Drug Testing

Louisiana proponents of random, suspicionless drug testing are smarting after being handed a pair of defeats in the past 10 days.

Just what an expectant mother with a drug problem needs: To be arrested and go to jail. That's what one Missouri bill would do. Over in Tennessee, legislators showed some common sense by refusing to act on similar bills.

A West Virginia bill that would have mandated random drug tests of people seeking unemployment benefits or food stamps met its deserved fate this week, dying without action in the legislature's House Judiciary Committee. But similar bills remain alive in a handful of states.

A number of states are considering bills to require drug testing to receive public assistance or unemployment benefits. Kansas is the first one where such a bill has won approval in even one chamber.

In a memo to judges, Indonesia's Supreme Court has ordered them to send small-time drug users and possessors to treatment instead of prison.

Faced with economic crises, fiscal shortfalls, and growing welfare and unemployment rolls, some state legislators are proposing a really bad idea: drug testing welfare and/or unemployment recipients. But there is a broad array of organizations lined up against them. Oh, and there's that pesky Constitution, too.

Faced with anger and ridicule over its drug testing policies, the World Chess Federation decided it didn't want to punish one of game's most popular figures for missing a drug test after all.

Philippines President Gloria Arroyo has named herself drug czar, declared war on drug traffickers, and started off by ordering the random drug testing of high school students. But she's just beginning.

Drug testing in chess? You've got to be kidding. That's what the players think, but the chess federation is dead serious, and now it finds itself in something of a pickle.

West Virginia's Kanawha County school board wanted to subject teachers to random, suspicionless drug testing, but a little thing called the US Constitution got in the way.