Drug Testing of High School Athletes

[Vogue State]

Some concessions you make in life make sense. For example, you submit to security procedures on flights because there is an obvious potential for the shit to hit the fan -- you are stuck in a sardine can in mid-air for a few hours with a hundred or two other people, and you want to make sure none of those people are able to stop you from landing safely. Not to mention the safety of people on the ground should the control of the plane be taken from the pilot.

The security measures at airports are also in line with the specific threat we are trying to thwart. Mainly, they are trying to detect weapons and/or explosives, either of which has the potential to cause a catastrophe in the hands of an airline passenger. Note that you do not have to pee in a cup to board a plane.

Air travel is only necessary if you want to partake in a highly mobile, global lifestyle. Cars and trains are quite usable for intra-continental travel such as a New York-Seattle or Rome-Brussels trip. Note that when you drive a car you are subject to many restrictions -- you must have a photo driver's license, and in the U.S. a police officer can search your vehicle without a warrant if he can show some ``probable cause.'' This is because when you operate a car you have the potential to cause some havoc, and that risk has to be countered. To board a train you don't even need to have ID -- just buy a ticket with cash and hop aboard.

dhamsaic's recurring point seems to be that since there will always be justified, necessary concessions in life, we shouldn't think twice about creating new, counter-productive, overly intrusive, unjustified and unnecessary ones -- apparently just to send the message that "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch!" Hopefully, dh, you won't take this personally; I actually get much enjoyment out of your usual posts. However, I find your "point" in this thread to border on the asinine.

Sure, life is not fair. Nor is anyone suggesting that we try to grab this law of nature by the horns and attempt to create a rosy, pink 100% fair world for everyone. The question is: Why go out of our way to be explicitly unfair for no good reason whatsoever?

There is no constitutionally guaranteed right to a Chess Club, to be sure. Where's the constitutionally guaranteed right to a Chess Club free of potheads? Failing that, where is the threat from kids who would come to a Chess Club and play while stoned? Failing that, what are we hoping to achieve, what do we as a society stand to gain, from instituting such a policy across the nation? If it is not to protect rights, or to counter a threat, what is it for? (Answer this question to my satisfaction, and I'll owe you a drink. However, "to make money for the drug-testing industry" or "to psychologically prepare students for an overly intrusive police-state in the future" will not satisfy me).

There is no constitutionally guaranteed right to pizza, either. Would you object to a policy that called for the urine testing of anyone who wants to buy pizza? Sure there's no good reason for it, but the pizza industry still doesn't want to serve heroin addicts or cokeheads, so why shouldn't they be allowed to reach into your bladder to make sure you're an acceptable client? After all, life's all about making sacrificies. You want pizza, you pee in the cup. If you don't want to pee in the cup, you can always go eat Chinese with the other druggies.

Well, thanks for reading the awfully long post if you made it this far. BTW, I too have made the concession of taking a drug test for my current employer, for what it's worth. That doesn't mean I'm going to consider it an immutable part of our social structure from now on.