Random Illegal Drug Testing Among High School Students

Purpose

Using illegal drugs has been problem affecting different age levels. People use illegal drugs for so many different reasons. Even high school students do drugs in order to enhance their performance in academic, athletic, or extracurricular activities. Although not every high school student uses drugs to modify student’s skills, this ill-defined drug use in high school bring up the question whether to do random testing among high school students. People have different views on random testing. Some people might prefer random testing among high school students, while others say there should not be such a test for drug use. Viewing at two different sides, people might wonder which topics are investigated on the issue of random testing on illegal drug use among high school students.

In order for people to know the issue of random testing, they need to realize how serious drug issues are. Because the random and suspicion based tests are different among many other kinds of methods, both tests are comparable each other. Do students have rights to avoid both random and suspicion based testing? Does random testing work? How accurate is it to do random testing? Is there any poll or survey data that clearly shows the actual situation? Random drug testing is being widely discussed concerning student’s rights, accuracy of drug test, and comparison of public opinion. Overall, I am leaning towards random drug testing in high schools because I believe it would not be fair to treat students who do not use drugs with who do drugs.

Topics to be investigated

Random testing and suspicion based tests are the most common tests for drug use. Both tests show whether people have used drugs, but is it really necessary for the government to do both random and suspicion based tests in high school? The real issue here is which test should be used.

The random tests seem to work in most cases. Shamoo and Moreno state in their research that Tallmadge...