The Drug Czar's blog was very excited [3] on Friday. Why? Because a school in Florida drug tested 120 students and all of them passed!
"It worked out very positively," [the principal] said this afternoon. "We did not have a single student test positive, out of 120 students we tested."Admittedly, a random sample of 120 students testing negative for drugs is a surprising result. So surprising, in fact, that one begins to wonder how the hell it happened. Well the answer is simple: according to Tampa Bay Online, they used saliva tests, which are practically useless.
Random meant random, she said. Tests were done unannounced at different times during different days of the week. Some students were tested more than once, just because of the randomness of it all, she said. [Tampa Bay Online [4]]
Via wikipedia [5], here are the estimated detection times for saliva drug testing:
- Marijuana [6] and hashish [7] (THC [8]): An hour after ingestion, and up to 24 hours depending on use.
- Cocaine [9] (including crack [10]): From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days.
- Opiates [11]: From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days
- Methamphetamine [12] and ecstasy [13] (MDMA, "crank," "ice"): From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days.
- Benzodiazepines [14]: From time of ingestion up to 2 to 3 days
So, basically, all 120 of these students could have been smoking hash and crack all night on Friday and still passed their drug tests on Monday when they got to school. I'm not saying that's what happened. I'm just saying that testing students' saliva doesn't prove whether or not they use drugs. That's not how it works, and any newspaper article purporting to celebrate the effectiveness of such a program ought to disclose that fact, lest it should become yet another arm in the Drug Czar's nationwide campaign to randomly collect bodily fluids from our children.