COMMENTARY : Supreme Court Sends Kids the Wrong Message

All junior high and high school athletes in America are now more than just athletes. They also are suspects. Because they are athletes and they hang with athletes, they are suspects of such notoriety that they can be compelled to prove to the authorities that they do not use illegal drugs. Which is to say they are presumed guilty until proving themselves innocent. Incredible.

We’re talking seventh-grade sports here, grades 7 through 12. We’re talking about lining up teen-agers in order to inspect their urine for evidence of drugs. America’s legal system is often absurd. Here is one more example. The Supreme Court has given public elementary and high schools permission to drug-test athletes simply because they are athletes. No suspicion necessary; no probable cause necessary; no evidence of wrongdoing necessary.

Has American society disintegrated so completely that to protect ourselves against our failures we now must inspect the urine of 13-year-old volleyball players? Major League Baseball is the home of Darryl Strawberry, Steve Howe and George Steinbrenner. The lords of baseball have never dared ask to drug test all athletes at all times. Nor have the NBA, NFL or NHL suggested it. They know better than to suggest suspension of the Constitution.

But junior high and high school athletes are children with no political power. The perpetually reprieved Howe and the given-a-felon’s-second-chance Strawberry have lawyers on call. Public school athletes have no one speaking for them. So now they have a Hobson’s choice. They can give up some of their rights. Or they can quit sports.

Such is the circumstance created by the Supreme Court’s decision in an Oregon case brought by a seventh-grader who didn’t want to submit to his school’s drug-testing program. School district 47J in the 8,000-population logging community of Vernonia, Ore., instituted testing after a series of drug problems identified with athletes.

Those who support such drug testing agree with the Supreme Court’s decision that the need to test outweighs the loss of privacy and protection against unreasonable search. They believe the testing is appropriate if it promotes a legitimate governmental interest, “which the prevention of drug use by children surely is,” to quote columnist George Will.

Sorry. No sale here. It is ludicrous to believe that testing a few athletes--a minority at all schools--will prevent drug use by a majority of users. No survey has ever shown that most teen-age drug users are high school athletes. More likely, most users prefer a less-disciplined lifestyle that hides them from authority figures.

Common sense tells us as much. But common sense has nothing to do with the Supreme Court’s decision, a 6-3 vote on the Oregon case. Instead, Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion says: “It seems to us self-evident that a drug problem largely fueled by the ‘role model’ effect of athletes’ drug use, and of particular danger to athletes, is effectively addressed by making sure that athletes do not use drugs.”

In dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor says “a mass, suspicionless search is categorically unreasonable.” Yes, she says, prohibiting such searches may allow drug users to go undetected. But she also says, “There is nothing new in the realization that Fourth Amendment protections come with a price.”

The price in this case is low. The price is missing a drug user or three. Even if we miss a thousand, better to miss them than to tell millions of innocent children--Scalia even calls them “role models”--that we think they could be guilty unless they prove to us, by handing over their urine, that they are innocent.

And once we test for cocaine and steroids, what then? Alcohol is illegal under a certain age, as is tobacco. Do we bring Breathalyzers to class? And why test only athletes? Let’s test the computer wizards, the artists, the musicians, the engineers. Let’s strap the teachers to a polygraph to see which of our children’s custodians cheated on last year’s income taxes. Yes, let’s give up freedoms of privacy that men and women have died to create and sustain. Let’s give them up so parents and teachers in Oregon can pass off their responsibilities to the government’s drug testers.