Supreme Court Hears Case On Expanded Drug Testing

By Mark Walsh

Washington

Drug testing in schools stoked an intense argument in the U.S. Supreme Court last week, with a seeming majority of the justices willing to expand a 1995 decision that allowed drug testing of student athletes, and thus uphold an Oklahoma district's policy of testing a wider group of students.

"Children today are on the front lines of the drug problem," said Paul D. Clement, a deputy solicitor general who provided the Bush administration's argument in support of the Tecumseh, Okla., district's policy of testing participants in such extracurricular activities as choir, band, and the Future Farmers of America.

"The danger is getting young people used to a drug culture," Justice Antonin Scalia said in agreement during the March 19 oral arguments in Board of Education of Independent School District No. 92 of Pottawatomie County v. Earls (Case No. 01-332). Justice Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the case that upheld testing of athletes, Vernonia School District v. Acton , and he made it clear last week that he believed that expanded testing does not violate the Fourth Amendment's...