Home Drug Tests An Ineffective Tool Against Testing Privacy Rights Should Be A Consideration

No parents want their children getting lost in the drug culture. But home drug tests are a futile answer to the problem.

It doesn’t really matter which government organization attempts to regulate home drug testing because the tests will be ineffective. It also remains questionable whether drug testing is supported by the U.S. Constitution.

Young people will not volunteer their urine so their parents can send it off to a lab for testing. Just imagine a mother confronting her adolescent daughter with a lab cup on a Saturday morning after the girl has had a late night out. “I’d like you to take this cup to the bathroom and bring it back to me when it’s full,” mom says.

The teen will feel humiliated. She’ll view her mother’s action as a complete lack of trust. After handing the cup back to mom, she’ll feel degraded and spiteful. This won’t make the girl afraid of using drugs. But it will make her rebellious and inattentive to anything her mother has to say.

And urine tests never will be 100 percent accurate. Suppose the girl in our scenario ate the infamous poppy-seed muffin for breakfast. And that’s not the only thing that might cause mom unnecessary concern. Suppose daughter took an antihistamine, ibuprofen or antibiotics. Suppose she drank the recommended eight glasses of water a day. Any of these factors could produce an inaccurate result on her test.

The best possible defense against children using drugs is a young person armed with healthy self-esteem and unbiased, non-judgmental information.

Some states deem involuntary drug testing an invasion of privacy. Required testing of such a highly personal possession as urine, they say, is an infraction of the Fourth Amendment right not to undergo unnecessary search and seizure. Compulsory drug testing also presumes that a person has absolutely no sense of personal responsibility.

Although parents are mentors and caregivers, they do not have the privilege of controlling a young person’s thoughts and decisions regarding health, education and lifestyle. Giving parents that right assumes they always will have their children’s best interests at heart. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

Parents should offer education and love to combat chemical dependency - because a home drug test will not do the job.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view, see headline: Home drug tests a tool for survival

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, EDITORIAL - From both sides CREDIT = Elana Ashanti Jefferson/Editorial writer