Compensating Behavior and the Drug Testing of High School Athletes

On June 26, 1995, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Vernonia Sc/i. 131st. 47J v. Acton that middle-school and high-school athletes can be required to submit to suspicionless drug tests as a condition of athletic participation (Greenhouse 1995). Although the decision removeda major constitutional roadblockto the adoption of such programs by public schools nationwide, the response was initially tepid: as of January 1996, six months after the ruling, only 1 percent of the country’s 16,000 public high schools had implemented random drug-testing programs. For many schools, the financial barrier of drug testing ($20 to $30 per standard drug screen; $100 per steroid test) proved far harder to surmount than the constitutional barrier (Dohrmann 1996). In the past year, however, the number of schools engaged in drug testing has continued a slow but steady rise. For instance, the high school in Kokomo, Indiana, began subjecting all students who participate in extracurricular activities to random drug testing in April 1996 (Glass 1997: 20), and the city of Oceanside, California, began a drugtesting program for its high-school athletes early in 1997 (Penner 1997). Future improvements in testing technologies that lower costs and increase reliabilitypromise to accelerate the spread of such testing (Renter 1988: 556). Not surprisingly, suspicionless drug testing has come under attack from a number of quarters. Civil libertarians (e.g., Shufler 1996) and newspaper editorialists (e.g., Berkow 1995, Goodwin 1995, Bradley 1995) have assailed the Supreme Court decision and condemned random drug testing of student athletes as an unjustified invasion of