[420 Girl]

YOU will often hear people talk about an issue being a question of common sense. In the area of drug policy, many people in the community think that drug testing of school students is such an issue. Surely we should do all we can to stop young people using drugs and so testing them to make sure they don't is common sense?

The truth is that some things are not as sensible as they may seem, and drug testing school students is one of those things.

The new report from the Australian National Council on Drugs, prepared by the National Centre for Education and Training on Addiction, clearly exposes school drug testing for the inefficient program it is.

Apart from costing between $100 million and $1 billion to introduce, depending on whether the program would cover all students or a random sample tested weekly or yearly, the evidence is clear that it would be ineffective and potentially harmful.

So how can such a sensible-sounding program be so wrong? First, let's think about the cost. When education became part of the centre stage of the recent federal election, would anyone have seriously accepted that the Government should spend an additional $1 billion of education money on collecting urine samples or mouth swabs from students? Or that turning teachers, in their chosen profession as educators of children, into quasi drug testers would be the "education revolution" the community was looking for?

Second, its substantive lack of effectiveness has to be considered. The independent, but limited, research available on this issue from the US shows us that when schools that have testing programs are compared with nearby schools that do not, very little difference in levels of drug use by students is found.

What needs to be remembered is that self-promotional reports from US schools that have introduced drug testing without any real information either on the level of drug use before testing or in surrounding schools that have not introduced testing, do not constitute independent evidence. Adherence to a belief or ideology they may be, but evidence they are not.

Third, there are several problems school drug testing can cause. Drug testing is by no means infallible and a percentage of false positive results will be returned. Thus we would be allowing a system to be put in place that we know will result in a proportion of students being falsely accused of using illegal drugs. This would be traumatic for such students and their families. Drug testing also undermines the critical area of trust between the school, its teachers and its students.


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