Is Spying on Parents Now Official Policy?

“Who denounced you?” said Winston.

“It was my little daughter,” said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. It shows I brought her up in the right spirit, anyway.” --George Orwell, “1984”

Deanna Young, age 13, showed up on Aug. 12 at the Tustin, Calif., police station to report her parents for using drugs. She brought with her as evidence a trash bag filled with marijuana, unidentified pills and $2,800 worth of cocaine.

The folks were carted off to jail. Although they have since been charged and released, Deanna at last report was still in the Orange County children’s shelter, despite her pleas to be let out to rejoin her parents. According to Deanna’s lawyer, parents and child have met and “they are very supportive of her.”

So we’re on our way toward the conclusion that everyone is longing for: Tearful reconciliation-cum-press-conference. Parents announce that they now recognize error of their ways, praise daughter, join drug-rehabilitation program. Nancy Reagan helicopters in from ranch to present whole family with award for showing “the right spirit.” Music up and out.

We don’t know what home life was like for Deanna. Maybe there was no dinner on the stove most nights, no one to tuck her in because her parents were drugged out all the time. The point is that Nancy Reagan had no idea to what extent the Youngs’ drug use was interfering with their parental duties when she congratulated Deanna. “She must have loved her parents a great deal,” Nancy said. Judging from the sepia-washed coverage of this episode in the press, it appears that encouraging children to spy on their parents is now an official policy of the war on drugs.

Obviously, arresting someone for using drugs is not like arresting someone for “thought crimes,” as in “1984.” On the other hand, the political response to the current hysteria over drugs contains a genuine whiff of thought-crime thinking. There is more and more pressure for people to get on board, to have “the right spirit.”

Consider the growing fad of “voluntary” drug testing. President Reagan started the ball rolling by taking the test himself and inviting 78 top White House aides to follow suit. His Commission on Organized Crime recommends “voluntary” testing for the whole federal government. The only point of such a program would be to set an example for private employers.

In a way the prospect of widespread “voluntary” drug testing is even more ominous than the idea of mandatory testing. By ostensibly giving you the right to refuse, “voluntary” testing makes the act of urinating into a bottle a patriotic gesture, a test of your right-mindedness as well as your clean-bloodedness. This is especially true since, as a matter of logic, the notion of “voluntary” drug testing is nonsense. If you’re using drugs and the test is truly voluntary, you won’t take it. The test is meaningless unless the authorities draw some negative conclusion from a person’s refusal to take it. And if they do, it’s not really voluntary, is it?

The use of employers to enforce social mores is also insidious. A treasured difference between an American-style free-market capitalist society and a Mussoliniesque or Japanese-style corporate state is separation of the economic and personal spheres. In America a job is just a job, and how you lead your life is none of your boss’ business if you are doing your job well.

A properly administered drug test must be supervised to prevent cheating. Thus it becomes a humiliation ritual: urinating on command in front of a watchful agent of employer or government. A free people ought to have an awfully good reason before subjecting themselves to this.

Sure, some jobs offer reason enough. There is a widespread and easy consensus that there’s nothing wrong with drug testing for air-traffic controllers, people with high-level security clearances and so on. But this is a solution in search of a problem. What evidence is there of widespread drug use among air-traffic controllers or CIA agents? Drug testing of people in “high-risk” jobs is really a response to a more generalized need to do something, anything, about drugs.

Conservatives are supposed to believe that society is healthiest when authority is diffuse. Central government power should be minimal. Social control should spring from smaller social units--especially the family. But in the rush to exploit the drug hysteria it seems that top-down authority is back in and parental authority is out.