AFFIRMATIVE — WORKPLACE DRUG TESTING — SIGNIFICANCE 271

REINFORCES THE WAR ON DRUGS

EMPLOYEE DRUG TESTING IS THE FOREFRONT OF THE WAR ON DRUGS AS AN INVASION OF PRIVACY AND CIVIL LIBERTIES TO ELIMINATE DRUGS

RUDOVSKY, DAVID, Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania School of Law, 1994, The Univeristy of Chicago Legal Forum, " ARTICLE: THE IMPACT OF THE WAR ON DRUGS ON PROCEDURAL FAIRNESS AND RACIAL EQUALITY"//lxnx-Sj

The Supreme Court has also sanctioned searches of thousands of innocent persons without cause, suspicion, or judicial warrant. To augment drug detection and drug enforcement policies, drug testing in the workplace has become a popular measure for both governmental and private employers. n89 This process involves targeting entire groups of persons, most of whom we know will be free of drugs. The Supreme Court has sustained  [*252]  drug testing of employees without suspicion or any particularized evidence of improper drug use on the "special needs" exception to the Fourth Amendment, n90 thus creating a broad range of searches that are exempt from any meaningful constitutional scrutiny. n91 Analysis of the drug-testing opinions makes clear the impact that the War on Drugs has had on the fundamental shift from the insistence on cause and prior judicial approval to Executive and legislatively authorized suspicionless searches and seizures of entire classes of persons. n92 Justice Scalia, dissenting in National Treasury Employees Union v Von Raab, n93 succinctly exposed the flaws in the Court's approach:

The only plausible explanation [for the drug-testing rules] . . . [is that] 'if a law enforcement agency and its employees do not take the law seriously, neither will the public on which the agency's effectiveness depends.' What better way to show that the Government is serious about its 'war on drugs' than to subject its employees on the front line of that war to this invasion of their privacy and affront to their dignity? To be sure, there is only a slight chance that it will prevent some serious public harm resulting from Service employee drug use, but it will show to the world that the Service is 'clean,' and -- most important of all -- will demonstrate the determination of the Government to eliminate this scourge of our society! I think it obvious that this justification is unacceptable; that the impairment of individual liberties cannot be the means of making a point; that symbolism, even symbolism for so worthy a cause as the abolition of unlawful drugs, cannot validate an otherwise unreasonable search. n94