While injustices are being served up far too often by the policy making elite, the common people must simply conform.

Recently the Supreme Court approved legislation that makes random drug testing of junior high and high school athletes legal.

This policy not only puts kids at risk of being singled out as a dissident from the norm but gives the government another stepping stone to decrease individual freedom. Granted, most of the school’s random drug testing policies implemented before the ruling are confidential and done only when there is reasonable suspicion. Now the law stipulates any student athlete regardless of suspicion is subject to having their urine monitored.

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Carbondale’s student athletes may be subject to random testing this fall, in turn facing the possibility of being ostracized from social cliques, team sports and generally frowned upon by the community for turning up positive for alcohol, steroids or cocaine. Yes, there is a need to curb drug use among the youth of America but this is also putting completely innocent students with no cause for suspicion in the position to have their urine sampled.

What of false positives and over the counter medicines that trigger positive results from tests. Will those innocent students in our community be given a second chance or immediately be removed from a sports program?

Breaking the community into two sectors, users and non, us and them, is not a valid way to deal with losing the drug war on the front lines. As the government has recognized their efforts have not been effective in stemming the drug flow on the borders of this country, they have begun to turn their efforts inward to the very persons that make up this country and community.

When James Acton, a 12-year-old in the seventh grade in 1991 refused to submit his urine for sampling at his Vernonia, Ore. junior high school, little did he know the school would refuse his right to be a member of the football team.

Parents Wayne and Judy challenged the policy and had a federal appeals court rule that the school’s policy was an unreasonable search barred by the 4th Amendment. In a 6-3 ruling by the Supreme Court on June 26, 1995, the federal appeals court decision was abandoned.

The 4th Amendment reads, the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be

see COYNE, page 11

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