Testing the Limits

Testing High School Students for Drugs May Yield Accurate Stats on Russia’s Drug Problem, but What Will Happen to the Students’ Privacy and to Those Who Get Found Out?
In their war on drugs Russian officials have turned their attention to the classroom, with a nationwide campaign for drug testing during the students’ annual medical exams at high schools and universities. At a press-conference on Friday the director for Russia’s Federal Service for Narcotics Control, Viktor Ivanov, announced that the drug testing program will commence in the coming school year, citing several local initiatives in districts around the country already underway. “This will provide a preventative measure,” he said. “It’s an early diagnosis. In the earlier stages of addiction, treatment is always simpler.”

Ivanov is not the first to suggest instituting regular drug testing in schools. In September of 2009 President Dmitry Medvedev admitted that Russia faces a “threat to its national security” due to widespread addiction to drugs, and stated that obligatory testing for students would act as an important preventative measure. Local initiatives have also pointed to the importance of testing students as an aggressive measure against addiction. “This age group was not chosen by chance,” wrote the Ministry of Education of the Primorsky Territory in a press release. “According to the results of monitoring conducted in 2010, the most likely age for the first use of drugs among students in the district is 13 to 14 years.”
Nonetheless, Ivanov’s definitive statement on the start date for a federal drug testing program has galvanized supporters, including Russia’s Chief Medical Officer Gennady Onishchenko, while raising concerns among critics over the efficacy of testing and the violations of the students’ rights to privacy.
In many local initiatives public support has been overwhelmingly in favor of regular testing for drug use. In Ekaterinburg, the administrative center of the Sverdlovsk Region, the need for obligatory testing is clear to the local residents, said Evgeny Roizman, the president of the foundation for “A City Without Drugs.” “About 90 percent of the population is for compulsory testing for drugs in school, and if their political interests are recognized, then testing will become mandatory,” he said. “Further, testing will help us to better understand what’s happening right now with drug use in schools.”
Despite strong public support even for mandatory testing, local officials have mostly stood by the line that testing will be administered on a strictly voluntary basis. Under this plan, students over 15 years of age have the right to refuse to submit a blood sample, and the parents of younger students have a similar prerogative. Students in the Sverdlovsk Region, who are slated to undergo testing on March 1, have so far overwhelmingly submitted to the new regime, with 62,000 students agreeing to the test and about 3,000 refusing it as of Tuesday morning.
Voluntary testing is an important first step, but it presents a natural paradox as well, because most likely a self-selecting group of “clean” students will undergo drug tests while those at risk will refuse to give blood. One hope among proponents of voluntary testing may be that students will undergo the test because of pressure at home, where a refusal could be interpreted as an automatic admission of guilt.
Yet whether such a law could remain voluntary has also raised suspicion among some critics. “Unfortunately, quite often the voluntary becomes mandatory here,” Lyudmilla Alekseeva, the head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, told Interfax on Friday. Indeed, if a regular drug test is instituted for all students in Russia, it’s difficult to see how such testing could both be effective and remain voluntary, and officials will either have to take a stronger line on making testing mandatory or face providing an expensive but useless service.
Onishchenko has been the administration’s most stalwart supporter of making testing mandatory, and responded strongly to criticism that drug testing would violate personal rights. “For some reason no one asks these questions when students are forcibly put on the needle, here nobody sees a violation of human rights,” he told Interfax on Friday. “But when we want to expose drug addiction earlier in order to help a person, cynical talk about violating human rights pops up. What, are we going to keep talking for 15 years about voluntary and involuntary testing? What does voluntary testing mean? We’re risking losing people. They need to be stopped, taken off the needle and cured."
Despite the current drive for testing, others have noted that many of the details of the testing policy remain hazy. “Let’s say everyone’s been tested, and we’ve dealt with any issues about violating the children’s rights. What happens next?” asked Irina Birukhova, a teacher at a high school in Vladimir. “We’re not guaranteeing 100 percent tolerance, and as we know the punishment for drug use can be quite harsh. That is what’s most worrisome for me.” Before the beginning of the next school year, the authorities will have to abandon the stage and put in the work to hammer out the details of the new initiative.

Posted in: SOCIAL MEDIA