Drug Czar Visits Austin
July 20th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
U.S “drug czar” John Walters was in Austin today, getting the Administration’s product out on local media’s corners. Walters, whose official title is Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, held a closed-door meeting with a variety of local officials (including new Austin PD chief Art Acevedo, left) as part of Bush’s community-based prevention program. The topic of his media briefing afterwards was increased teen abuse of prescription drugs. Really, though, what he was stumping for was every Draconian’s favorite prevention method: random, suspicion-less drug testing.
Walters called the Supreme Court decision allowing random testing a “watershed moment” in his office’s fight against drugs. The Supreme Court, employing some twisted logic, allowed testing of students involved in voluntary extracurriculars, but only so long as the testing was not used to punish students. Since then the Administration has been shilling for testing programs, throwing out grants to any takers. Texas, for one, just passed random steroid testing for high school athletes. Proponents’ main argument is that testing gives students an escape hatch from peer pressure — e.g., “Nah, man, I can’t. They test at my school.”
In support of the policy, the drug czar noted that teen drug use continued its downward trend last year. Although he never said so directly, his emphasis on random testing sure seemed designed to make it sound like testing helped drive these decreases. In fact, the downward trend in drug use began almost a decade ago after hitting a peak in the mid-1990s. (See page 2 of this PDF for an example.) Walters inherited the trend when he took over ONDCP in 2001, so he gets points for not messing up a good thing. But it’s disingenuous to imply that a policy that wasn’t even allowed until 2002 — and now, five years later, is in place in only 1,000 schools nationwide — is somehow critical.
There is, of course, a bigger problem with the claim: the data doesn’t back him up. The feds use the mammoth Monitoring the Future survey for their drug use data. An article in Slate reported that researchers from the same school that produces the survey, the University of Michigan, found that random drug testing did nothing to decrease teen drug use.
More information on arguments surrounding drug testing is available from the Drug Policy Alliance. The ONDCP’s faux-grassroots effort — “the first Cabinet-level agency with its own Weblog” — pushingback.com has the flip side.
July 21st, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Wondering if John Walters has contemplated the drug and other attendant problems created by George W for this future Texas metropolis of misery?
Baghdad-Near-the-Brazos
Location for Iraqi refugees to resettle in the coming human surge?
Crawford is the perfect site to converge!