Student Drug Testing Is Bad Essay

School Drug Testing and Why It Is Bad

Requiring students to urinate into a cup, while a school staff member stands outside a stall is a violation of the Fourth Amendment [Pathos]. Currently there are organizations and state government officials trying to recruit schools to start doing randomized drug testing, but there are also several organizations who oppose them. A lot of these organizations that oppose random drug testing at schools are experts on the subject including: the National Education Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry [Logos]. Most of these students are underage, except for the few seniors who are 18; therefore, the school has no right to force them to get drug tested without reasonable suspicion. On top of that, research has shown that student drug testing is ineffective, counterproductive, expensive, and an invasion of privacy. Unless a student is an athlete, the fact that some students may be using drugs gives the school no right to randomly select students to drug test without having any evidence

Some believe that if students know they might be tested, than they won’t do drugs but there is no evidence to support that claim, and it does not address the motives of why kids turn to drugs in the first place. Enforcing students to get drug tested or face being suspended/expelled can lead to unintended consequences, such as students turning to drugs that are more dangerous but less detectable by drug tests; for example, meth, cocaine, inhalants, ecstasy, etc. These tests can also expose schools to serious legal liability which can be extremely costly if an incident of some kind were to occur. On another note, drug test are subjected to sometimes give off a false positive, which can condemn innocent students to punishments they don’t