Drug Testing Persuasive Essay

In recent years, the government has increased their funding in the campaign to encourage drug tests in many schools across the country, to decrease the number of students that already take harmful drugs, however, this system of drug testing has many faults, as it is proven to be ineffective to stop students from using drugs, it is expensive for schools to pay for, and it invades the rights and privacy of many, if not all, high school students. The government has a good reason to be launching these random drug tests, as a survey taken in 2014 shows that drug use has been increasing exponentially in 8th, 10th, and 12th graders. The top drugs that have increased in use are marijuana, alcohol, and inhalants, the numbers have increased almost dramatically, almost a 12% increase of the U.S. student population from the year before, which is a large group of people, considering that there are approximately 319 million people in the United States. With these unstable numbers,

Urinal drug tests are faulty, they have been known to create a false positive, meaning that the results will make it seem like a student has been abusing drugs when, in reality, this student was not involved in any such thing. The same tests have also created a false negative, which means that tests results will say that a student hasn’t used drugs when they may have just used them that very day. This results in the escape of guilty students, and the undeserved punishment of innocent ones. Also with these effects, those students that do take part of using drugs have been shown to take ‘harder’ drugs, or drugs that are stronger, than the ones that the urine test can detect, which defeats the entire purpose of using the tests in the first place, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse