Before you attend your next school board meeting about student drug testing, arm yourself with these talking points about the potential dangers and pitfalls of random student drug testing programs.

• Student drug testing is unproven, expensive, counterproductive and invasive.
  
  
• The scientific literature does not support the safety or effectiveness of random student drug testing. The only federally funded, peer-reviewed study conducted on the topic to date compared 94,000 students in almost 900 American schools with and without a drug testing program, and found virtually no difference in illegal drug use.
  
  
• Prominent national organizations representing experts on adolescent health oppose student drug testing including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Association for Addiction Professionals, the National Education Association, the American Public Health Association, the National Association of Social Workers and the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, among others.
  
  
• Drug testing is expensive, wasting scarce dollars that could be better spent on other, more effective programs that keep young people out of trouble with drugs.
  
  
• Random drug testing erodes relationships of trust between students and adults at school, hindering open communication and damaging an essential component of a safe and rewarding learning environment.
  
  
• Drug testing programs are counter-productive, erecting barriers to participation in extracurricular activities—the very activities likely to increase students' connection to caring adults at school, and provide structure and supervision during the peak hours of adolescent drug use from 3-6pm.
  
  
• Drug testing programs further marginalize at-risk students and do not effectively identify students who have serious problems with drugs.
  
  
• Testing may trigger oppositional behavior by inadvertently encouraging more students to abuse alcohol—not included in many standard testing panels—or by motivating some drug-involved adolescents to switch to harder drugs that leave the system more quickly.
  
  
• Drug testing is invasive and introduces problems from false positives and false negatives, to humiliating specimen collection, and a chain of custody /storage process prone to human error.
  
  
• Drug testing fails to reach students’ key attitudes and beliefs. Instead, we should spend our scarce resources educating students through comprehensive, interactive and honest drug education with identification of, and assistance for, students whose lives are disrupted by substance use.