August 2009

Recent support for compulsory drug testing in schools is symptomatic of extensive ignorance. Supporters of school drug testing are unacquainted with a number of facts. These enthusiasts know nothing of drugs, or the needs of people who become abusers. The test advocates know precisely nothing about the availability and ease of manufacture of narcotics, and the sophisticated, efficient and a highly effective network of the global drugs trade, which is what one would expect when trafficking attracts the elite criminal minds because of its extreme profitability and the low risk of arrest. Supporters demonstrate they misconstrue the ‘drug problem’ as being a straightforward cause and effect situation.
The misconception is ‘we deal with the effect, and the cause disappears.’ Such thinking often leads to the false conclusion that with enough legislation, enforcement and education, narcotics abuse somehow vanishes. It doesn’t.
  Apologists for school drug testing also have a profound lack of enlightenment of why people become tragically addicted. There was a total absence among the supports of drug testing of anyone addressing the psychiatric, psychological or emotional considerations that all have bearings on addiction in young people.
   One blatant reality staring everyone in the face but which astonishing numbers of people seem utterly unaware, is that the first and principal bulwark and safeguard against drug abuse lies at home, with parents. Parents have a duty to fully inform their offspring about the dangers of substance abuse, and ensure home life is emotionally secure enough so that youngsters have no
need of any chemical recourse to escape.
   Drug testing considerably worsens the situation with negligent and badly informed parents, as these kind of people are apt to assume that drug testing at schools somehow obviates the need for the necessary parenting skills that ensures their offspring grow up well-adjusted enough not to require drugs. That means having a supportive atmosphere where youngsters may freely and productively discuss their emotional problems and where parents teach of the dangers of drugs from a young age. Having compulsory drug testing appears to unburden parents of the responsibility of ensuring they bring up offspring without the need for drugs. It appeals to the ‘someone else’s problem, not mine’ mentality common with so with many Hong Kong parents who are guilty of outsourcing their responsibilities. You could clearly see in this the letters pages with the ignoramus’ repeated platitudes of ‘compulsory drug testing is for the students’ own good’ and ‘these young people can get the help they need.’ These are the reactions of a squeamish non-parent eager to farm out their responsibilities, and who are unable to emotionally connect with their children. By the time there is any chance of a drug test yielding and positive result, the opportunities for successful intervention and effective prevention have long passed.
   The particular irony here is that one of the foremost reasons a young person may turn to drugs is that the miserable adolescent is a victim suffering absent and unsupportive parents who are ever-keen to judge their children solely on academic achievements. Emotionally distant and hypercritical parents often lumber their offspring with unrealistic pressures to do well in academic subjects in which the youngster has no interest in, but
which the parents deem suitable for their family’s esteem and conform to their own personal preferences. The kids endure this in a pressurised, competitive, non-creative, exam oriented education system primarily designed for grooming an elite.
   Youngsters have to juggle adolescent emotional turmoil as they seek an identity, find a purpose in life and deal with relationship problems, social isolation and low self-esteem. Narcotics supply a temporary liberation and self-medication from all these accumulated miseries.
   Parents who are the most vocal and outspoken supporters of the drug-testing scheme normally have a complete ignorance of drugs and the potential and reasons for addiction, and lack the ability to communicate and empathise with their children as well as being most likely to burden offspring with excessive educational demands. The ‘band-aid’ solution of drug testing is obviously extremely attractive to such parents. Support for compulsory drug testing in schools is symptomatic of wishing to paper over a problem and find comfort with superficial stopgap measures that help distance parents from their duties and convince them that the only accountability they have is to support drug testing. These parents feel that drug testing replaces correct expressions of love and concern and placing young people’s interests over forcing them to study face-giving subjects that give the parents more kudos.
   All this reveals most clearly why legislating against and criminalising youngster’s drug abuse is futile. The US Office of Narcotics Drug Control Policy announced a ‘war on drugs’ using law enforcement in an attempt to eliminate drug usage and distribution. 76,000 students were randomly tested in a large-scale check, over three years in 722 US schools. It was a complete failure. Drug-related deaths, Aids and homicides in the US are three times higher than in any EU countries.
   The countries achieving the best results are liberal and drug tolerant countries like the Netherlands, and Switzerland which provides clean needles together with active demand reduction and supportive social policies. The EU approach sees drug use as a social problem, not a crime. It emphasises drug reduction and drug prevention interventions in the at-risk populations.
   The drug testing policy in Hong Kong lacks any of the underlying principles, policies and protocols that are necessary for any kind of drug reductions plan to be feasible or even humane. These policies and protocols include identifying and supporting individuals who, because of adverse social and environmental factors are vulnerable to drug abuse. We need community health centres, an improvement in teacher / student ratios, improved housing and social welfare and adequate mental health and psychological support. School-based prevention protocols have had promising results in other countries.
   The very thought of attempting to legislate families into being happier and more well-adjusted is absurdity itself, and here we have a government trying to do just that, and similarly misinformed individuals agreeing with it. Governments can put out anti-drug messages until they are blue in the face but it won’t make one scrap of difference to how stable and happy a family is. Well-adjusted families who foster a wholesome environment giving correct expression of love and concern and with open communication and who give rigorous education about the nature of narcotics have no need of warnings about drug abuse and threats of drug testing. Dysfunctional or inadequate families are completely incapable of acknowledging the issue, let alone taking preventative action.
   Compulsory drug testing at schools is most attractive to parents who wish to avoid parental responsibilities, bury their heads in the sand and not face up to the realities of these social problems enormity of the task of raising happy adolescents. These kinds of parents find these ‘anti-drug’ measures attractive and potent.
   Most Hong Kong principals are concerned with one and only one thing, burnishing their institutions’ reputations. Such head teachers would be strongly averse to the prospect of channelling precious resources that might otherwise further a school’s good name into drug awareness campaigns. Places of education should include in their curriculum appropriate guidance about drug abuse, is this guidance is just as important as any academic one. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a principal who’d go along with this idea, and even if they did, over-ambitious academia-obsessed parents would probably start squawking anyway about focusing on irrelevant activities.
   The appeal of compulsory drug testing for schools is the means to conveniently and quickly identify and remove any suspected drug user who might otherwise tarnish a school’s standing.
   Campaigns like a ‘war on vice’ often manifests as a simple war on sex workers and this does nothing to alleviate the social and economic conditions that force women into the sex trade, and the operation turns into merely a ‘war on sex workers.’ In much the same way a ‘war on drugs’ winds up as nothing more than a ‘war on drug users’ while the real criminals, the masterminds behind the manufacturing and distribution and trade in narcotics remain safe and at large, while only the end users are punished. I fail to see how the prosecution of some teenagers at a school is in any way going to stem society’s drug problems.
   Society and modern living pressures ensures a bottomless supply of disenchanted youth with a potential appetite to use narcotics to medicate against emotional gaps in their lives engendered by parental neglect, overwork, alienation and other emotional problems that the government, parents and the education system consistently fail to address and are mostly responsible for. Every young addict represents a parenting failure, and compulsorily testing young people is nothing less than persecuting victims of the system.