DRUG TESTING : High Schools Inaugurate Voluntary Programs to Give Athletes a Reason to Say ‘No’--and Set an Example

On Wednesday, the Conejo Valley Unified School District became the first in the Valley area to adopt a drug-testing plan for high school athletes, following the lead of the U.S. military, the federal government, 30% of Fortune 500 companies--and dozens of school districts from San Diego to New Jersey.

At Westlake High, the Conejo district’s guinea pig, drug testing will be voluntary. The names of five football players will be randomly selected by a school administrator each week, starting next month. If drugs are found in an athlete’s system, he will not be removed from the team or disciplined by the school. Results of the tests will be known only to the athlete, his parents and his physician.

Athletes, not math majors or violinists, have been singled out for one reason. “These young people are leaders,” said Conejo school board member Kate Cox.

Unlike professional athletes, who are arguably obligated to set an example for the nation’s youth, high school quarterbacks and shortstops are expected to set an example for their peers.

But will example-setting work? The majority of more than three dozen doctors, lawyers, coaches, players and athletic officials interviewed by The Times over the past two months said testing programs can, in general, be an effective deterrent to drug and alcohol use. But their effectiveness and propriety in high schools are debated.

The sports pages during the past few months present a good reason for resorting to testing, advocates say. It could keep athletes such as Len Bias and Don Rogers from making larger headlines in death than they did with their lives.

And it could keep people such as Paul Moskovitz from making news at all. Unlike Bias and Rogers, who died of cocaine overdoses, Moskovitz didn’t make the headlines. He just missed.

Two years ago, Moskovitz picked up a loaded revolver, spun its cylinder, held it to his head and pulled the trigger. He has lived to recall the experience--the chamber was empty--but he doesn’t know whether he really wanted to die that day or not. He says he was too high on cocaine to remember.

Moskovitz was not a haggard, stumbling drug addict and alcoholic. He was a clean-cut 16-year-old sophomore who earned good grades and played football and basketball at Taft High in Woodland Hills. Friends and teachers say he was the kind of person you’d never suspect of drug involvement. There were those who said the same thing about Bias and Rogers.

It was Bias, an All-American basketball player at the University of Maryland, and Rogers, a Cleveland Browns safety, who brought the reality of cocaine overdoses to the covers of national newsmagazines when they died in June in a span of eight days. Their deaths inspired new efforts on the part of professional and collegiate sports authorities to clean up their acts.

The incidents also put pressure on high schools to deal effectively with drug users before they become drug addicts or wind up in the morgue.

But drugs and alcohol are so readily available to teen-agers that being able to “just say no” is more difficult than First Lady Nancy Reagan makes it sound.

Moskovitz, who eventually spent 100 days in a drug and alcohol treatment program, said peer pressure to go back to using drugs and alcohol upon his return to school was so intense that someone once forced a joint into his mouth at a party.

“I know if I lower myself to their level again, I’ll be right back into drugs,” he said. “I have to say, ‘I care for none today,’ and walk away. It’s not an easy thing to do.”

Steve Landress, football coach at Cleveland High, said that when he coached at Manual Arts in downtown Los Angeles, pushers would park on a street behind the school. “We’d be out there practicing and they’d be out there selling,” Landress said. “The same guys would show up at the games.”

And drugs are just as easy to find in middle-class Valley streets as they are in the inner city.

“I’ve seen cocaine done right in front of my eyes,” said Greg Fowble, a former all-star football and baseball player at Granada Hills High. “I’ve had it offered to me. It’s been at every high school party I’ve ever been to.”

A study completed this year by Rodney Skager, associate dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Education, supports Fowble’s observations. Skager estimated that more than 51% of the state’s high school juniors have used illegal drugs and more than 65% have been intoxicated by alcohol. The same study showed that 10.7% of seventh-graders had used illegal drugs at least once.

Said Moskovitz: “Drugs and alcohol are all over. It may not be as vivid as the image of someone bringing a Thermos full of vodka to school--and I’ve seen that a couple of times--but the problem is bad. Real bad. At parties, everyone has something in their hand, and most of the time, it’s not a Pepsi.”

A growing awareness of the problem has helped drug testing gain momentum.

In a survey conducted last year by the National Federation of State High School Athletic Assns., 27% of 1,209 schools that returned questionnaires were in favor of testing students for drugs. Of the schools that responded, 15 already had implemented programs. In a Gallup Poll published in Newsweek last month, 60% of 758 adults said high school students should take periodic drug tests.

Edison High in Huntington Beach, which started a voluntary drug testing program last fall, has set the standard for Southern California. This year, Banning, St. Bernard, Colton and Fontana high schools--and schools in the San Diego Unified School District--have instituted similar programs. Others, including schools in Antelope Valley and Simi Valley, are evaluating testing proposals.

Westlake’s program is similar to Edison’s in that five volunteers will be randomly selected each week for urine tests. At Edison, the test costs each family $17. At Westlake, testing will be sponsored by Los Robles Regional Medical Facility in Thousand Oaks.

Gary Farr, Edison’s assistant athletic director, said athletes were tested for alcohol, cocaine, marijuana, amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, heroin, PCP and several other drugs. Alcohol and the majority of the most popular drugs are traceable for up to four days. Marijuana, however, can be stored in the body’s fatty tissue and be detected months after use.

Football Coach Bill Workman, who proposed the testing program at Edison, said 90% of the football players on the varsity, junior varsity, sophomore and freshman teams signed up for the program.

“The object of the volunteer test is not to catch people--it’s to keep them from doing it to begin with,” said Workman, who is now coaching at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. Similarly, Conejo officials said they do not intend to test merely to keep those under the influence of drugs from hurting themselves or other players.

“The whole idea behind the program,” Workman said, “is to help kids avoid social pressures--to give them a reason to say no to drugs and alcohol. And it works.”

“I had kids come up to me and tell me what a relief it was not to be pressured. If someone came up to them at a party with drugs, all they had to do was say, ‘Hey, I’m a football player. I might get tested,’ and that was it. Even a drug pusher can accept that.”

The Edison football team last year was co-champion of the Southern Section’s Big-Five Conference. A coincidence? Workman doesn’t think so.

“I don’t know if I can say the drug testing was the major reason for our success,” Workman said, “but I can say this for sure: The reason we got to the finals was we concentrated on what we had to do.”

Kaleaph Carter, who rushed for more than 1,000 yards as a sophomore at Edison last season, said the football players were drawn closer by their coach’s campaign to win with a clean team.

“We became a family,” Carter said. “We were getting high on life, not things that make you lose control of your mind and body.”

The majority of the Edison athletes were tested during their seasons. Dave White, who replaced Workman as Edison’s head coach, said some football players have told him they want to be tested more often. “They want everyone to know they’re clean and can stay clean,” White said. “It’s become a team rallying point.”

So far, high schools have favored making drug tests voluntary. That trend could change, however, if two proposed mandatory programs do not meet legal resistance.

In July, Antelope Valley became the nation’s first community college to initiate mandatory drug testing for its athletes. This month, Hawkins High in Texas became the nation’s first high school to implement a mandatory program for students involved in extracurricular activities.

Hawkins (enrollment 215) serves a rural oil town 105 miles east of Dallas. Mark Pool, assistant principal, said the program was adopted even though the school has no worse a drug problem than any other Texas high school. “Our philosophy is that drug testing gives students a reason to turn peer pressure around,” Pool said. “That’s all some of them need--a reason to say no.”

The school will test students once in the fall and again in the spring, Pool said. Between the scheduled dates, Hawkins also will conduct random testing. “The students will know when the fall and spring tests are, but not the others,” Pool said. “We may draw 50 names one week and 20 the next, then not do any testing for a while.” The school budgeted $10,000 to cover the cost.

Becton Regional High in East Rutherford, N.J., tried to start a similar program last year, but its policy was challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union. Last December, the Superior Court of New Jersey ruled the plan unconstitutional.

Gary Williams, assistant legal director for the Southern California chapter of the ACLU, said his organization would not contest the implementation of voluntary testing programs in Southland high schools.

“If the program is truly voluntary and there is no coercion from coaches or teachers and no penalties for those who choose not to participate, then we have no problem,” Williams said. “There may be peer pressure from teammates to take part in the program, but as long as that pressure is not encouraged by a coach or teacher, then it’s up to the student and his parents. Dealing with that kind of peer pressure is a part of life. We only want the student to be in a position to make a choice for himself.”

Banning became the only L.A. City school with a drug-testing program after the school board adopted a pilot program in August. Rita Walters, board president, said the board has not yet discussed implementing the program districtwide.

The district is going slow, she said, because of a concern that voluntary testing often really isn’t voluntary.

“Some quotes I’ve seen from coaches make it sound like the kids are going to volunteer, but if they don’t they’re going to be in trouble,” Walters said. “Pressure like that doesn’t make the testing voluntary. To me, voluntary means that coercion is absent.”

Walters also expressed concern with the validity of the tests, but Dr. David Lewis, medical director of the ASAP Chemical Dependency Program, said inexpensive urinalyses are accurate if handled by a reputable laboratory. The margin of error in such tests is roughly 5%, he said.

Doctors advise that a more expensive test--such as the mass spectrograph taken by Olympians--should follow a positive urinalysis before disciplinary action is taken. The second test can cost as much as $200.

“Urine testing is a good tool but it depends on who does it, how its handled, and what you do with the results,” he said.

Lewis, who is the director of six inpatient hospital dependency programs in Southern California, said urinalysis should be closely supervised to prevent the swapping of samples.

During the investigation that followed Bias’ death, prosecutors were reportedly told that one player who did not use drugs allowed another player to substitute his urine sample during testing.

Maryland athletes were allowed to go unaccompanied into men’s room stalls to provide urine samples. Marshall said investigators learned that some players who were forewarned of tests put a plumbing chemical such as Drano into their urine samples to alter the results, or used a diuretic to flush out their systems.

“In the drug-abusing world, as soon as you have one thing that could be a good tool, some unsavory person figures out a way to beat it,” Lewis said.

It may be hard to imagine a high school athlete putting Liquid Plumr in his urine sample, or putting a sample of someone else’s urine in a balloon and stuffing it in his underwear. After all, freckle-faced teen-age athletes would never have more than one beer at an occasional Friday night postgame party. Would they?

Jim Woodard, who taught and coached Moskovitz at Taft, said he was unaware that Moskovitz had a drug problem. “Paul was always articulate,” Woodard said. “He wasn’t stumbling around and unable to perform.”

Moskovitz said he was not surprised that his coach didn’t know. “I had my little thing of Visine in one pocket and my little thing of chewing gum and Binaca in this pocket,” he said. “That doesn’t stop you from looking like a zombie all day, but I think I probably held my book up to my face and went to sleep without him knowing it.”

Skip Giancanelli, football coach at El Camino Real High in Woodland Hills, said one of his football teams in the mid-1970s may have lost a league championship because of drug abuse. At the same time, he admitted that he does not watch closely for signs of drug and alcohol use. “It’s something I may overlook in concerning myself with my other duties as a coach,” he said.

Said Lewis: “I think education of parents and coaches is as important--maybe more important--than educating the kids. They need to know what to look for so they can catch a kid with a problem before the problem gets too bad.”

Coaches, at least, are becoming more aware.

Dave Carson, the football coach at Burbank High for three years, said that he is just beginning to understand the extent of the teen-age drug and alcohol problem.

He learned the hard way. “What opened my eyes was when I started hearing about some former players who were into drugs,” Carson said. “Kids I never would have thought were using. I talked to some of them who told me, ‘Yes, coach, I’ve used the stuff before.’ That experience opened my eyes. When I see a kid whose behavior is a little erratic I look a little closer now.”

Carson said he often counsels his players about their conduct at parties. He added that one of the reasons he has his players work out at school on Saturday mornings after a Friday game is to sweat drugs and alcohol out of their systems.

“Kids are susceptible to peer pressure and it would be naive on the part of coaches to think they’re not,” Carson said.

Said Greg Hayes, basketball coach at Canyon High: “If anyone outside of the home can make a difference in a young person’s life, it’s the high school teachers and coaches. It goes with the job.”

Canyon has no plans to start a drug-testing program, but Hayes has instituted a deterrent of his own--a contract. Before trying out for the team, basketball players are required to sign a document stating that they will not use tobacco, drugs or alcohol. If an athlete breaks the contract he is suspended from the team. After a second offense, the player is dismissed.

Hayes said his program was inspired by the death of Laura Stricklin, a student in one of his classes at Canyon who was killed last year when the car she was driving flipped over on a winding road. Coroner’s tests revealed she had been drinking.

“I really thought a lot of Laura,” Hayes said. “I know if it could happen to her, it could happen to anyone. There were basketball players at the scene of that accident who told me later, ‘Coach, I’ve been involved with the stuff and I’m gonna quit.’ This program is designed to help them do just that. It encourages teammates to watch out for each other.”

Hayes’ system relies on students, parents and players snitching on other players, but he’s convinced that it works. “If someone would have slipped, I would have heard about it,” he said. “Some people on campus would have taken pleasure in seeing it fail and would have told me if it had. Our kids took a lot of pride in staying clean and it pulled our team together.”

And, like Edison, Canyon enjoyed a successful season, winning its first league basketball championship in eight years.

Testing may point the way to solving the drug problem in sports, but it doesn’t provide all the answers, Moskovitz says.

A few weeks after he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger, Moskovitz admitted he was a drug addict and alcoholic. He refers to Sept. 13, 1984, as his new birthday. He says he has not used drugs or alcohol since then.

“If I wouldn’t have stopped when I did, I’d be dead,” said Moskovitz, 18. “I was lucky. I realized I needed help and I got it--just in time.”

Moskovitz reached his decision to seek help after he played Russian roulette with his life. He is hopeful that drug testing may force other users to abandon their habits.

“Drug testing is a positive step, but the facts are, you can make it tough for someone to play sports and do drugs, but you can’t stop them,” Moskovitz said. “Len Bias was tested, it came up negative, and he’s dead now.

“That’s the scary part. If someone wants to do drugs bad enough, they’re just gonna do ‘em. And there’s not much anyone can do about it.”