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| | White House Pushes Controversial Student Drug Testing Agenda At Summit in Falls Church |
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date: Mar 12th 2006 13:30
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Communities Throughout VA Rejecting Ineffective and Intrusive Random Student Drug Testing Parents, Experts and Others Available for Interview
The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) is conducting a series of summits promoting random student drug testing, a policy unsupported by the available science and opposed by prominent adolescent health groups. The third one-day summit takes place on Wednesday, March 15th in Falls Church, VA at the Fairview Park Marriott at 8:30 a.m. The final summit will follow in Milwaukee, WI (April 25). The first and second summits were held in Orlando (January 19) and San Diego (February 22).
Although the Bush administration has been busy promoting student drug testing for the last three years, the largest ever study on the effectiveness of such testing found no difference in drug use among students who were tested and those who were not. The federally funded study and follow up study was released in 2003 and included 94,000 students from across the country.
Regional educators and drug testing industry representatives have been invited to attend the Falls Church summit, where the drug czar’s office will continue to describe student drug testing as a silver bullet to prevent adolescent drug use. Summit participants will be misled about the reliability and the accuracy of student drug testing, and will not be warned that student drug testing may in fact deter young people from participating in the very extracurricular activities that have proven to decrease drug use.
Drug testing is humiliating, costly and ineffective, but it’s an easy anti-drug sound-bite for the White House, said Dr. Marsha Rosenbaum, a mother of four and the director of the Drug Policy Alliance’s Teens and Drugs project. The people and educators across the country who make serious decisions about young people’s safety won’t find the information they need at these propaganda-filled summits. They need the actual research, not slogans and junk science.
Communities throughout Virginia are rejecting the policy of random student drug testing. Eight out of the nine school districts in northern Virginia, including Falls Church, publicly stated they will not administer random drug testing programs after the state released guidelines for school drug testing programs. Roanoke County, Mathews County and most recently Williamsburg-James City County scaled back or abandoned their mandatory student drug testing proposals after fierce community opposition.
“It’s not appropriate to have my son urinate on demand in order to go to school. It is every parent’s nightmare that a child’s adolescent mistake appears on his or her record years later, during a job interview,” said Keven Zeese, an attorney whose son attends public school in neighboring Arlington County. “For this and many other reasons, I adamantly oppose and fight random student drug testing in my son’s school.”
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article 'White House Pushes Controversial Student Drug Testing Agenda At Summit in Falls Church' source is Drug Policy Alliance, visit source site:
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