‘Just Say No’ Has Become ‘Go Prove It’

The Supreme Court has given band directors across our land new ammunition in the talent tug-of-war being played out in our schools:

Play French horn and not football and what’s urine will remain your’n.

Choose athletics instead, Junior, and your school district may now compel you to pee in a beaker for the privilege of breaking a sweat. Random urinalysis - without so much as a suspicion of drug use - of high school and junior high athletes is now OK by the Supremes, who have ruled against an Oregon teenager who balked at signing away what he thought were his Fourth Amendment rights.

More than OK, really; the majority opinion written by Justice Antonin Scalia assigns it a priority “at least as important … as deterring drug use by engineers and trainmen” or others in the fields of public safety and security.

So the next time the coach tells you basketball isn’t brain surgery, you set him straight.

The Supreme Court has not yet figured out a loophole in the Constitution that would prevent George Steinbrenner from rewarding Darryl Strawberry for repeated drug abuse and tax evasion with a $680,000 salary, but no doubt the Big Robes have it on the docket.

Their latest decision is rife with ironies and contradictions and even some galling nonsense, and libertarians are quite properly mourning the further erosion of the personal right of privacy.

Question is, would we prefer to mourn a son or daughter who may need only the threat of a drug test and the carrot of a varsity letter to say no?

“Because ‘just say no’ doesn’t work,” Pat Pfeifer insisted Tuesday. “Giving them a reason to say no will work.”

Pfeifer was sitting in the shade of a tree at Gonzaga University, where practice had just ended for the players in town for Friday’s East-West All-Star Summer Classic football game - Pfeifer’s adieu to coaching after a long career at Ferris and Lewis and Clark high schools.

He hadn’t heard of the Supreme Court decision because he’s been living in the dorms with his players, but he applauded it. And because he’s a guy who’s done his time in the trenches with kids he’s worth a listen.

As are the kids.

“If you’re not doing drugs, it’s no big deal,” said Bob Strahl, newly graduated from Gonzaga Prep. “I have no problem with any testing.”

Echoed Gunder Gregerson, an East teammate from Central Valley, “Even on my team, I know somebody who started for us that was on steroids. There’s a lot of guys. We lost a game because some dudes were on drugs.”

Of course, rare is the 18-year-old whose hobby is defending the Constitution. It’s one of those things left to older, wiser heads - only in this case, the wisest heads have not only assigned custodial rights to the schools but given them powers not even shared by the police.

What seems especially bizarre is that the court has singled out this group because “legitimate privacy expectations are even less with regard to student athletes,” wrote Scalia. “School sports are not for the bashful. Public school locker rooms … are not notable for the privacy they afford.”

Let that be a lesson to the debate team: don’t get naked.

Pfeifer and his colleagues, meanwhile, have the daily duty of weighing Constitutional theory against practical application.

“I remember coaching at the Mooberry Relays six or seven years ago,” Pfeifer said. “Somebody comes up to me and says, ‘Are you going to let so-and-so throw?’ I say, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ Because on the front page of the paper that day, and I didn’t know it, he’d been arrested in a cocaine bust the night before. I had no clue that kid was using anything.”

Pfeifer has been around too long and seen too many kids lost to play footsy in the gray areas. Some of us remain tortured by the ambiguities, of how you teach a child about trust, faith and responsibility and then advocate, as minority dissenter Sandra Day O’Connor put it, “mass, suspicionless searches (which are) per se unreasonable.”

We ask our kids to make wise choices, but we’ve never before made dignity the price.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

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