Rogers, Petrauskas, Muhlenhaupt 1

Nathan Rogers, Jackson Petrauskas, Emily Muhlenhaupt

College Prep Period 1
December 8, 2016
Abstract
Drugs are poison in our society, a cancerous tumor that must be removed swiftly, In our
efforts to cleanse the youth from the despair that drugs will wreak on their lives we will finally
have a significant use for the money being wasted fighting drugs that cannot be fought. Instead
you must declare a war on the mind. Offering help to students, children, found to be taking
drugs, in order to stop the problem we must understand how it starts. Once we do taking a less
aggressive approach will not only save money, but also solve the problem better.
Need Explanation
While the medical and physical effects drugs have are still being debated and cant be
agreed on, one thing that can is the negative attitude it gives off the user, as well as the
agreement that it should be kept for legal adults. The mind of a teenager in adolescence is
extremely delicate. Constantly being bathed in various chemicals. For the same reasons, we
keep alcohol for people 21 and over. We need to keep drugs away from children and,
consequently, the learning environment (AddictionCentr.)
Plenty of families have torn apart from drugs. The more help your family provides, it seems like
the deeper the addict goes into their addiction. The more you create an environment of love and
support, the more the addict lies and manipulates friends and family (Home Drug Testing.) The
negative attitude towards people who take it and the attempts of the parents to keep their children
away from it creates a hostile environment that the child does not want to be a part of. They will
push their family away if needed, all in order to keep the relationship with the addiction they

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strive to quench. Pushing your family away can make you feel alone. Turning to people you can
relate to drives them to a harmful culture of drug users, letting them feel as if their actions are
okay while slowly ruining their life.
Mandated drug tests of all students is an extreme task, but a necessary one if we want to solve
the problems it creates. We should not simply shun the users away from education, or even
punish them for their actions. Instead, necessary steps should be taken to push the user away
from the drug by convincing them their life would be better without it.
Description of Innovation
In order to help high schoolers in America, we will need a way for teenagers to easily get drug
tested quickly and efficiently. What better way to do this than implementing school mandated
drug tests. This innovation will be modeled after common tests such as oral or urine drug testing.
High schools will be able to drug test students sporadically every so often in hopes of decreasing
drug use across the US. We are creating our innovation on drug testing within high schools
because ninth through twelfth grade is often the first time that kids encounter illicit substances
and the curiosity can be too much to resist.
The problem with drug tests in school today is that they are too aggressive. Police are involved
and the students are punished. Expelled from school in some cases, which would only lead to
more problems with that child in the future. All that should be done is that parents are informed
and the child be pushed to attend rehabilitation. With counselor and therapist help the cause of
the drug using can be located and hopefully can be stopped. These goals are intense and most
likely costly, but the future of our children should never be questioned (Drug Use In High
School.)
This innovation will allow teenagers to decrease the curiosity surrounding drugs. Why do

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teenagers use drugs? There are countless reasons. Many are reacting to peer pressure and believe
turning to drugs and alcohol is how to become popular in high school. Some use drugs to selfmedicate from painful feelings. Some teens even turn to study aid drugs like Adderall or Ritalin,
because they believe these substances will boost their grades (Drug Use In High School.)
Implementation
We will have a developed plan which we will bring to county school boards.
Implementing it will be the simple part, as long as we have school approval. The reason this will
be so easy is because we are not only cutting down on costs for the school, but we are also
bettering the lives of young adolescents. We would be saving money because we are eliminating
the need for the drug task force that schools spend large sums of money on. The U.S. federal
government spent over $15 billion dollars in 2010 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $500
per second. State and local governments spent at least another 25 billion dollars (Nadelmann,
Ethan.) This aggressive stance on drugs has solved nothing and wasted millions. For a single
school, it would cost $48,000 dollars a year. Including the cost of the rehabilitation centers
which are $5,000 dollars for a 3-month program, we are still much under budget from the 25
billion dollars already being spent.
We are planning on using oral saliva drug tests on the students. Oral tests are a more precise
reading than urine tests that could be easily manipulated (Home Drug Testing.) Implementing the
tests on a random day every two months will prevent kids from planning their drug use
accordingly. We believe that sporadically testing the students will get a more accurate amount of
teenagers who actually abuse drugs. If we find that students are abusing drugs, we plan to set up
an optional 3-month outpatient rehabilitation program with consent from parent or guardian.
Potential Obstacles

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Through our intensive studies, we have come up with five main problems that have cause
to address. Cost is the largest issue with this plan, however, no cost to have a plan that actually
works is too high, and the future of our children is priceless. This money could be taken from the
countless, useless programs within our government. Trash bins that money is being thrown down
every day. This money could be spent on more important things such as this plan.
The second obstacle is the possibility of absent students on testing dates. The students using
drugs could catch the wind that there is a drug testing date in the near future, and ditch school
that very day. To combat this, we will keep lists of students who have missed the test date, then
over the next week, proceed to call them out of class to perform the oral tests. Also, we will
have randomized testing dates that very few people will know about in hopes of finding the
majority of students abusing drugs.
The third problem we must face is training and finding the admin to administer these tests. We
will solve this by training all homeroom or advisement teachers in how to give the drug tests.
We will put them through a class to ensure these teachers will swab the mouth correctly.
The fourth problem would be getting consent from students and parents to apply these tests.
We will place it in the code of conduct that the students must consent if they would like to attend
the high school. Parents and students must oblige to this contract if they want their child to be
attending the school.
The fifth problem is the use of prescription drugs through legal medical reasoning. This will
read positive on the test. Therefore, making the school pursue false accusations against these
students. We will have parents submit medical records including medication they are on to
compare to the drug tests in case of a false positive tests.
Budget

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The rough estimate of how much this will cost a year is 5 billion dollars. This will be
taken out of the amount going to fighting drugs in America. Appropriate steps will have to be
taken in order to fully reduce drug use in America, and this is just a small step to achieving that
goal. The 5 billion dollars mostly goes to drug testing, but there is also an amount going to
funding the therapists and counselors

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Works Cited
AddictionCentr. "Health Effects of Teen Substance Abuse - Mental and Physical Effects."
Addiction
Center. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov. 2016
"Drug Use In High School: Facts & Statistics About Teens." Teen Rehab Center. N.p., n.d. Web.
29
Nov. 2016
"Home Drug Testing: Information for Parents." HealthyChildren.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Nov.
2016.
Nadelmann, Ethan. "The United States War on Drugs." The United States War on Drugs.
Standford,
n.d. Web. 06 Dec. 2016.