The Office of National Drug Control Policy was greeted by a strong opposition voice when it brought its random student drug testing promotional tour to San Diego Wednesday. Several opponents of random student drug testing raised important questions and distributed materials at the ONDCP summit, and DPA hit the airwaves and the pages of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The morning of the summit, the Union-Tribune published an op-ed by Marsha Rosenbaum, director of DPA's drug education program, enumerating the problems with student drug testing. The paper also featured a news article about the summit exploring the arguments on both sides and discussing the local response to the idea. The day before the summit, an editorial in another local paper, the North County Times, spoke out decisively against random student drug testing.

Jennifer Kern, DPA's Drug Testing Fails campaign coordinator, brought the message of opposition to San Diego public radio on KPBS show "These Days." Kern and Margaret Dooley, San Diego outreach coordinator for DPA, both spoke to several print and television media outlets as well to get the word out to San Diegans about the flaws of random student drug testing.

About 15 community members attended the summit itself to counter the ONDCP's characterization of random student drug testing as a "silver bullet" for the problem of adolescent drug use. The message was well received by the approximately 150 educators present, who collected materials such as Making Sense of Student Drug Testing: Why Educators Are Saying No (PDF) and Beyond Zero Tolerance from DPA's information table. The available materials also included the real life story of random student drug testing's negative impact on a San Diego family.

The ONDCP presentations at the summit were predictable, making no distinction between drug use and drug abuse, and focusing mainly on the legal and research aspects of student drug testing. Jennifer Kern noted, "There was one breakout on assisting students who do test positive, but the language was so vague as to be of no use at all: 'Education is prevention. Refer students to counseling.' Testing students was much more heavily emphasized than supporting students with a positive result."

Most educators did not seem to be strongly persuaded by the ONDCP presentations. "For many professionals in the audience, the ONDCP reps raised more questions than they answered about the constitutionality, the reliability and the effectiveness of random student drug testing," observed Margaret Dooley, who is a San Diego resident.

Thanks to the hard work of the people who opposed random student drug testing at the summit, attendees came away with balanced information to take back to their schools and communities.