The Office of National Drug Control Policy will be in San Diego next week advocating random student drug testing as a "silver bullet" for the problem of adolescent drug use. This is San Diego mother Gretchen Burns Bergman's story of how student drug testing failed her family.

About fifteen years ago when my second son was attending Valhalla High School in El Cajon, there was growing alarm about student drug use, and our community—including myself—voted to implement random drug testing of our children in athletic programs. At the time, we parents hoped that learning about our children’s drug use through drug testing would help us save them. We were wrong.

The first student to be tested at Valhalla High was my younger son, then a senior and a member of the water polo team. I doubted it was random at all, since his older brother had been kicked out of the same school for possession of marijuana a few years earlier. I wondered: was this program really about prevention? Or was it about identifying the "bad" kids?

When my son’s results came back negative (no drugs), it was an immense relief to me. I had been worrying about my younger son, ever since our family had begun struggling with his older brother’s drug abuse problems. Because my younger son tested drug-free, we all assumed he was.

But the test had given us all a false sense of security. Much later, after he had graduated from high school, I learned that he and several others on the team had already been dabbling with drugs at the time of his negative test results. We lost precious time in offering him help that he deserved, because we trusted that a test would tell us all we needed to know.

I’m not sure why the test was negative, but it’s probably because he was using infrequently and maybe only on the weekends. By the time he took the test, the drugs were out of his system. Although drug tests have become more accurate in recent years, in most cases (especially with the harder drugs) they can still only tell us what our kids have done in the past few days—not what they did a week ago or what they might try the next day.

Despite being clearly at-risk (given his brother’s problems), after my younger son tested drug-free he received no more help or advice than the school had offered students before drug testing—which we already knew was insufficient.

After graduating high school, my younger son eventually also graduated to experimenting with heroin. Over a decade later, he is working towards recovery. I can’t help but wonder: what if, instead of a drug test, my son had participated in an effective drug prevention/education program in high school? Might he have been more wary about continued drug use?

Adolescence can be a particularly difficult and critical period.  Relationships with parents and teachers are often tenuous, so trust is a precious commodity.  More time and money should be spent on counselors and healthcare professionals who can spot kids in trouble and guide them to services.

Drug testing creates an atmosphere of distrust and often deters students from extracurricular activities that can help kids at risk to navigate the tempestuous waters of adolescence. There is no proof that student drug testing deters drug use.  I wonder whether it might just as likely silence an individual who would otherwise reach out for help. 

The place for drug testing is in a treatment setting as a treatment tool, at the hands of a healthcare professional, not in our public schools, especially when they choose to punish—rather than support—those kids who are suffering from drug abuse problems.