A Test of Love : Sunny Cloud was just a mom worried about her son’s drug use--so she invented a home screening kit. Now she, and her creation, are at the center of a political tug of war.

When single mom Sunny Cloud caught her 15-year-old smoking a joint one weekend, she had no idea the incident would turn into a presidential campaign issue more than two years later.

She had surprised the boy one Sunday afternoon with her unexpected return home from a real estate gig in suburban Atlanta. Incensed at the mind-numbing spectacle, she dragged him to an emergency room to have him tested for marijuana, just to make sure. It was a harsh experience. The nurse called out for all in the emergency room to hear: “It’s time for your drug test.” And the ordeal cost about $120.

That’s when Cloud decided it was time parents had access to an affordable, at-home drug test. About six months later she had a home test kit, “Parents’ Alert,” up, running and available by mail for $40.

The problem is, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has not approved the kit. And she has not submitted it for approval because the agency has ruled in the past that such kits should be available to home users only with a doctor’s prescription.

A thundering Cloud has vowed to continue selling the kit (largely by word-of- mouth) without submitting it to the FDA judgment. But while the agency has yet to move against her, Republicans have raised her plight as a campaign issue, upholding it as an example of what it claims is the Clinton administration’s soft stance on drugs.

“Clinton comes out with this pro-family agenda and then his FDA is preventing parents from using a tool to fight drugs,” says a spokesman for House Commerce Committee Chairman Thomas J. Bliley, a Virginia Republican. The chairman himself says: “They think parents somehow can’t handle the results” of an at-home drug test.

“Some people want to make it into a political issue, but it’s not,” counters a Clinton administration spokesman. “It’s a question of the merits of the device.”

Cloud--a 47-year-old self-described moderate who received half of her singsong name from an ex-husband--never intended to be the spokeswoman for the war on drugs. But she would be an eloquent one.

Standing 5-feet-4-inches tall with red hair and blue eyes, Cloud speaks in an even, light Southern accent, sounding like a sensible every-parent. She is clearly not a zealot for the right nor an absentee parent who took notice of her children after that fateful Sunday. She’s a hard-working single mother of two (she boasts of having logged 300,000 miles on her car, consulting on real estate and workplace drug testing, and selling her kits) who argues that even the best of parents need extreme tools to fight today’s fatal influences.

“I thought I raised my children to know better,” she says, “but drug use is more the norm than the exception now.”

Cloud says she isn’t in the drug testing business for the money but refuses to say what her per-unit costs are for the $40 kit: “I can tell you, there’s not a lot of profit in there.”

She is quite adamant, however, about what she says is parents’ right--nay, duty--to monitor children’s behavior.

“If we’re supposed to be legally responsible for our children’s behavior,” Cloud says during a telephone interview, “we need the tools.

“It’s not a matter of whether you like the test, but a matter of whether you should have a choice to use the test.”

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Cloud has spent the last two years selling the kits--identical to many of the drug test kits used in the workplace. The difference is that, at home, a parent would be supervising the test, while at work it is often administered by a nurse or lab technician. She has sold 1,000 so far but will probably sell many more now that she has become a symbol for the Republicans’ anti-drug platform.

The kits allow testing for amphetamines, barbiturates, cocaine, marijuana, PCP, benzodiazopines (which include such drugs as Valium) and opiates. There is also an optional alcohol screening available. Parents take a urine sample, send it to one of several certified laboratories and call in with their anonymous code number for results. (The lab fee is included in the $40 price.) Literature included in the kit advises parents on where they can turn for advice if their children test positive for drugs.

The FDA at first expressed serious concerns about such tests, particularly in how parents, often untrained in drug counseling, would handle positive results. But the agency seems to have backed off that now that the test has proved to be potentially popular with voting parents.

Spokesman James O’Hara says the FDA never had a beef with Cloud. She never applied for the agency’s approval, so as far as they are concerned, she doesn’t exist. Kits such as hers, however, do come under the agency’s jurisdiction, he says, so she has the obligation to seek its approval.

It sounds like approval is becoming more likely with every campaign stop.

During the vice presidential debate last week, Vice President Al Gore used Cloud’s test as an example of unnecessary government red tape and indicated that the Clinton administration would loosen the rules to get such home test kits on the market. “It’s under consideration by the FDA right now,” he said.

“The agency doesn’t have a policy against these particular kits,” O’Hara says. “The agency thinks there should be kits on the market that provide reliable information and that are adequately labeled.”

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The teen counseling community seems split whether such a device should be made available.

“I don’t think it’s the greatest idea for some parents to be doing drug testing in the home,” says Cary Quashen, a teen drug counselor for Action, an L.A.-based parent-teen support program. “You want parents to develop a healthy relationship, and when they start acting like the police officer, there could be some problems.”

Conversely, Quashen says testing could be a boon for parents of children trying to recover from addiction, adding that his and other groups already test teens for drugs at the behest of parents. “If you have a kid who’s been using drugs and is way out of control and is on probation and he knows you’re going to give him the test, it might keep him in line,” he says.

Teen reaction seems mixed too.

“I would have to advocate such a thing, having personally experienced many of my friends succumb to drugs,” says Kevin Marcus, 16, a junior at Santa Monica High School. “Most parents are completely unaware of their kids’ drug use.”

Classmate Alex Santiago, 14, disagrees: “It’s like they’re not going to trust you.” Adds Ebony Hawkins, 17: “It would be an invasion of our privacy.”

Meanwhile, Cloud is swamped filling orders since her kits have become a slice of the 1996 campaign story.

“I’m caught up in this media firestorm, which I never expected,” she says. “I’m not a martyr. I’m just a mom.

“But when it comes to raising my kids, I will fight. We have a responsibility to our children.”