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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Blair can't resist a cheap fix
Mary Ann Sieghart The Times
Wednesday 25 Feb 2004 Comment If only random testing could drive the opiate of pandering to tabloid prejudices out of the Prime Minister's bloodstream WANT A GUARANTEED way to turn our children into binge-drinkers, heroin addicts and coke fiends? Easy. Just introduce random drug testing into schools. As with so many of Tony Blair's 'eye-catching initiatives', this latest one is half-witted, ill thought-out and likely to lead to exactly the opposite of what he intends. I had hoped that the Prime Minister had managed to kick the habit of pandering to the prejudices of whichever tabloid he graced with his next interview. I was sadly deluded. Addictions like that are not easily conquered, and it seems that Blair lacks both the discipline and the determination to quit. When a fix is offered, he cannot resist. If only random testing could drive that opiate out of his bloodstream. But no. Focus groups have told him that voters believe (as they always have) that young people are out of control. Something must be done. So the Prime Minister casts around for a solution that costs the Government no money but sounds as if he is 'cracking down'. Had he bothered to ask the experts first, he would have discovered what a crackpot, wasteful and intrusive 'solution' this is. The critical fact that Blair has overlooked is that cannabis, because it stays in the body's fat deposits, can remain in the bloodstream for a month or more, while heroin is gone within two to three days, cocaine in a day, and Ecstasy and alcohol in a matter of hours. So if you are a teenager worried about having drugs detected in your blood, what will you opt for on a Friday night? Surely heroin, coke, E or alcohol rather than the less damaging cannabis. We already have problems enough with young people and drink. Increasing numbers of them have taken up binge drinking, with the result that town centres have become violent and scary at night. What is more, cases of cirrhosis of the liver are emerging ever earlier. Deaths from liver disease have risen eightfold in men aged 35 to 44 and sevenfold among women over the past 30 years. Do we really want to encourage more of this? Cannabis isn't harmless - which drug is? - but it is indisputably less dangerous than heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy or even alcohol in large quantities. Given that teenagers are hardwired to take risks, it is surely better that they smoke the odd spliff at a weekend than inject themselves with smack or experiment with crack. It is not as if random drug testing in schools even works. Three University of Michigan researchers published a large-scale study last April based on 76,000 pupils at 722 American schools. They found that drug use in the schools that tested pupils was exactly the same as in the schools that did not. The conclusion was that drug testing was both expensive for the schools (from $14 to $30 - 7.50 to 16 pounds - per test, and $100 for steroids) and utterly pointless. All it succeeds in doing, in fact, is alienating the students from their schools. What could be more humiliating for a teenager than being forced to pee in front of a teacher? And why should the school anyway be allowed jurisdiction over what a pupil gets up to in the evenings or at weekends? This practice is bound to breed deep and lasting resentment. Drug use is problematic for a student only if it affects his or her work. Of course drugs have no place inside the school itself, and a headteacher should have every right to bring in sniffer dogs to detect them. Pupils should not be stoned during lessons or selling drugs to each other in the playground. But on a Friday or Saturday night, it is none of a school's business what its pupils choose to do. And it is a gross invasion of their privacy to demand evidence of that behaviour. The more enterprising of American students have already found ways of getting round the tests, including buying kits off the internet. Doubtless some British pupils will follow suit. That means they will continue to take a toke on the joint as it passes by. And why should schools, or prime ministers, worry about them? Most of them are not going to turn into crazed crack addicts. They will lead perfectly productive and fulfilled lives. Moderate, recreational use of cannabis will not destroy them. But a positive drug test might, if it leads to suspension or expulsion from school. Random testing, for those who do not manage to stymie it, will lead to loads of 'false positives'. It will unearth plenty of students who have no problem with drugs, whose schoolwork is not suffering, who do their homework conscientiously before they roll a spliff. And what will happen next? Is their school career to be blighted because they prefer to get stoned rather than drunk at the weekend? Meanwhile, pupils who do have a problem are easy enough to identify without testing their urine. They bunk off school, fail to hand in work, look glassy-eyed in lessons. No experienced teacher should have any trouble identifying them. In fact, teenagers with a drug problem are just as easy to spot as a Prime Minister hooked to a headline high.
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