Drug Testing In Schools

“The opioid epidemic has ravaged communities around the nation — deaths from overdoses now outnumber deaths from car crashes” (Spencer). This quote from a recent New York Times article provides some evidence towards the idea that the United States of America is sprawling with addicts hooked on drugs so widespread, and with no segment of the population more susceptible to them than young adults. The same drug prevention policies and punishments have remained in place at the federal level down to school systems, despite evidence of this growing trend towards usage. Therefore, the changes should occur starting with the group most at risk: children. Schools persist to be locations to buy, sell, and even use illicit materials, but now in greater

This policy will, in fact, be successful in deterring drug use among teens as the fear of punishment, such as suspension or expulsion, causes students to avoid even making the choices to try and therefore become addicted to illegal drugs. The Institute of Education Sciences (Department of Education) performed a multiple year study of 36 high schools in the southern United States that use random drug testing and compared it to control schools not using the policies to compare the effectiveness. In this study, they found that sixteen percent of students in the schools with drug tests used, whereas twenty two percent of students in the control schools used these same drugs being tested (“NCEE”). Assuming this six percent drop could transfer across all other regions, this one policy could prevent thousands upon thousands of kids from using narcotics. The study found that the measures had both short and long term ability to drop the usage rate consistently, therefore it can be part of a long term solution to help minimize drug use in the United States. Drugs are addictive, and therefore minimizing the number of youth from getting hooked limits the number of adults using as they grow up. This trickle down idea states that a drop in a younger category’s usage will eventually transfer to other age groups. It is evident from this study that testing does not eliminate the problem, but rather

Drug testing allows for the identification of students in order to rehabilitate them from their addiction. The punishment has a large ability to deter users, whereas the tests pinpoints those users that need an entry into programs to cope with dependence on illegal substance. Julie Linneman, a former student at Northern Kentucky University, began using prescription pills in high school that she got from her classmates. She eventually started using harder drugs like heroin. Unfortunately, she did not have any system to tell her that she had a problem, so she continued to abuse for years. This destroyed her social life as well as her grades, but she refused to admit she had a problem. Thankfully, her father acted similarly to a drug test by identifying her use of narcotics, and he proceeded to get her enrolled in a program to help her. She graduated the program drug free, and has since enrolled in Villanova University to study the field of drug recovery (Spencer). Miss Linneman was unable to turn her life around on her own, but thankfully to an outside source she now has a bright future at a university of high prestige. A drug test can act in a very similar manner as her father as it points out the issue, when the user depends on the drug to a large enough extent that they deny the existence of a problem. This identification by drug