Wednesday’s Guest View from the Cape Cod Times (“Drug testing students?”) correctly calls into question legislation proposed in the Massachusetts Senate providing for blanket “drug testing” of middle and high school students. Senate Bill 2008 requires that “Local school departments or boards of health shall require SBIRT screening at least once annually for all students in grades 8 or 9, and in grade 11.”
The Cape Cod Times editorial points out that no other state has voted to subject its students to intrusive (and expensive) drug interviews of this sort, and suggests that lawmakers are grasping at straws at the very real opioid epidemic gripping the nation and the SouthCoast.
Both Governor Baker and the “Special Senate Committee on Opioid Addiction Prevention, Treatment and Recovery Options” have apparently made the schools a focus of their efforts. Massachusetts is throwing almost $1 million at a TV and website campaign (“Stop Addiction in its Tracks”) that so far has generated a disappointing number of clicks and deserves the same ridicule the ineffective DARE program earned in its day.
I went online to find out if middle and high school students were in fact the victims of opioid overdoses. The mass.gov health statistics for public consumption lump children in with adults (15-24). An analysis of news reports of overdose cases in SouthCoast from early September through early October shows an average victim age of 35, which is in line with a bulletin published by the Massachusetts MDPH in 2007. In other words – these are people who have been shaving a while.
In 2014 Massachusetts had 1,256 opioid-related overdose deaths, and this number is expected to increase once 2015 figures are tabulated, so the problem is very real. However, invading every teen’s privacy annually and at public expense in order to root out potential addicts twenty years before they actually overdose sounds as ridiculous as it is. Citizens don’t need to have their civil liberties trampled annually – especially when the data doesn’t support it. State Senator Montigny and the rest of the legislature need to take a big red pen to these provisions, retaining only the better aspects of the bill.
This was published in the Standard Times on October 9, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20151009/opinion/151009418
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