Jenny’s Pennies

Landskrona in southern Sweden will be the the first municipality to randomly drug test 8th and 9th graders. 20 percent of the students will be randomly selected for the testing. The tests will be administered by the school nurse, and the student’s parents or guardian has too consent as well before the test is administered. The student is allowed to say no, but then a letter will be sent home to the parents. That’s how “voluntary” this is. Of course students who say no will be pointed out as potential drug users and/or troublemakers, disrespectful of authority and refusing to buy the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to be afraid of”-rhetoric.

Many people are critical, including the Swedish National Agency for Education. Although they are saying that the tests are not against the law, one of their lawyers asks whether it is really the school who should administer these kinds of tests, and also questions how the tests results will be handled with regards to confidentiality.

You know, drugs are definitely a societal problem which should be taken seriously. But blanket testing, disguised under some false voluntariness, is not the solution. I don’t think treating everyone as potential drug users, cheaters (not the sexual kind), criminals etc. are the way of creating a just, equal and thriving society. But what do I know, I’m just a bleeding-heart, terrorist-loving, Sweden-hating, tree-hugging communist.

Due to budgetary cuts, many schools nowadays do not have school nurses or counselors, or only have them very few hours weekly. In total, the number of adults in schools per student has gone down. And now the school nurse’s time will be clogged up from administering and following up and and filing drug tests. Is this wise use of seriously constrained budgets? I ask, wouldn’t it be better to spend the money on real preventive measures instead? (And by that I don’t mean the ridiculous scare-mongering propaganda that I was subjected to in school, the “if you smoke pot once you will end up a heroin-injecting homeless criminal”-kind, which was so easily debunked.)

I haven’t heard a single word about what kind of support would be given to the student who have given a positive drug test - it’s like this that I wrote about screening for partner violence among pregnant women: when you get the results, exactly what are you going to do with it? Report the student to the police? Kick them out of school? Offer them counseling? Enforce mandatory counseling? No-one has said anything about that. Probably they don’t know.

This is another of those measures which sounds good (making sure kids don’t get caught up in drugs, I’m all for that), but which merely paints over the real problems and doesn’t solve anything in the long run. It seems the preferred way of conducting politics nowadays, and I guess anything else would require quite a revolutionary remake of society. And we can’t have that. But now at least the politicians can pat each others backs and say that they are “tough on drugs”.

(Read more in Swedish: SvD; HD)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Body and Soul, Crime, Education, Health, Sweden, Swedish politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.