This plan will cost too much and won't work NO Dr John Whittaker, Euro MP for the UK Independence Party.
THE news that four schools in Liverpool and one on the Wirral will be introducing random drug tests at the start of the new school year raises a number of troubling questions.
Of course, all of us want our schools to have a healthy, safe environment, where children can learn and play without the threats presented by drug use.
However, I have some serious doubts as to whether these plans will have the effects that are hoped for, or indeed whether they may be counterproductive.
So far, the evidence, gained mostly from the 700 or so schools in America that have instituted the practice and the Abbey School in Faversham, Kent suggests that the jury is still out.
Meanwhile, there are other methods that have shown themselves to be effective in driving down the incidence of drug use in schools.
Though random drug testing in schools should be cautioned against for moral reasons - schools do not own the bodies of their pupils after all - there are practical objections aplenty.
The most simple is cost. Though one test supplier is offering the initial testing kits for free, each kit costs between £10 and £35, which having only a 98% accuracy means that any positive result needs to be double checked at a cost of at least £50 a time.
These costs will come from the school budget, putting pressure on other school services.
Even the confirmatory tests are not 100% accurate, leaving a school open to legal challenge from either the child accused, or their parents.
The most serious finding published by Neil McKeganey, Professor of Drug Misuse Research at Glasgow University for the Joseph Rowntree Trust, is that the drug that is easiest to pick up - cannabis - is the least harmful; and that children not wishing to get caught but still wishing to take drugs transfer usage to more serious drugs, thus utterly undermining the whole project.
And finally it fails in its target of deterrence. As one US supreme Court Judge put it; random drug testing, "falls short doubly if deterrence is its aim: it invades the privacy of students who need deterrence least, and risks steering students at greatest risk for substance abuse away from extra-curricular involvement that potentially may palliate drug problems."
Then there is the whole question of trust. The way in which it is done can undermine trust between students and teachers, and between parents and children. Trust once broken in this way is almost impossible to rebuild - one moment a teacher is mentor, the next a policeman.
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