Few people want high school students involved with drugs.  But the mere incantation of the word “drugs”, or the even scarier word, “heroin”, seems to lead otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people to rush to the most simplistic solutions.  In Nassau County, the latest “do it for the children” scare has so shaken the Newsday editorial board that their brains are sadly addled.

In the editorial, A sad choice: dogs v. drugs, Newsday doesn’t bother with the effort to find a solution that might protect the innocent or respect the privacy of students.  They just jump in blind:

More and more, schools are using trained drug-sniffing dogs to examine students’ lockers, cars and book bags. The fear behind this is heroin – the cheap, available drug of choice for this school-age generation. There is demand, too, for dogs who search out gunpowder, and for portable metal-detectors. Fear of gang activity lies behind these searches.

These are sorry times that lead us to invade students’ space in these ways. The searches can create an atmosphere of distrust, but they are often necessary – and even wise.

What about these times are so sorry that they demand a Newspaper to ignore all consequences that turn the school house into the Big House, with dogs roaming the hallways in search of contraband?  If, as the editorial presumes, there is a horrendous drug problem in a school, then the solution is to address the problem, not turn the school into a prison camp and blindly undermine the privacy of all students. 

Sweeping schools also creates a safe haven for some kids who see drugs and weapons in their communities. One of the chief justifications for these searches is to deter kids from bringing that stuff to school.

Can anyone be this is naive?  Since when do dogs and their handlers roaming the hallways make for a safe haven?  Worse still, if the students live in communities where drugs and weapons are rampant, does it somehow fulfill a school administrator’s dream to know that her students are only shooting up or getting shot after school lets out?  As long as it’s not on school grounds, all is forgotten?

Schools that turn up drugs or weapons should make counseling available or require attendance at treatment agencies. The old-fashioned sanction of suspension from school only further ostracizes troubled students.

But to the extent there’s any rationale for this extreme, and unexplained, need for drug dogs in schools, it’s based on the belief that schools are rife with heroin.  So are they or aren’t they?  If no one knows, then where’s the compelling need to turn schools into prisons first?  Is this an example of “just in case” reasoning?  And if schools are rife with drugs, forget the dogs and get to some serious mandatory counseling now.  But if they aren’t, then there is no explanation for such extreme and harmful tactics as turning schools into prisons.  Which is it?

No one wants to live in a police state. But in this case, protecting children means tolerating more adult intrusion.

Protecting children is the mantra of adults too happy to throw away reason, ignore consequences and rush to the most simplistic solution available.  Newsday has fallen into the trap, and makes no pretense of presenting a rational argument in favor of a solution so fundamentally harmful, destructive of civil rights and deleterious to the educational environment that it should only be considered as a last resort, when everything else has been tried and failed. 

Bizarrely, Newsday doesn’t even try to make the case that it’s actually needed, that they know the problem exists and is of such severity that no lesser effort could suffice.  They support the immediate jump into the abyss of elimination of privacy and personal security while still questioning whether there’s a problem that requires the attention of school officials.

Everyone wants to see schools drug and weapon free. Then again, everyone wants to see students in schools that encourage education.  But how to accomplish this is a sensitive question, and one that would do far better by avoiding the knee-jerk reactions evidenced by this editorial.  It’s not enough to incant “children” and “heroin” to justify turning schools into prisons.  And if the feared problems of violence and drug use are that pervasive in the community, dogs in schools aren’t going to help these students anyway. 

Rarely have I seen an editorial so utterly devoid of reasoning, so reactionary and so happy to leap off the ledge of reason without the slightest consideration of the consequences.  Think harder, Newsday.  Do it for the children.