Daily Mail - Sniffer dogs and random tests in the classrooms are NOT the way...

[edgarshade]

Sniffer dogs and random tests in the classrooms are NOT the way to protect schoolchildren from drugs

By DAMON BARRETT
Last updated at 9:24 PM on 10th January 2012

With reader comments

Kathy Gyngell, of Ian Duncan Smith’s Centre for Policy Studies, writes in the Daily Mail that UK drug prevention policies are not living up to expectations.

me aspects work better than others, and there are certainly areas for improvement. Mass media campaigns and health education alone, for example, are well known to be ineffective at changing behaviour significantly at a population-level.

The prevention of children’s initiation into drug use is a debate that should be central to drug policy formation. But Gyngell’s concerns about current prevention policy (or, rather, one specific aspect – the ‘Talk to FRANK’ campaign and helpline) lead her to a perverse conclusion that the government should introduce police-led sniffer dog searches and random drug testing in schools. This would do more harm than good.

Damon Barrett is Senior Human Rights Analyst at Harm Reduction International in London, and editor of ‘Children of the Drug War: Perspective on the Impact of Drug Policies on young People’ (2011) www.childrenofthedrugwar.org

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[pete+carl]

when i was in school the school teamed up with the police and had random sniffer dog searches of all pupils
this would be done 1st thing in the morning and you would arrive at school and not told anything except to wait in the hall where youd be split into groups of about 30 and in a circle a dog would go around sniffing ou and your bags

one person was found with a small quantity of drugs on her

EDIT: upon reading the comments section of the article i have lost faith in society some people are amazingly small minded and ignorant

 

[mattnotrik]

EDIT: upon reading the comments section of the article i have lost faith in society some people are amazingly small minded and ignorant

Its the daily mail, Daily Fail as known in the UK, its where all the cunts read there news.

 

[Renz Envy]

when i was in school the school teamed up with the police and had random sniffer dog searches of all pupils
this would be done 1st thing in the morning and you would arrive at school and not told anything except to wait in the hall where youd be split into groups of about 30 and in a circle a dog would go around sniffing ou and your bags

one person was found with a small quantity of drugs on her

EDIT: upon reading the comments section of the article i have lost faith in society some people are amazingly small minded and ignorant

Seems like all of the negative comments are down voted pretty heavily. I don't really see anything more than fairly neutral opinions otherwise.

Schools ARE a government facility after all. Imagine if you're a parent that runs on the frame of mind that one hit of marijuana is going to cut up the nerve endings in your brain for life or that kids are off doing meth in the bathrooms and itching deep ulcers into their skin. Obviously with the kind of "blissful" thinking the average american runs on in regards to knowledge of medicine, it's going to be old news that people vote for such things as sniffer dogs to protect their children from drugs.

By "blissful" I mean ignorant.

 

[hydroazuanacaine]

schools have a hard enough time just getting their students to attend. drug testing? yeah right.

 

[clubberdude]

That was a pretty good article - he sums up a very fundamental point here, what if a student tests positive then is expelled? Not just the damage this will cause to the self-esteem of the student, but their card is marked, they may well find its difficult to return to school or get into a new one, and effectively the negative feedback loop has started. How many people who's lives are now at the brink of ruination or even past that point, where a trigger like this started the entire thing? It really is the wrong approach to tackling the drugs in school problem.

The comments are, for the most part positive for this article - I saw two negative comments, and only one I would have personally really considered negative.