those who didn’t comply
quickly enough were handcuffed. While some of the police, with guns drawn and
pointed, stood over the students, others ransacked lockers, backpacks and
other student belongings in search of drugs. They found nothing. Parents were outraged, but the police were never
sanctioned for their insidious incursion.
Last year at Berkeley Middle School another such raid
occurred, though the commandoesque approach was absent and guns were not
trained on students. Nevertheless, students were ordered out of their
classrooms and told to line up in the halls while the police and their dog
rummaged through belongings left in the classrooms. According to School Board chair Ann Brown, such raids
are condoned whenever reports of drug activity in the schools are conveyed to
police by school administrators. Such is the sad state of student civil liberties and privacy
rights not only here, but throughout the nation. Though guaranteed protection
under the Constitution against unwarranted searches and seizures, students
are all too frequently harassed by police and school administrators demanding
zero tolerance for drugs. That most students never engage in drug use seems to be
of no concern. All students are presumed guilty and caught in the same net of
classroom disruption and privacy invasion.
In an effort to ameliorate the expulsive harshness of
the schools’ zero tolerance dicta and encourage what they see as a more
reasoned approach to drug abuse, a group of concerned parents recently
attended a meeting of the WJC School Board and requested that it establish a program of random drug
testing for extracurriclar groups, beginning with student-athletes. Their
hope is to identify drug users and, through counseling and medical help,
avert the consequences of serious addiction. Laudable as this sounds, it nevertheless may run afoul
of constitutional concerns and current research in the field of random
testing. According to Marsha Rosenbaum, a drug researcher and director of San
Francisco’s Drug Policy Alliance, there is no evidence that random drug
testing deters drug use. In addition, it alienates students and reduces them
to the status of experimental guinea pigs to be used by those seeking a
panacea for drug abuse. As Rosenbaum points out, despite harsh legal penalties,
drug testing, and subjecting students to searches, guns and dogs, teenage
drug use is on the rise. Zero
tolerance as a legal standard or school policy has failed. It does little
more than demonize students who have experimented with drugs and confronts
them with humiliation and expulsion if caught more than once. What lies at the core of the drug problem in this
country is the frenzied fiasco known as the war on drugs, which was begun in
1914 by a group of fundamentalists. At a cost of $30 billion a year and an
arrest rate of 1.5 million people on drug-related charges, we now have behind
bars for drug offenses more inmates than Britain, France, Germany, Italy and
Spain combined. And for what? Statistics from the Addiction Research
Center in Switzerland indicate that, worldwide, of the over 7 million who die
each year from addictive substances, 71% can be traced to tobacco, 26% to
alcohol and 3% to drugs. Yet, in 2002, police in this country arrested almost
700,000 people for the mere possession of marijuana. Even worse, in 2004,
over 100,000 women, many with dependent children, were arrested for
possession of drugs. Nationwide – and this includes our own regional jail – a
whopping 80% of those behind bars are in jail on drug-related charges. It would seem that the only groups benefiting from our
failed drug policies are the police and federal drug officials. Joseph
McNamara, the former police chief of San Jose, Calif., admitted that
financially strapped police departments receive significant funding from
federal officials, who encourage drug arrests and the seizure of assets of
suspected drug criminals to fund their departments. Certainly we can do better than this. It’s time that we
admitted that the war on drugs, as well as the war against those who use
them, is a colossal failure and a striking waste of money and human
productivity. It’s time that we consider the legalization of soft-core
drugs, such as marijuana, and decriminalize the use of hard-core drugs, such
as cocaine and heroin. In this regard, we might well look to the paradigm
established in the Netherlands. Since 1972 the Dutch have allowed the
government-controlled, legal use of marijuana. Users of hard-core drugs are
not incarcerated, but rather are considered patients and hence undergo
treatment in state clinics or out-patient centers until they can function
effectively in society. Virginia’s 28 drug courts, which offer a counseling and
educational alternative to incarceration for non-violent drug users, appear
to be mirroring the Dutch experience with exceptional results. Whatever we do, we must insist that drug searches,
random drug testing of young and presumably innocent citizens, guns pointed
at students and dogs sniffing their belongings have no place in a country
whose constitutional guarantees strongly preclude such activities. |
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lewleadbeater.com Copyright 2002 All Rights Reserved
email: LWL@lewleadbeater.com |
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