February
27, 2006,
Volume 13 Nr. 37, Issue 205
Rover Goes to School: Sniffing
Our Kids' Civil Liberties Away Jozef Hand-Boniakowski,
and
JeanneE Hand-Boniakowski
Janelle Brown in, Why
Drug Tests Flunk, (April 2002, salon.com), writes,
Indeed, at least at school, giving
up Fourth Amendment rights is becoming a way of demonstrating
patriotism. Scott Linke explains the mentality that is now
prevalent...about drug testing: "People say, 'I'm a good
person, therefore I don't need my rights, because what do I have
to lose? Go ahead, I'll show you I have nothing to hide.' "
"Acceptance of this is a badge
of honor," he says. "That's nefarious: It's being guilty
until proven innocent. That's not the American way: It's the
totalitarian police state. But an entire generation is being
raised with this mentality."
So it is with the
acceptance of drug-sniffing dogs in our schools. Encroachment
upon the civil liberties of teens seems to matter little. We
have become a nation where civil liberties matter less and
less. We are tracked, wire tapped, our homes searched without warrant, our
reading material and internet usage tracked, our health records and spending patterns filed. Our
emails are read and our words are
archived and often manipulated. Our presence is videotaped in
the streets, stores, airports, schools, just about everywhere. Our relationships have become salacious
reading material for domestic spy agencies. Our children are
continuously suspect, and now, sniffed. We too easily accept the loss of more and more of our
freedoms. Perhaps the day will come when education
administrators conclude that enough is enough
Perhaps, when their own rights have all disappeared, they will decide
to just say no to the loss of civil liberties.
In the surveillance
culture that the United States has become, notions of patriotism
have become dangerously skewed. Somehow we have come to accept
the creepy meme that when we give up our rights — like privacy —
we are being patriotic. That voluntary waiving of our civil
liberties is a great proof of our patriotism. This misguided
patriotism is acceptance of despotism. It is
fascism.
The Constitution is
not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is
an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it
come to dominate our lives and interests. — Patrick Henry
Dog Sniffing in the
Green Mountains
Recently, a Vermont
school decided to bring police and their drug-sniffing dogs to its
campus.
The school administration determined this was necessary after reviewing the results
of a student survey. One-fifth of the school's student population said
that drugs could be purchased on its campus. The
decision to sniff the school premises assumes the worst in
students. It brands the students guilty until proven
innocent. Drug-sniffing dogs will not resolve the issue of drug
use and abuse, but will have
long-lasting negative repercussions. Allowing drug-sniffing
dogs into schools does not deal with the
complex issues of supply and demand, and the relationship between the
free enterprise system, its profit motive, and the desire for
people to self-medicate. It does not take into account
society's constant pressures. It ignores the severe, endemic institutional, family and personal stress.
As society more
absurdly narrows the boundaries within which people must live, it redefines
normal
behavior. Not taking drugs of one kind or another is abnormal
behavior as the United States adult population routinely self-medicates.
Normal adults pop pills for every malady imaginable, from headaches and
colds to
obesity, anxiety and depression. Adults pop pills to fall
asleep, stay awake, enhance libido, eat more, eat less, overcome
anxiety, phobias, depression, shyness, enhance their immune
system. Adults consume drugs when they smoke cigarettes,
cigars, and pipes, chew tobacco, drink coffee, cappuccino, tea,
beer, scotch, gin, vodka, bourbon, rum, wine, take aspirin, ibuprofen,
pain medication, eat chocolate. And, of course, the vast
majority of users of illegal drugs (like marijuana, heroin, met amphetamines
and coke) are not teens, but adults.
Pills For Every
Occasion
It is easy to conclude
that the United States is an addicted nation, considering all of the
drugs and the enhancing supplements its people consume. One
can get a "free Viagra Value Card" at
many pharmacies: after filling six prescriptions, the
seventh is free. While kickbacks may be illegal in bars and
pubs, they are part of the way pharmacies do business. There have been
130,000,000 legal
prescriptions for Viagra filled.
Former U.S. Senator Bob Dole tested Viagra
and became an ardent spokesperson for the drug, starring in television commercials for the product. Viagra, a long- acting nitrate,
is a popular
way of attempting to alleviate depression in our society. Viagra celebrated its 6th
anniversary in 2004.
According to Pfizer, the maker of the drug, 30,000,000 men worldwide
have erectile dysfunction.
There are pills
available to supposedly enhance brain function. Buying these
supplements might indicate a need for better brain use, but not a
need for these supplements. As for their
benefits, the product manufacturer stands the most to
gain. The herbal tea and supplements market is huge.
This despite the fact that few very herbal/dietary supplements have
been shown by science to have any beneficial effects, yet they are
made and marketed with no legal requirement to prove content,
safety, or efficacy (See: Food
and Drug Safety: The Concumer Handbook).
Sales for 2004 were over $27,000,000 (Herbalgram).
The market is so big that the pharmaceutical giants have taken notice, not because
of the efficacy of the supplements, but because of the prospects of
grabbing a huge chunk of the market. If you bottle the
pills, people will pop them. If you package an herbal
supplement, people will drink it.
On Tuesday, February 21,
2006, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that members of O Centro
Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal, a small New Mexico religious
congregation, may use a hallucinogenic tea, which contains the illegal
drug known as DMT, as part of their rituals to connect with their God. (Court Allows Church's
Hallucinogenic Tea,
AP). If institutionalized cults, no
matter how small, can use drugs in their religious ceremonies, why
cannot individuals? Surely, a religious belief with one
adherent is just as valid as one with millions. Students
clearly see the hypocrisy when it comes to drugs. They are well aware that adults,
their role models, take various meds while hammering them for doing the same.
War Obsessions
Joe Blankenau and Mark
Leeper, in their article Public School Search Policies and the
"Politics of Sin", (Volume 31 Issue 4 of
the Policy Studies Journal, November 2003), write:
There has been a
significant rise in the number of random drug searches, despite the
principals' observation that these measures neither lessen drug use
nor catch perpetrators...Principals articulate limited concern for
student rights, and students largely accept searches without
resistance.
Blankenau and Leeper
refer to drug searches as "waging the drug war in our nation's
classrooms and hallways." The war goes on
with police dogs roaming the hallways of our schools led by
uniformed and armed officers, often trained by the military.
We are a nation at war with ourselves.
Our society is obsessed
with war. We wage war on just about everything.
We name domestic public policy campaigns as "The war
on...." hunger, poverty, crime, pollution, terror, fat, etc.
In our foreign policy, we wage violent and deadly wars of choice, convenience,
and imperialism. Our schools have long been a battleground in
the war on (some) drugs. Both good and bad tactics have been
used for decades in schools, from 70's "rap sessions", to
"Scared Straight" tours of cons and ex-cons as
motivational speakers, to DARE, to Health classes, to those driver
education movies that dramatize the prior events and then show real
police film footage of the car crashes. The current surveillance
which includes drug-sniffing dogs is yet another tactic in the war
on drugs, which, unlike those previous mentioned, are explicitly not
educational and explicitly not about respecting
students. Quite the contrary.
With each new domestic war waged, there comes
a restructuring of the established order. On the battlefield
of the school, we can expect a shift in the established
academic climate. Will it be toward more resentment and
(hopefully) rebellion as the police state further
encroaches into the school, or toward less resentment as the school
culture sheepily and sleepily assumes the notion that a militarized
school culture is a good thing? Control, discipline, morality,
safety...these are the buzzwords by which fascisms are sold to
society.
And what of the
academic environment? Much emphasis over the past decade has
been placed on not interrupting the academic learning
environment. The argument is that time-on-task is vital for
learning to take place. No longer is it considered good
educational policy to interrupt instruction. Yet police dogs performing
drug searches will do just that. In the student project at the
University of Illinois at Urbana, Surveillance in
Schools: Safety vs. Personal Privacy, Kathy Davis, John Kelsey,
Dia Langellier, Misty Mapes, and Jeff Rosendahl write,
When
drug-sniffing dogs come in to search the lockers, it often
requires that the halls be clear of students. This too can
cause problems. The search must be conducted while students
are in class. Once they see or hear what is going on in the
hallway, their attention will no longer be on the classroom
material but on what is happening in the hall.
The Urbana student project points out
that the
definition of the word "surveillance" is: "close
observation, especially of a suspected person". With police
dogs roaming the school campus and hallways, everyone becomes
a "suspected person". This is necessarily the case,
as the ACLU makes clear on its student rights website.
In response to the question, "Can the school search the entire
student body or an entire class just because they suspect one
student?" the ACLU states,
No.
Since the law says that there must be a reasonable suspicion that
the individual student or students to be searched are violating
school rules, information that some students are using drugs
should not justify a search of everyone in the class, or at a
school football game, or at the prom. Not all courts agree,
however, that there must always be "individualized"
suspicion before a larger group is searched.
The ACLU
makes a point of stressing the following regarding drug-sniffing
dogs,
The
Supreme Court has ruled that a sniff of unattended personal
belongings is not a search. Some lower courts have held that when
a dog is used to sniff the student herself, it is a search that
must be reasonable under all of the circumstances. The ACLU
believes this means that the search must be based on
individualized suspicion. The ACLU has also challenged school
policies that require students to leave belongings in a classroom
so that dogs can be brought in to sniff them. Importantly, the
California Attorney General has issued an opinion saying that such
policies are unconstitutional. No court has yet ruled on this.
Comfortable That
Something Is Being Done
What about sniffing for
tobacco? Dogs can be easily trained to find tobacco. Why
are there no tobacco-sniffing dogs in our school? Tobacco is a
gateway drug. Perhaps, some day, the fantasy will become
reality when drug-detecting dogs are capable of sniffing athletic-enhancing
supplements, alcohol, and anti-depressant medications (prescribed
legally or otherwise). School officials could throw in a canine
or two capable of testing
high concentrations of caffeine, tannic acid, or the ubiquitous depressant:
television viewing. The schools would have to close as there
would be no-one left for the dogs to check. We could then let the canine patrols loose
to check on
the community itself. Faster than one can say, "Are the
dogs sniffing the school hallways?", just about everyone would
be whisked away to private penal institutions
that already profit handsomely from the "just say no to drugs"
industry.
School administrations
project
the illusion that something is being done about drugs in the school.
Drug usage exists, however, not all drug use is a problem, nor is it
a symptom of a problem. To assume so implies that taking drugs
is always, or even usually, a bad thing. Schools should
examine the means by which they determine whether there is, in fact,
a drug problem. To always, or even usually, pathologize drug
use is a habit we have fallen into in the last century. The
fact is that human use of "drugs" — including narcotics,
hallucinogens, stimulants, mood altering substances, wine, caffeine,
cigarettes, mushrooms, ganja, beer, etc., — is as old as
civilization. As a nation, we have become "tough on
crime". When drug-sniffing dogs certify that the school hallways are clear, we
think we know something is finally
being done about the drug problem. We can rest
comfortably that the drug problem has gone away when the dogs sound
the all clear. This is, of course, a delusion.
The debate rages
within our communities about drug searches, including by drug-sniffing police
dogs. Faculty often applaud the introduction of the police and
their dogs into the schools. Militarization of our federal, state, county and
local carabinieri, combined with the supra-constitutional authority
granted by the misnamed PATRIOT Act, have now put into place the
ingredients required for totalitarianism. Apparently loss of liberty matters
little in this age of being homeland secure. Whatever that
means.
If only we could
apply this same toughness onto the members of Congress and the White
House. Most students' drug involvement and history of making poor choices
cannot be expunged
from their personal file. Their fathers and families do not
have massive wealth and political connections of a George W. Bush. I suggest letting
the sniffing dogs loose in the White House, House
of Representatives, and the Senate. They can then sniff the school
administrative
offices. If students
are to be suspects under surveillance, then so too should the
administrators and faculty be.
Drug-sniffing dogs in our schools
will do little to alleviate drug use or abuse. It will foster an atmosphere of increased
surveillance in a society where privacy, trust, and presumed
innocence are becoming historical
artifacts. Many accept this loss of civil
liberties. This is a big mistake. Thurgood Marshall
said, "History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come
in times of urgency...when the scourge is manifest...and the need
for action is great." One can strenuously question
whether there exists a time of urgency within our schools that
warrants drastic action. One cannot, however, question that
the loss of teens' civil liberties in our schools is tragic and
reprehensible. Thurgood Marshall further stated that one of
the goals of terrorism is "getting
governments to show their repressive, true colors." School
administrators should know better. As agents of school
government, they have an obligation not to repress the least
vulnerable among us, our youth. For, if they are successful,
they may find in their latter years that the products of their
schools have learned well and taken all their remaining civil
liberties away.
"How fortunate
for governments that the people they administer don't think."
- Adolf Hitler.
Jozef
Hand-Boniakowski is co-editor and co-publisher of Metaphoria
along with his life partner and wife, JeanneE. He is 30-year
veteran retired teacher and a member of Veterans For Peace. His
writings have appeared in Metaphoria,
After
Downing Street, Buzzflash,
Counterpunch, Thomas
Paine's Corner, Rense.com, Omni
Center, Rutland Herald,
Times Argus, and others.
JeanneE
Hand-Boniakowski is co-editor and co-publisher of Metaphoria
along with her life partner and husband, Jozef Her
writings have appeared Metaphoria,
Quackwatch, The
Quack Files, and others.
© 2006
Jozef
Hand-Boniakowski and JeanneE
Hand-Boniakowski
|