Should Middle School Students Be Drug Tested? - Anita

• Nowadays, Olympic athletes are requested to submit urine samples to their administrative board to conductive medical examination and research as a portion of being admitted and permitted to participate in the amazing world-wide sporting event. Why? By taking samples of these athletes, they can use the medical test results to determine their participants's current medical condition. Now, appearance is not all that determines a person's physical well-being. We must examine how the body operates from the inside and the effects of what we place in our bodies does to us. Again, they mainly take these urine samples to determine if the athlete participating is having drugs. This is important to conduct because we must understand who of our role models is actually practicing a negative habit secretly. This one realization can change us all.
• Currently, due to this habit for professional athletes, schools have taken into consideration that some of their average students can possibly be influencing themselves and others around them to practice the habit of drug consumption. Now, grades as low as middle school are required to have drug testing conducted upon themselves when they decided to join sports teams and other extra-curricular activities. While alumni who have attended such schools and have dropped out and suffered throughout their lives either because some event triggered them or they were under the influence of drugs return to their schools to speak to the children and convince the teachers to conduct drug testing. While this controversy is met with confusion and questioning thoughts from the students, the parents are definitely opposing the idea. The parents main reason of not allowing this is because they trust their children and desire to exercise their civil liberty.
• During this phase, teachers seemed to support the idea of students having drug testings when entering or participating in a significant extra-curricular activity, whatever this make be. From coaches holding leadership of serious league teams to teachers holding advanced educational club meetings to simply administrative, authoritarian figures finding the idea to be very appealing. At this point, our teachers and mentors and leaders are not looking for people who can perform the job the best, rather the people who have the best self morals and habits. Most teachers acted as deterrents for students encountering harmful drugs such as steroids, marijuana, and alcohol. They were watching out for their children for a prolonged amount of time, but now that the schools are conducting these tests, they are relieved for their students.
• The main reason the school districts have decided upon such as drastic measure is because they intend to spread social awareness and warning to their students to quit drugs or be discovered and suffer the various consequences of refusing to do so. They believe that they are just embodying every other student using drugs, every other concerned parent, teacher, or guardian, and every other responsible school district. After the various tests were conducted, research and statistics that were compiled prove that students, especially the competitive athletes, were not abusing steroids and other growth-hormones, which was oddly unexpected by coaches who were training these abnormally rapidly growing children. The higher amount of students who were consuming drugs were usually using marijuana, but only in a few rare cases found.
• The main point of beginning drug testing in middle school with these low grades and young people who would rarely even risk touching over-the-counter medicine out of fear is to warn the children that this is what they are most likely going to be exposed to in the future and most prepare and arm themselves so that their hard work and determination this far throughout life is not ruined, flushed down the toilet, because they decided to smoke one cigarette or sip some alcohol. Companies such as Sport Safe and Drug-Testing Coalition have already dedicated themselves to planting these seeds of prevention in the minds of the middle school students and others younger. They also, most importantly believe that the eldest children have made their decision on the course of their life, whereas the younger ones can still be positive outcomes.