Drug Testing: Discussion questions for students in schools and universities

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Drug Testing: Discussion questions for students in schools and universities

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

January 2, 2026

Check your schedules, people. This is Drug War 101. Drug haters, you're in the wrong classroom. We are actually going to use our brains in here today, thank you very much.

Did you see that last guy that popped his head in the doorway and then snarled? I think he was looking for an advanced class in Drug Law Enforcement. SWAT TEAM 403: Tips on dealing with recalcitrant grandmothers and stubborn children. Of course, that should be a simple enough class: you deal with them like everybody else who commits the crime of being near a suspected drug dealer: you tell them to get down on the floor now or ELSE? Am I right? That's the American way, after all. So what if they don't like being scared to death; they should have thought of that before they decided to associate with riffraff. Imagine, living in the same home as a guy who thinks that human beings have a right to take care of their own psychological health as they see fit. The very idea! These people had it coming to them!

All right, then, brains in the full upright position, guys. Today we are going to be discussing drug testing. Who can tell me why drug testing is wrong?

STUDENT: But why is it wrong to ensure that employees are not impaired?

Aha! Yes, thank you, Mister...

STUDENT: Williams.

Thank you, Mister Williams. This is the whole point. There is, indeed, nothing wrong with ensuring that workers are not impaired, but that is not what drug testing is about these days. Drug testing is all about removing people from the workforce should their digestive system be found to contain a trace of any outlawed substance. That is a far cry from checking for impairment.

STUDENT: Fair enough.

Alas, fairness has nothing to do with it, grasshopper. Those who test positive are essentially removed from the American workforce without trial -- indeed, without even having had charges preferred against them. They are just like Josef K. in Kafka's Trial who cannot defend himself because he is never charged with a specific crime.

There is no due process for such people because there is no process at all. Drug testing is thus just the extrajudicial enforcement of the Christian Science lifestyle, Christian Science being the drug-hating religion founded by Mary Baker-Eddy ¹.

But what do you guys think about these things? Let's have a ten-minute discussion in groups of five. In order to focus your conversations, I ask you to consider the following provocative apothegm as it relates to this topic:

"In America today, you are judged, not by the color of your skin, but by the content of your digestive system."

And discuss!

[lively and pertinent discussions ensue, interspersed with laughter and an occasional fervent declamation]

TEN MINUTES LATER

Wow! Those were some very lively and pertinent discussions! And I like the way that they were interspersed from time to time with laughter and the occasional fervent declamation: it shows that you guys really take this stuff to heart.

STUDENT: But why is the injustice of drug testing not obvious to everybody?

Why, indeed. Well, the answer is that the Drug War has convinced Americans of the enormous lie that drugs are evil without regard for context, and once we accept that postulate, then scarcely any law or social policy can be too extreme for eradicating that supposed plague. If drugs are pure evil, we have a moral duty to stomp them out. This is what motivated the Church during the Inquisition: yes, the auto-da-fé was an extreme measure, but then the Christians of the time felt that they were up against an extreme enemy.

Sealed plastic bottle containing urine sample with label reading: 'To test for plant meds of which politicians disapprove' — The Land of the Free and the Home of the Thoroughly Humiliated Employee

STUDENT: It seems to me like drug testing is all about enforcing a certain way of "being in the world," a la Heidegger ².

STUDENT 2: Yeah, a way of being in the world that passes muster with our pharmacologically clueless Congress.

STUDENT 3: A beer-bellied and belligerent way of being in the world, if you ask me.

Good points, all around! In fact, do you know what? I call discussion time again!

[students murmuring]

No, this is important. Work with me here. I call another ten-minute discussion period so you can debate the following scenario.

What if... Oh, you're gonna love this. What if... we were to develop a test that could figure out if anybody had imbibed alcohol within the last month? Okay? And what if drug tests were set up to flag workers who had partaken of alcohol at any time in the past 30 days?

And discuss!

[more lively and pertinent discussions ensue, complete with laughter, spirited asseverations... the works]

TEN MINUTES LATER

Funny, right? And you guys are laughing advisedly. I mean, what is this job-seeking prohibitionist gonna say to us when he tests positive for alcohol? "Yes, but I wasn't using alcohol on the JOB"? To which we would smugly reply, scarcely able to conceal our triumphant sense of justifiable Schadenfreude: "Yes, but neither was Joe Blow using cocaine on the job and yet you removed him from the workforce merely because he had a trace of that substance in his digestive system!"

As Emeril Lagasse would say, "Bam!" Case closed.

What else can the drinker say? "Yes, but alcohol is harmless"? To which we would smugly reply: "Yes, alcohol harmlessly kills 178,000 a year in America alone ³, whereas cocaine is much more rarely misused ⁴. Moreover, its re-legalization would put an end to most cases of chronic depression around the globe ⁵!"

Gavel behind plaque that reads: 'Sharia Law." Caption below: Traveling? Know your Sharia law! Music is fiercely criminalized in Taliban-controlled territory. Plants are ruthless criminalized in territories controlled by Drug Warriors. — Americans shiver at the thought of Sharia law, never realizing that they themselves live under just such restrictions with regard to psychoactive medicines.

But I am getting ahead of myself, class. These topics will be covered in future classes on how the Drug War is all about the outlawing of godsend medicines. We have to sort of work our way up to talking about such things in light of the brainwashing that you've all undergone as Americans -- first by having been shielded from all positive stories about drug use since childhood, and second by having been subjected to all sorts of implicit and explicit drug demonization in TV, movies, magazines and books, etc. If you don't believe me, just enter your local library and ask the librarian to show you books about the benefits of cocaine or the benefits of opium. It is an American article of faith that no such benefits can exist, and you will find that our authors have been in no hurry to gainsay that dictum. You'll find plenty of books about abuse of such drugs, but almost nothing about safe and positive uses -- again, because it is an article of faith in America that we can never use drugs safely, that we are, in fact, eternal children when it comes to drugs.

STUDENT: You say that we have been subjected to the implicit demonization of drugs in movies and such. To what do you refer, exactly?

Good question, Miss...

STUDENT: Pakal.

Good question, Miss Pakal. Of course, we all know explicit drug bashing when we see it, like in the movie "Running with the Devil," in which the DEA agents hang suspected drug dealers from meat hooks and, when all else fails, shoot them at point-blank range when they are unarmed ⁶. But there are also movies that seemingly have nothing to do with drugs whatsoever but which contain, nonetheless, what we might call "throwaway lines" that serve to demonize drugs as a matter of course ⁷. Consider a horror movie with a bunch of young people in a haunted house. One of them does something stupid, and another one responds: "You must be on drugs or something!" You might say that's a harmless enough thing to say, but it helps validate the impression that Americans already have thanks to censorship that drugs have no benefits and can only make things worse. It validates the lie, in other words, that "drugs" is a meaningful and objective category, when the only thing that all drugs have in common is the fact that they are hated by demagogue politicians.

In some ways, these throwaway lines do more damage than the Gestapo tactics employed by DEA agents in movies that are specifically meant to be about drugs. At least we can see what the producers are up to in the case of drug-bashing movies: there is nothing up their sleeves. We can clearly see the points that they are trying to make about drugs, no matter how ill-informed those points may be and no matter how alarming their anti-democratic consequences and implications. These throwaway lines, on the other hand, operate below the level of consciousness, they bypass the logical mind. They tell us in effect that drug-hating is a normal predilection for Americans, that drugs are evil, and that this verdict is no longer even up for debate. It is rather the baseline understanding with which we live our lives and from which we deduce all other drug-related "truths." We thus are taught the lesson, as it were through a kind of subconscious peer pressure, that a normal person is one who holds such views. And what's the result of this stealth indoctrination? We come away from such movies less tempted than ever to question the negative view of drugs that we have been taught since childhood.

To pee or not to pee

Man in public bathroom urinating in urinal, with a sign overhead reading: PLANT MED DETECTED... URINAL 2... Police officer approaches on left — America: where you are judged, not by the color of your skin, but by the content of your digestive system.

STUDENT: But what can we do if an employer demands that we take a urine test?

Good question. Unfortunately, it is one that each person has to answer for themselves. It is really the age-old question of "To what extent should I, as a freedom-loving person, go along with a demonstrably unjust policy?"

I think it also depends on exactly how unjust you consider the policy to be. I have always been surprised that more Americans do not protest drug testing from the standpoint of simple human dignity alone: just imagine, what's going on here. A beer-swilling (and possibly drug-using) cadre of corporate suits tells you to urinate for them so that they can search your bodily fluids for substances of which politicians disapprove. Why should they themselves not be required at very least to urinate for their employees as an act of good faith! You would think that labor unions would be demanding that companies refrain from such a humiliating and phenomenally invasive practice.

But no one speaks up on behalf of the human dignity of the worker. It's almost as if the real reason for indiscriminate drug testing is to put workers in their place, to humiliate them, to show them that their employers are in control, thank them very much. It is surely no coincidence that most of the original advocates for indiscriminate drug testing were fiercely anti-union, including Ronald Reagan, of course, who fired 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981 and abolished the union that represented them shortly before calling on big business to humiliate the workforce with the crass indignity of drug testing..

And yet nothing in the world could be more antithetical to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution and in particular to the Fourth Amendment of that Constitution than indiscriminate drug testing, than this fishing expedition into our most intimate human biology. But then Reagan never cared much for the Bill of Rights. That's why he sent his DEA to Monticello as a sort of posthumous coup against Thomas Jefferson, to confiscate the Founding Father's poppy plants in violation of everything that he stood for as a statesman. And yet most Americans, uneducated in the anti-democratic perfidy of the Drug Warriors, do not consider drug testing to be a major dilemma in their lives. Few even get around to asking the question: "To pee or not to pee?" Nor do they seem to be affronted by the invasive and unreasonable nature of the policy. They may think of these things as silly and overreaching, but they do not feel particularly affected by them. They are personally satisfied with their own drugs -- with their liquor and maybe with a little marijuana -- but they have learned to be a good boy or girl with respect to all other drugs and to foreswear the endless list of alternative psychoactive substances that have been placed off-limits by our pharmacologically clueless politicians. They fail, of course, to realize the following simple fact: that when we as Americans outlaw a drug to "save" one demographic, we outlaw that drug for every demographic in the entire world.

As Thomas Szasz wrote in Our Right to Drugs:

"The laws that deny healthy people 'recreational' drugs also deny sick people 'therapeutic' drugs." ⁸

As if drug prohibition were about saving anybody in the first place! If Drug Warriors really thought that prohibition was a tool for saving lives, they would demand the immediate prohibition of guns -- which kill close to 50,000 people a year in America alone -- and half of those are suicides, most of which would have been avoided had we not outlawed cocaine, which Sigmund Freud himself knew to be a virtual cure for depression ⁹.

But there you guys go again, getting me started on advanced topics.

[bell rings]

Homework assignment, people! A thousand words on the topic "To Pee or Not to Pee?" Let me know how you confront this dilemma while living under drug-war sharia in the intolerant Christian Science Republic of America!

Drug Testing

Key Takeaways:

Drug testing is not about checking for impairment; it is about flagging users who commit the modern crime of self-medication.
Drug War is all about outlawing godsend medicines whose re-legalization would be a threat to the medical industry.
Modern movies demonize drugs by implication with throwaway lines that register subconsciously in the viewer.
No one speaks up for the dignity of the worker when it comes to indiscriminate drug testing.
Reagan ordered the DEA to confiscate the poppy plants of Thomas Jefferson in a kind of posthumous coup against Jeffersonian freedoms.
If drug warriors were really interested in safety, they would outlaw gun use first and foremost.

Notes for essay entitled Drug Testing: Discussion questions for students in schools and universities:

1: Christian Science is the religion of Mary Baker Eddy, who believed that drug use was wrong because all problems, mental and physical, were to be solved by praying to Jesus Christ. (up)
2: “Being-In-The-World.” n.d. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262540568/being-in-the-world/. (up)
3: CDC. 2024. “Facts About U.S. Deaths from Excessive Alcohol Use.” Alcohol Use. July 8, 2024. https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/facts-stats/?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/features/excessive-alcohol-deaths.html. (up)
4: Cocaine is a Blessing, not a Curse DWP (up)
5: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)
6: Running with the DEA -- er, I mean the Devil DWP (up)
7: How Modern Movies Brainwash Americans about Drugs DWP (up)
8: Szasz, Thomas. 1992. Our Right to Drugs. Praeger. (up)
9: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)

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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

New article in Scientific American: "New hope for pain relief," that ignores the fact that we have outlawed the time-honored panacea. Scientists want a drug that won't run the risk of inspiring us.

If drug war logic made sense, we would outlaw endless things in addition to drugs. Because the drug war says that it's all worth it if we can save just one life -- which is generally the life of a white suburban young person, btw.

Addiction thrives BECAUSE of prohibition, which limits drug choice and discourages education about psychoactive substances and how to use them wisely.

All drugs have positive uses. It's absurd to prohibit them because one demographic might misuse them.

The DEA should be tried for crimes against humanity. They have been lying about drugs for 50 years and running interference between human beings and Mother Nature in violation of natural law, depriving us of countless potential and known godsends in order to create more DEA jobs.

The 1932 movie "Scarface" starts with on-screen text calling for a crackdown on armed gangs in America. There is no mention of the fact that a decade's worth of Prohibition had created those gangs in the first place.

The drug war controls the very way that we are allowed to see the world. The Drug War is thus a meta-injustice, not just a handful of bad legal statutes.

Science knows nothing of the human spirit and of the hopes and dreams of humankind. Science cannot tell us whether a given drug risk is worthwhile given the human need for creativity and passion in their life. Science has no expertise in making such philosophical judgements.

We need to start thinking of drug-related deaths like we do about car accidents: They're terrible, and yet they should move us to make driving safer, not to outlaw driving. To think otherwise is to swallow the drug war lie that "drugs" can have no positive uses.

Getting off some drugs could actually be fun and instructive, by using a variety of other drugs to keep one's mind off the withdrawal process. But America believes that getting off a drug should be a big moral battle.

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Unless otherwise indicated, no AI is used in the creation of site content. These essays represent the original ideas of their author and not the ideas that the author SHOULD have based on an algorithmic parsing of existing data. For more on this subject, consider the AI-related viewpoints to which the author subscribes as delineated in the New York Times opinion piece entitled "What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity" by Rebecca Winthrop of the Brookings Institution.

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Drug Testing: Discussion questions for students in schools and universities

To pee or not to pee

Drug Testing

Key Takeaways:

Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US

Break the ice with a sledgehammer: place this book on your coffee table.

Diary of a Drug Fiend