Linn State Admits They Have No Data to Justify Drug Testing Program

A month ago we noted in Drug War Chronicle that Linn State Technical College in Missouri had instituted a broad drug testing policy of all incoming students, the first public institution of higher education in the country to adopt a suspicionless drug testing policy. The ACLU of East Missouri announced it would litigate to block the program, and asked students at Linn State who were opposed to the program to contact them to be plaintiffs.

Evidently they found some, as an article by Timothy Williams at the New York Times this week reports that ACLU has obtained a preliminary injunction blocking the program. Williams interviewed the lawyer for the college, Kent Brown, who admitted the school had no data to justify or motivate the program :

Q. Did graduates have problems with failed drug tests at their jobs? Is that the reason for this?

A. I probably need to answer that this way: I can’t give you specific examples, but it would not surprise me at all if some students encountered difficulties with drug tests after they graduated. The members of our advisory councils for various programs were some of the initiators of this idea and I doubt they would have brought it up if it hadn't been a problem. We don't have any statistics once they graduate. (Emphasis added.)

And if the school has anecdotal information to motivated the policy, they did not share it with their attorney prior to his interviewing with the media -- with The New York Times of all outlets -- a case that had already hit the media four weeks before Williams contacted them.

It begs the question, did decision makers at Linn State review any hard information about drug testing programs and their track record, or the drug testing issue as a whole, before deciding to drug test all their students and charge them $50 for the privilege too? Does anyone doing drug testing review the evidence?