Drug Testing Helps Edison Cope With Teen-Age Problems

This is Edison High School, Huntington Beach, Calif.

This is a little slice of American pie where the color-coordinated cheerleader strolls hand-in-hand with the letterman. Where teens wearing the latest Euro-rage fashions dart through the locker-lined aisles during lunch break.

This is a school inhabited by teen-agers who are not unlike their peers across the nation. They are youths with dating, parent, grade and drug problems.

Edison is a campus not immune to society’s nefarious ways.

But the way the school’s staff has handled the drug problems, well, that is what makes it different. And controversial.

Three years ago, the high school developed a voluntary drug-testing program for its athletes to combat the growing substance abuse problem. Edison coaches think they have found a strong deterrent to drug use by instituting random, year-round testing.

They say athletes who test now have an excuse to say “No” at parties where drugs and alcohol are being offered. Because coaches also view athletes as role models who are emulated by the rest of the student body, their hope is that an anti-drug attitude will eventually spread throughout the school.

At first, then-football Coach Bill Workman was concerned only with the Edison team. He had heard that some of the players on the 1983-84 teams were using drugs as much as the rest of the Edison student body.

He lost two sophomore players who quit football and later checked into drug rehabilitation centers. Also, he saw a cheerleader with a 4.0 grade-point average sent to a hospital because of drug addiction.

That’s when he decided to take action.

“I don’t want to coach druggies,” said Workman, now coach at Orange Coast College. “I don’t want to coach people who have a hangover on Monday.”

Randy Williams, the Edison trainer who helped start the drug testing program, said he was shocked when he heard that at least 10 players on the 1984 team had used cocaine at a party.

“These are kids who are the best kids in the world,” Williams said. “I’m thinking, there’s no way. Big-time starters. All-league, All-county in a couple of instances. And those are only the ones I know about.”

Workman said the standard school procedures to handle drug problems--the ones some principals cite when defending their on-campus solutions to drugs--weren’t working.

“We (Edison) had all the anti-drug assemblies,” he said. “We had all the networking that could have possibly been done and our problems were still there. We were educating, we met with our athletes twice a year and the parents signed a contract that the kids would not use alcohol, drugs and tobacco, and we still had problems. So, we can sit there and give it lip service and do all the things everybody else is doing . . . or we can test. Nobody has figured out (that) what we’re doing is failing.”

Workman acknowledges that drug testing is not a solution; but for the time being, it helps, he said.

“I know that I lost guys who could have been in the NFL because they have gone too far with alcohol and drugs,” he said.

The Edison athletes interviewed said they endorse the program.

“There’s some drinking and stuff, but cocaine and marijuana use has stopped,” said Bernie Colacchio, a football and baseball player. “In football, almost everybody is going through the testing. It’s definitely working.”

So far, only a handful of Southern California schools, and none in the Huntington Beach Unified High School District of which Edison is a member, have followed this lead.

Banning (Carson), Fontana and Colton high schools have adopted programs, as well as schools in the San Diego, Coronado and Fallbrook unified school districts. Mission Viejo High School will drug test its football teams starting next fall.

Gary Williams, assistant legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Southern California chapter, said last fall that his organization would not contest the implementation of voluntary testing programs at Southland high schools.

But many school administrators are viewing drug testing with trepidation. They cite court cases in which similar programs have been ruled unconstitutional.

Civil libertarians argue that drug testing in general is an invasion of privacy and a violation of Fourth Amendment rights, which protect citizens against unreasonable search and seizure. Even in a voluntary program such as Edison’s, administrators are afraid teachers and coaches would be accused of penalizing those students who do not want to test.

Officials also are concerned about the validity of urinalysis, the drug screening test, and that unsupervised sample-giving may allow for the switching or “doctoring” of samples. Also, some say voluntary testing does not deter use, per se.

Dr. Don Catlin, who runs the International Olympic Committee’s accredited laboratory out of the UCLA School of Pharmacology, said there is not a standard guideline for consumers to evaluate drug-testing laboratories, though the National Institute of Drug Abuse is developing one.

However, he said many laboratories do excellent work for this kind of testing.

School officials point out that compulsory testing on high school campuses has been declared unconstitutional by courts in New Jersey and Arkansas. And the case of Simone LeVant, the Stanford University diver who won a court victory over the National Collegiate Athletic Assn.’s mandatory testing at national championship events last March, has heightened concerns.

Marie Otto, superintendent of the Huntington Beach district, said her school board has not endorsed Edison’s program on a district-wide basis because of the potential liabilities.

“I don’t think we can be in the drug-testing business,” she said.

What Otto and others are afraid of is being sued for an incorrect and potentially damaging test result.

With Edison’s program unchallenged even after ACLU scrutiny, proponents of testing say many school officials may be looking for a way out to dealing with the problem.

Said one prominent Orange County high school football coach who asked not to be identified: “Most principals, most districts, feel if they do something there will be attention and finger pointing: ‘Oh, my school has a drug problem.’ That’s not right. I know that’s the way the people at the top look at it. Don’t bring attention to yourself and the problem will go away. But somebody has to start someplace.”

With the help of Edison’s team physician, Dr. Robert Belanger of Huntington Beach, Workman started a program that is independent of the district. The program’s autonomy enabled them to skirt the legal issue, and alleviated district officials’ fears of liability.

The testing cost is $17.50 per family per school year. Families joining the program are asked to donate the money, and many contribute additional amounts. Parents who cannot afford a donation but want to participate can have their children tested without cost.

The urinalysis is screened for alcohol and drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, amphetamines (uppers), barbiturates (downers) and phencyclidine (PCP). Belanger said they do not test for anabolic steroids because few athletes are taking these drugs. Also these complex tests are expensive--from $80-$250.

Features of the program:

- It is voluntary.

- Consent by student or parent can be revoked at any time.

- The student is given privacy when supplying the specimen at the school or Fountain Valley Regional Hospital.

- Results are confidential. They are told only to parents and the doctor.

- Positive samples are tested again by more complex procedures to ensure accuracy.

- The school is not informed regardless of the results.

The program is operated by a parent committee that selects three to 10 athletes in a lottery-style drawing each week to be tested.

Because the program lacks punitive action against drug users, critics call it weak. But Belanger wasn’t looking for reprisals. Along with therapists who say it takes a family commitment to help a person to begin to recover, Belanger simply wanted to bring the problem back to the family.

Belanger said that 96% of the 1986 Edison football team signed up for the program, and that after 100 tests there were one or two positive results, which remain confidential to the players, parents and doctor. He said that teams on which coaches supported the program had better sign-up rates than others, but the actual breakdown in sports other than football had not been determined.

“It takes off the pressure,” said senior Michelle Hennessey, a Times’ All-Orange County basketball player from Edison. “Most kids do drink, but I know a lot of people who don’t want to drink but they’re just pressured into it.

“Last year there may have been a lot of partying after games, but after drug testing came into effect football players really got into football.”

As some school district officials continue to debate the testing issue, some Edison athletes walk around campus wearing T-shirts proclaiming them, “Mean, Green and Clean.” And that makes them a little bit different under the veneer of tranquil campus life.