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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: We cheated drug testers
Merope Mills The Guardian
Wednesday 25 Feb 2004 Comment Of all the goods currently available for sale in the modern playground - stolen trainers, alcohol, mobile phones - Tony Blair's plans to introduce drug-testing in schools may well throw up another less palatable black-market product. "Clean" urine, free from impurities likely to show up in a drug analysis, looks set to be a highly sellable commodity for enterprising students in future years. The prime minister announced this weekend that he wants to follow the example set by America in deterring drug use among young people through urine tests. The Bush administration is pointing to an 11% fall in drug use among students of 15 and upwards in the past two years. So we now have Blair standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Bush in the war against child drug abuse. But Britain is not a complete stranger to the drug-testing of children. At the sixth-form college I attended, random drug-testing has been in place for years - the headteacher felt very strongly about the issue. Being found out would automatically result in expulsion, even though it was an otherwise liberal school: it provided smoking areas, and pupils could address teachers by their first names. There, several hundred 16- to 18-year-olds swore blind they never touched the bad stuff - and, as in the American schools, both pupils and teachers happily pointed to their exam results to prove it. So I, and other ex-pupils of the school, could tell Mr Blair a few home truths about how we cheated the system. Because the reality remains that kids who want to take drugs will dedicate hours to finding and developing a way to make sure they can - and the threat of drugs tests is unlikely to stop them. In the early years of the tests being introduced at my school, a (pretty unpleasant) urine sample racket sprung up. This involved the "clean" students either giving or selling - depending on the relevant levels of friendship and poverty - a sample of their own urine to the drug-takers, who would then transfer it to the sample tube in the toilet cubicle or when the teacher's back was turned. This system worked for a while, but eventually the teachers caught on and enforced a new regime: from then on, all samples had to be passed while the teacher was watching - as if adolescence isn't bad enough, without this royally embarrassing addition. So the pupils had to seek new ways to get around the tests. And the solution that they settled on is the principle reason why drug-testing schoolchildren is a seriously misconceived idea: they decided to take stronger drugs. The briefest of internet searches will tell any interested teenager which drugs stay in your system longest, and are therefore most likely to show up in a urine test. So cannabis - which would have been most pupils' relatively harm-free drug of choice - was off the menu for us because it could stay in your system for up to three weeks. But class A drugs like LSD and ecstasy had a more transient effect. Pop one on Friday and - hey presto! - you're clean by Monday. Cocaine, crack and heroin are even less likely to be detected, passing through the system in as little as one or two days (depending, of course, on the quantity taken). One of the success stories cited by the Americans involves students in rural Autauga County in Alabama, where drug tests showed an 18% drop in marijuana use in 2002. Sounds impressive - but there is little to prove that the students haven't just switched their habit to something harder. Anecdotally, this same effect has been seen in prisons, where drug tests have been enforced for years and heroin-use, though at alarmingly high levels, passes through the system undetected or ignored. There also remains a serious question of just how random these drug tests turn out to be. Leaving it up to the headteachers - as Blair proposes - means that picking on "difficult" students is practically inevitable. At my school, certain pupils (most notably those with poor grades who were in danger of bringing down the school's league-table position) found themselves "randomly" picked to take the test five or six times. Straight-A students, meanwhile, would breeze through two years of education without ever getting the dreaded call-up. Many teachers have made it clear that they have no desire to take up the burden of responsibility where police and social workers fail. Likewise, children have enough pressures on them without feeling persecuted by their school heads and pushed into higher-class drugs by inherently flawed tests. Mr Blair may like to take some lessons in life before he goes proudly declaring his solution to drug use in the young. His suggestion is likely to make matters worse.
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