Random drug testing gone awry

Put down your trumpet and shed your pom-poms. If you are a student wishing to partake in any after-school activity in the public school district of Tecumseh, Oklahoma you are required to be drug tested.\nIf you live in the Veronia School District in Oregon and plan on helping lead your team to a state title in football, or any sport for that matter, you'd better steer clear of weed, because you are subject to a random drug test.\nIn various cases that have wound their way through the court systems in states throughout our nation, finally landing in the mac-daddy of all courts, the Supreme Court, drug testing in public school systems has come to the spotlight.\nGone are the days of Fourth Amendment right to be free from unwarranted searches. Just ask Lindsay Earls, a girl who just wanted to be in the choir and the marching band.\nEarls has been searching for those constitutional rights, all the way to the Supreme Court, in her case Earls v. Board of Education. A straight-A student, Earls just didn\'t understand why her school system, with no noted drug problems, would target the groups of students that seemed to be participating more than those that hid under the bleachers during recess.\nIt's like accusing a National Honor Society member of cheating, while the student who has more absences than attendances is sliding by with an A+.\nIn a ridiculous new wave of the war on drugs, the school boards in perhaps some town near you have started to target the students involved in activities in their quest to rid their schools of drugs. \nThis makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? Trying to bust Pee Wee Herman as a Colombian drug lord seems like a clear step in the right direction in battling drugs. \nStatistically, members of these boards are groping in thin air. In Earl's school district, hundreds of band and choir members later found that out of 505 students, only three tested positive for drugs. \nAnd while some legal minds would like to laud this as the system working, it is doubtful that had the tests been unannounced the results would have varied. \nIt seems like the ambassadors against drugs don't really know their target market. In my high school, the drug users weren't the guys and gals lined up on the fifty-yard line playing our high school theme song during half-time. Instead, they were the kids at the top of the bleachers, intoxicated and stoned, throwing empty fifths at the heads of the poor flute players down below.\n As our nation's highest court reviews these ridiculous cases, they should reassess where the true problem lies. If students are going to be tested, why not go after the ones that are more likely to be getting high during fourth period? If certain groups are going to be targeted, Constitutional rights left far behind with the founding fathers, then why not go after the stoners? I am sure a school district that has a group of athletes or band members has a group of potheads.\nOptimally, the Supreme Court will rule that all of this random testing should subside. Leave the parenting to the parents, and keep the freedoms in check. If mommy and daddy are worried that their child is a stoner, let them address it. Don't subject 502 innocent kids to a humiliating pee test.