Last Brick in The Kindergulag

By Peter Cassidy, AlterNet. Posted July 17, 2002.

The culture of war relentlessly envelopes the American civil experience, informing and deforming our expectations of civil rights, yet none so insidiously or so caustically as that of America's schoolchildren. In the last decade a veritable Kindergulag has been erected around schoolchildren, making them subject to arbitrary curfews, physical searches, arbitrarily applied profiling schemes and in the latest institutionalized indignity random, suspicionless, warrantless drug testing for just about any kid that wants to pursue extra-curricular interests. If you're a kid in the US today, martial law isn't a civics class lecture unit. It is a fact of life as the war on drugs, the war on violence and a nearly hysterical emphasis on safety has come to excuse the infliction of every kind of humiliation upon the young.

Drug testing cases involving urinalysis of kids have been coming to federal courts for years, with high profile cases being heard in Texas, Oregon and Oklahoma and returning conflicting rulings. Last week, it came to a head when the Supreme Court handed carte blanche to school districts that want to impose drug testing on kids who've cast suspicion upon themselves by volunteering for extracurricular activities. The 5-4 decision by the Supreme Court on June 27 upheld a drug testing program in the Tecumseh County, Oklahoma school district that requires students engaged in any "competitive" extracurricular activities to submit to random drug testing.

This isn't about keeping jocks from enjoying post-practice beer and hooch. The decision approves the testing of any student who volunteers for the Future Farmers of America, Future Homemakers of America, the cheerleading squad, the choir, the color guard or even those curators of Sousa, the band. Why not test those suspicious characters in the debating society, unruly cults of freethinking argumentative types? After all, future supreme court justices in high-school debating societies today should learn as soon as possible their responsibility to abandon freedoms the moment they're told to by anyone who claims state-vested authority.

There is understandably a good deal of sympathy for drug testing as a social safety mechanism to catch kids who might be going off onto dead ends of life-destroying drug abuse, social isolation and crime. Who doesn't want to catch a kid before he takes a life-long fall? Yet before parents surrender their kids to the arms of the therapeutic enforcement state, they need to come to terms with the provenance of the interventions they are tacitly endorsing for their kids - and some of the more enduring shared consequences of drug testing.

Drug testing actually arrived in American schools by way of the armed forces and the prison system. The U.S. Navy began testing service men for drug use in 1973 when the first test kits were developed. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, prisoners in penitentiaries were being subjected to urinalysis. By the mid-1980s, defense-related contractors were pressed to test their workforces for purity. In the final days of the Reagan Administration, the Federal Drug Free Workplace Act pressed drug testing onto all federal contractors working projects of any appreciable size. >From there, against sporadic and fractured opposition by labor unions and civil liberties groups, urinalysis and drug testing programs proliferated in most every industry.

America's kids are being subject to the kind of emotional violence and privacy intrusions that only 20 or 30 years ago the nation would only inflict upon conscripts and criminals. Who knows how much farther it could go? The decision last month lowered the bar of justification to an extent that it essentially opens the way for general random drug testing of America's entire school population, according to Timothy Lynch, director of the Criminal Justice Project at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. Grammar school kids? It would be presumptuous to even say it is unlikely, given its importance in the Bush Administration's political agenda. Give it two years. The rest of us? We'll see sooner rather than later if the therapeutic enforcement state will be satisfied with the children.

The decision should discomfit students and parents - though necessarily for the same reasons. Lindsay Earls, 19 and a student at Dartmouth College, had to directly confront her school district's urinalysis program and all the emotional violence it entailed. (School administrators literally called choir members out of a rehearsal to suffer the humiliation of urination on command.) David and Lori Earls said in an interview published on the ACLU's Web site, however, that they felt the program revoked their rights and responsibilities as parents, speaking eloquently to the perversity of a system that would supercede their custodial primacy.

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