Drug Testing Your Children

Should you drug test your teenage children? The answer is No, because it will only prove what you already know.

If you suspect they are smoking marijuana or using ecstasy or OxyContin or Vicodin at parties and clubs, then you should assume you are right. Why drive yourself crazy with worry? Then move on to the next step: patiently working through it and hoping nothing disastrous occurs in the mean time. Some parents may resort to more drastic measures but for most parents it doesn’t hurt sometimes to take a step back and see this as a teenage rite of passage.

The numbers are quite staggering though. The entire country is awash in drugs, both prescription and street, and the kids aren’t the worst offenders by any means:

1. The drug dealers of today are the kids in your kid’s classroom, not shadowy street figures.
2. The most at-risk generation from drug abuse may well be the 35-55 year-olds, not teenagers, judging by addiction and mortality rates.
3. Teens prefer marijuana to slow down (more boys) or they take prescription pills to speed up (more girls). Ask yourself why that is.
4. The justification for much of the pill use by all generations is pain remediation. Isn’t this a prescription for drug addiction and self-indulgence?
5. Most kids have access to drugs either through parents’ medicine cabinets or through their friends.
6. Teens see life in LA as boring. The best solution is for them to achieve euphoria through spiritual or intellectual growth that answers their questions and that means honest, nimble adults; exposure to radical eye-opening ideas and community values that protect without being simplistically judgmental.

One route not to take… When La Crescenta High School recently made drug-testing voluntary, only 16% of the kids agreed to be tested and that seems like a good estimate for the percentage of kids who aren’t trying one drug or another (most of them were freshmen). But the entire exercise wasn’t really about outing kids; it was about “facilitating conversations between families and their children” (LA Times), which sounds OK, but why are schools getting involved in this? Some parents rightly feel overwhelmed at times but in the end this is the responsibility of parents and teens, not the schools.