Staff Editorial: Mandatory Drug Testing for College Students?

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has come to the defense of community college students in Missouri who were facing mandatory drug testing in order to attend school. A new policy at Linn State Technical College required all new students, former students returning to the school and some students in joint programs at other community colleges to submit to testing for nearly a dozen illegal substances, including marijuana and cocaine. As a result of the ACLU's actions, a judge has temporarily halted the new procedure.   Students were to be charged fifty dollars to take the test and those who did not pass it were to be placed on probation for the semester, registered for a web-based drug prevention class and required to pass another test forty-five days later.

The ACLU has challenged the policy as a violation of students Fourth Amendment rights, which prohibits "unreasonable searches and seizures." While some drug testing for student groups, such as student athletes, has long been carried out, the Linn State policy is the most extensive of its kind. However, the school argues that as a technical school that prepares students for careers in technological and mechanical fields that require the operation of complex machinery and tools, drug tests are especially necessary. 

It would be naïve not to acknowledge the problems of substance abuse among many college students. Relatively common knowledge says that drug use can have adverse effects on not only individual student health, but also on students' academic performances. Even more serious problems related to drug use have the potential to negatively affect the entire student body. In that vein, drug testing does not sound like a particularly ridiculous or inhumane idea. It is the potentially discriminatory and excessively invasive effect that this policy can have on students that is most troubling.

Beginning this policy at a two-year college like Linn State suggests that people from more economically disadvantaged backgrounds are being targeted. If the appropriate operation of scientific and technological machinery is the primary cause for concern, do students at MIT face mandatory drug testing too? If students from poorer backgrounds are being targeted, there is also a chance that the policy could disproportionately affect students of color. How do we know that the student who is found with marijuana in his system is going to be penalized in the same way as the student found with methamphetamines? Should he or she be? 

There are also other serious substances and factors, addictive and non-addictive, that adversely affect student performance. What will be done to address stress, sleep deprivation, and nutritional deficiency? Will students be penalized for extreme amounts of coffee and soda?  What about cigarettes? Most importantly, what about alcohol? If academic performance and professional preparedness are the primary catalysts for this new policy, drug use is not the only problem colleges have to worry about. 

Our View: Mandatory drug testing for college students is an extreme violation of privacy that does not even begin to address the many obstacles to academic or future success.