According to the Times, private schools can make drug tests a condition of enrollment without inviting lawsuits. But now two public high school principals in New Orleans want to test their students, too, raising the prospect of a legal battle with national ramifications. The ACLU said it would challenge any plan to start hair testing for drugs in New Orleans public schools as a violation of protections against unreasonable search and seizure and invasion of privacy in both the state and federal constitutions, according to Joe Cook, Executive Director of the ACLU of Louisiana. Raymond Kubacki Jr., president of Psychemedics, which is based in Cambridge, Mass., told the Times that 80 schools, mostly private, in 26 states were using Psychemedics to test their students for drugs. Hair testing is based on the premise that drugs ingested in the body travel through the bloodstream and are deposited in hair follicles roughly in proportion to the amount taken.
Traces remain in the hair, disclosing how long the drugs have been used.
Since hair grows at the rate of a half-inch a month, the test uses the inch and a half closest to the scalp to detect drug use for the last 90 days. But government researchers have raised questions about whether drug molecules bind more to coarser black hair than to finer blond or brownish hair, creating racial or gender disparities, and whether passive exposure to marijuana or other smoked drugs could produce a false positive, said the Times. In June 1998, the ACLU of Illinois warned the Chicago Police Department, police unions and the City Council that hair tests of Chicago cops were unfair and racially discriminatory.