Secondary School

The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday in Safford Unified School District #1 v. Redding, a case that originated in a school administrator's decision to subject then 13-year-old Savannah Redding to a strip search after another student said she had obtained prescription-strength Ibuprofen tablets from her.

US Supreme Court

Redding was escorted to the principal's office, and Redding's backpack and outer clothes were searched, but no pills were found. She was then told to remove her outer clothing in front of the school nurse and an administrative assistant, both female. Standing in her underwear, she was ordered to pull out her bra and underwear to allow any hidden pills to fall free. None did.

Redding and her parents then sued the school district for violating her constitutional right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. Redding won in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, and the school district appealed to the Supreme Court.

The justices' questions during oral arguments Tuesday suggested that, as they sought to find a balance between student privacy and public school safety, they were tilting toward the latter. They appeared inclined to give school administrators broad authority to do what is necessary to protect kids from drugs.

That's what attorneys for the school district argued. "Searching any place where she might be reasonably hiding that contraband was constitutionally permissible" because the school district was acting as guardian, not law enforcement, said Matthew Wright, counsel for the district. "It's not like a criminal issue where they're trying to prosecute. This is a case where they're trying to protect," Wright said. "It is best for this Court to defer to their judgment... and not second-guess those rules."

Justice David Souter, noting that the drug at issue was Ibuprofen, interjected that, "At some point, this gets silly."

Still, Souter also remarked that it could have been a more dangerous drug, and the consequences of not acting could be tragic: "My thought process is, I would rather have the kid embarrassed by a strip search, if we can't find anything short of that, than to have some other kids dead because the stuff is distributed at lunchtime and things go awry."

Justice Antonin Scalia pressed Wright about whether a body cavity search would be permissible. While Wright tried to dance around that question, saying body cavity searches were not done because school officials were not trained to do them, Scalia kept pressing. In the end, Wright conceded that "I could see that result."

Despite concerns about how far school administrators could go in searching for drugs, the justices seemed even more concerned about more dangerous drugs. The justices repeatedly asked hypothetical questions about what if it had been heroin or methamphetamine instead of Ibuprofen.

When it came time for Redding's side of the case to be argued, a Justice Department attorney took the lead. "We believe that without some particularized suspicion or some specific indication that this, the location, was a likely one to contain the drugs, that this search was excessively intrusive," said attorney David O'Neil. "And this is not a new standard."

"We agree with the federal government that before conducting an intrusive strip search a school needs to have location-specific information," argued Adam Wolf of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project. "And while this case can begin and end with that well-accepted proposition, it's also important to recognize that a school needs greater -- a greater degree of suspicion to conduct a strip search than to conduct an ordinary backpack search. This search violated the clearly established point that in order to conduct an intrusive search of one's body, the searching official needs to at least reasonably believe that the object is located underneath the undergarments. The Fourth Amendment does not account -- it does not countenance the rummaging on or around a 13-year-old girl's naked body."

Justice Stephen Breyer tried to get Wolf to elaborate on "how bad" such searches really were, noting that students often changed clothes at school for gym class, but that only inspired Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman on the court, to intervene. "It wasn't just that they were stripped to their underwear," she said incredulously, referring to Redding and another girl similarly searched at the school. "They were asked to shake their bra out, to stretch the top of their pants and shake that out."

While the justices were weighing constitutional rights and student safety, youth rights advocates had little trouble sorting out the issues. "Strip searching eighth graders is way over the line," said Amber Langston, eastern region outreach director for Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP). "This kind of thing is a horrid example of the failure of our drug search policies in public schools. They said they were trying to protect the children, but who was protecting Savannah Redding from the humiliation inflicted on her by school officials?"

Students deserve the same constitutional rights as anyone else, said youth sociologist and Youth Facts founder Michael Males. And school districts should be making better choices, he added.

"Students should only be detained or searched under the same rules applied to adults," Males said. "If authorities have probable cause to suspect illegal behavior that would satisfy standards of reasonable suspicion, they can detain and search suspects. School strip searches require a very high level of probable cause, yet they typically seem based on gossip."

Males called the Redding case "particularly bizarre," noting that it only involved Ibuprofen. "School officials didn't seem interested in searching lockers, desks, or anywhere except inside the girl's underwear," he noted. "These kinds of traumatic cases are, again, why I keep arguing against raising hysteria about teenage drug use."

"Adults inspecting children's private parts is something we should be very wary of," said SSDP's Langston. "This was all over prescription-strength Ibuprofen, there was no evidence Savannah even had it except for the word of another student who was in trouble herself. If the Supreme Court allows this to stand, we will have given too much power to school officials to conduct such searches."

It's not just students but the school districts themselves that suffer from overbroad search policies, Males said. "These types of school searches have wound up costing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in legal costs and, to my knowledge, virtually never find anything, which raises questions of why administrators are allocating scarce education resources to them."

The Supreme Court will decide the case later this summer. All indications are it will reverse the appeals court and uphold this expansion of school administrators' authority to do "whatever it takes" to protect students from drugs.

The US Supreme Court agreed last Friday to review the case of a 13-year-old honor student who was subjected to a strip search by school officials looking for prescription-strength Ibuprofen. In doing so, it will once again revisit the contentious topic of just how far school officials can go in performing anti-drug searches that would be considered unconstitutional if conducted outside the school setting.

US Supreme Court

Redding's mother filed a lawsuit challenging the strip search as unconstitutional and seeking damages from the school district. A trial judge dismissed the lawsuit against school officials, ruling that they were immune from suit. A three-judge panel of the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, but was overturned in a 6-5 vote by the full court, which ruled that the suit could go forward against the assistant principal who ordered the search.

The 9th Circuit majority was scathing in its opinion. "It does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude," Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw wrote for the majority, quoting a decision in another case. "More than that: it is a violation of any known principle of human dignity."

But in his dissent, Judge Michael Daly Hawkins said that while the case was "a close call" given the "humiliation and degradation" endured by Redding, school officials were "not unreasonable" in ordering the search. "I do not think it was unreasonable for school officials, acting in good faith, to conduct the search in an effort to obviate a potential threat to the health and safety of their students. I would find this search constitutional," he wrote, "and would certainly forgive the Safford officials' mistake as reasonable."

Now, the Supreme Court must decide two questions: "Whether the Fourth Amendment prohibits school officials from conducting a search of a student suspected of possessing and distributing prescription drugs, and whether the 9th Circuit departed from established principles of qualified immunity in holding that a public school administrator may be liable in a damages lawsuit for conducting a search of a student."

The case is Redding v. Safford Unified School District #1, or, as it is now known with the school district appealing, Safford Unified School District v. Redding.

Despite spending more than $1 billion between 1999 and 2004, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP -- the drug czar's office) National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign has failed to demonstrate any measurable positive effects -- and it some cases, it may even have made youths more likely to use drugs, a new study has found.

John Walters

The findings come from a congressionally-mandated study conducted by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communication. The researchers conducted four rounds of interviews conducted between 1999 and 2004, each involving about 5,000 to 8,000 youths between the ages of 9 and 18 years. The study will be published in the December edition of the American Journal of Public Health.

"The evidence does not support a claim that the campaign produced anti-marijuana effects," concluded the authors, led by Professor Robert Hornik. "There is little evidence for a contemporaneous association between exposure to anti-drug advertising and any of the outcomes... Non-users who reported more exposure to anti-drug messages were no more likely to express anti-drug beliefs than were youths who were less exposed," they wrote.

"Despite extensive funding, governmental agency support, the employment of professional advertising and public relations firms, and consultation with subject-matter experts, the evidence from the evaluation suggests that the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign had no favorable effects on youths' behavior and that it may even have had an unintended and undesirable effect on drug cognitions and use," the report said.

The authors found that the anti-drug ads may have inadvertently suggested to youth that other kids were doing drugs. That could have had pushed more kids to try drugs, they suggested.

"Youths who saw the campaign ads took from them the message that their peers were using marijuana," the report found. "In turn, those who came to believe that their peers were using marijuana were more likely to initiate use themselves."

While the anti-drug message may have been muddled, the ads were seen. Overall, 94% of the youths interviewed reported seeing one or more ads a week, with an average frequency of two or three a week.

Still, teen marijuana use is down, declining by 40% between 1997, before the campaign began, and 2007, according to the annual Monitoring the Future surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders.

In an interview with ABC News last week, lead author Hornik said that the reported decline in marijuana use "could be due to lots of influences, not just the campaign." He said he had gone into the study expecting positive results, "but we couldn't find 'em."

This would appear to be a program ripe for the chopping block when Congress returns next year. After all, we are in for a time when we can't afford to be paying for unproven programs.

The latest annual Monitoring the Future survey of teen drug use was released Tuesday. It showed a continuing gradual decline in overall teen drug use, thanks largely to reduced marijuana and methamphetamine use rates, but a rebound in ecstasy use and increasing popularity of prescription pain relievers. While the White House and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) lauded the findings as validating their anti-drug strategy, that position had plenty of critics.

George Bush with drug czar Walters and NIDA chief Nora Volkow

According to the survey, the proportion of 8th graders using any illicit drug at least once in the past year was 13.2%, down from 14.8% in 2006. Tenth- and 12th-graders reported annual prevalence rates of 28.1% and 35.9%, respectively, both down less than one percentage point from the previous year. Only the reported decrease among 8th-graders was statistically significant.

Among the drugs whose use decreased in the past year were marijuana, amphetamines, methamphetamines, Ritalin, and what MTF referred to as "crystal methamphetamine," or smokable meth, or ice. Pot remains the most popular of all illicit drugs, used within the past year by 10% of 8th-graders, 25% of 10th-graders, and 32% of 12th-graders, but its use among 8th-graders declined a statistically significant 1.4% compared to 2006. Tenth-graders showed a tiny decline, while use remained steady among 12th-graders.

According to MTF, amphetamine use peaked in the mid-1990s and has declined steadily ever since, while crystal meth reached its lowest use levels since 1992 this year. Eight percent of seniors reported using amphetamines in 2007, while 1.6% reported using crystal. Ritalin, a prescription amphetamine used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, has seen its use decline gradually since first being measured in 2001. This year, between 2% and 4% of students surveyed reported using it outside medical supervision. Methamphetamine use also continues a slow decline, dropping by about two-thirds in all grades since it was first measured in 1999. Less than 2% of students reported using meth in the past year.

"Because this drug has such great potential for abuse and dependence, we are encouraged to see its popularity wane among teenagers," Johnston said.

But while pot and amphetamine use were down, a number of other drugs held steady, including cocaine, crack cocaine, LSD, other hallucinogens, heroin, other narcotics, Oxycontin specifically, Vicodin specifically, sedatives, and tranquilizers. Fewer than 5% of seniors reported using cocaine or psychedelics, fewer than 2% reported using crack or LSD, and fewer than 1% reported using heroin.

Some 6% of seniors reported using sedatives, and the same number reported using tranquilizers, while 9% reported using narcotics other than heroin. Five percent used Oxycontin, a slight, but statistically insignificant increase since it was first measured in 2002, and 10% of seniors reported using Vicodin. For most of these drugs, use levels are hovering at or near recent peaks.

The one drug showing an increase in use is ecstasy, with 4.5% of seniors reporting using it this year, up from 4.1% last year. But that is still only half the use level reported in 2001, the highest year since reporting started on the drug in 1995.

"These prevalence rates are not very high yet but there is evidence here of this drug beginning to make a comeback," Johnston said. "Young people are coming to see its use as less dangerous than did their predecessors as recently as 2004, and that is a warning signal that the increase in use may continue."

MTF and the Bush administration repeatedly compared this year's figures to those in 1996, when teen drug use was at a recent peak. That made for some impressive claims, such as MTF's that annual prevalence among 8th-graders "was 24% in 1996 but has fallen to 13% by 2007, a drop of nearly half." But the figures are much less impressive when compared to 1991, the first year listed in the MTF survey tables. For all three grades, drug use levels were higher this year than then.

Still, MTF, the president, and his drug czar all saw the glass half full. "The cumulative declines since recent peak levels of drug involvement in the mid-1990s are quite substantial, especially among the youngest students," said University of Michigan Distinguished Research Scientist Lloyd Johnston, the principal investigator of the MTF study.

"The most encouraging statistic relates to the use of methamphetamine, which has plummeted by an impressive 64 percent since 2001," President Bush said. "One exception to this trend is a rise in the abuse of certain prescription painkillers," he added. "This is troubling, and we're going to continue to confront the challenge, and the overall direction is hopeful."

Walters and ONDCP also put the best face possible on the numbers. The agency's web site now boasts a web page touting the findings as vindicating the anti-drug strategy and featuring a series of charts showing drug use declines.

But there were plenty of skeptics. "While it is certainly good news that teen use of illegal drugs appears to be falling, almost this entire decline is because fewer teens are using marijuana," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance. "Teen use of hard drugs like cocaine and heroin has remained steady, and illegal use of many prescription drugs is increasing. The Bush Administration needs to look at the whole picture of students' behaviors and advance pragmatic strategies that hold the health, safety and well being of young people as the bottom line."

While drug use can be problematic, said Piper, responding to it with arrests is not the answer. "Drug abuse and the problems associated with drug addiction can be difficult to recover from but students may never recover from arrest and imprisonment for drug law violations, which generally mean the permanent loss of eligibility for federal student financial aid and serious impediments to employment. The number of people who use illegal drugs fluctuates from year to year, regardless of what the government does. What doesn't change is many Americans' lack of access to effective drug treatment."

The latest numbers reveal "disturbing trends," said the Marijuana Policy Project."This new survey documents the complete, utter failure of current government policies on marijuana," said Aaron Houston, the group's director of government relations, citing higher use levels for most drugs compared to 15 years ago.

Perhaps most disturbing, Houston noted, are misunderstandings regarding the dangers of drugs shown in this survey, particularly among the youngest teens surveyed. For example, 50.2% of 8th-graders saw "great risk" in smoking marijuana occasionally -- more than saw great risk in trying crack or powder cocaine, trying LSD, or in drinking nearly every day. Twelfth graders were more likely to disapprove of occasional marijuana use than of binge drinking (having five or more drinks at one sitting) once or twice every weekend.

"Drug czar John Walters touts minor, short-term improvements, but deliberately ignores the big picture," Houston said. "Over the long haul, teen drug use is up, not down. As a parent, I don't want any kids smoking marijuana. It's truly scary that the White House has convinced millions of teens that drugs that can literally kill them are safer than marijuana. We're pursuing policies whose costs will be paid in lives."

Appalachian State University criminal justice and criminology professor Matthew Robinson, coauthor of "Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics," a work highly critical of ONDCP's manipulation of data, also had some choice words for the drug czar. "The recent claims by ONDCP with regard to the 2007 MTF study are misleading and do not tell the whole story about youth drug use in America," he said.

"First, ONDCP's online summary of the MTF features a very short-term focus from 2001 to 2007," Robinson noted. "As in its annual strategy reports, ONDCP downplays long-term drug use trends. In fact, the ONDCP website depicts only four figures, all showing declines. ONDCP does acknowledge increases in some drugs (e.g. Oxycontin), but it does not depict these increases in figures. Instead, as in its Strategy reports, ONDCP highlights drugs like meth and steroids," he said.

"Second, some of ONDCP's claims are misleading. For example, it says Ecstasy use is down 54% since 2001, when in reality it is essentially unchanged since 1996. Since Ecstasy use increased from 1998 to 2001, the long term trend is unchanged."

Even ONDCP's own materials show it is failing to accomplish its mission, Robinson noted. "ONDCP offers a slideshow on its website which summarizes some of the main findings from MTF. The slideshow proves that the drug war has not been effective at reducing drug use among young people over the long term. This is important because ONDCP's Performance Measures of Effectiveness demonstrate that ONDCP intends to consistently reduce drug use, something it has simply not done," he pointed out.

And while some drugs, such as LSD and marijuana showed decreases, Robinson said, more potentially harmful drug use is increasing. "The use of prescription drugs is consistently up among 12th-graders since 1991. While other drugs are down (e.g., LSD), this raises the possibility that young people have not stopped using drugs but rather have just switched to drugs that are lying around in their parents' homes. Ironically, these prescription drugs are more addictive and potentially dangerous to young people. "

Robinson also scolded ONDCP for taking credit even for reductions in alcohol and tobacco use, noting that the office claims its fight against illicit drugs causes such decreases. "Of course, ONDCP offers no evidence that reductions in alcohol use and tobacco use among young people have anything to do with the drug war, and that is because they don't have any," Robinson said. "In fact, the most consistent declines in drug use of all drugs depicted in the slideshow are for tobacco, a drug against which we are not waging a war; instead we are using honest educational campaigns combined with efforts to restrict legitimate businesses from selling tobacco products to kids. It is dishonest and wrong for ONDCP to take credit for these declines. "

The bottom line, said Robinson, is that after forty years of modern drug war, illicit drug use trends are virtually unchanged. "Drugs are just as available now as they were in 1992, in spite of increasing spending every year on the supply side portion of the drug war. In other words, this is just further proof that ONDCP is failing to meet its drug war goals of reducing use and availability of drugs," Robinson charged. "The president of the United States says the war on drugs is fought against an 'unrelenting evil that ruins families, endangers neighborhoods, and stalks our children.' If this is true, ONDCP's drug war is failing to keep this evil at bay. In spite of the spin, its own data prove it."

Come back the same time next year for the next episode of "Spinning MTF."