EDITORIAL:

Drawing a Line on Drug Tests

The Supreme Court, often too quick to dilute the Fourth Amendment's
protection against unreasonable searches in the name of fighting drugs,
sent a welcome message yesterday that there are some searches the war on
drugs cannot justify. By an impressive 8to1 margin, the justices
struck down as unconstitutional a Georgia statute that required
candidates for most state offices to submit to a urine test for illegal
drugs as a condition of appearing on the ballot.

Though two lower Federal courts had upheld Georgia's oneofakind
requirement, it was clear that the state had a weak case when it
appeared before the Court in January. The issue was not whether a drug
test is an intrusive bodily search, which it is, but whether this
particular test plan was reasonable. Even the lawyer from the Georgia
Attorney General's office conceded that there was no reason to suspect a
drug problem among Georgia's politicians and thus no pressing official
need of the sort that might begin to justify the tests.

Indeed, upon probing by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the best the
attorney could offer was that the law sent a strong symbolic antidrug
message to the public. That was not good enough for the members of the
Court, with the exception of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a
conservative who does not share the libertarian streak of his fellow
conservatives on the Court. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a
wellcrafted majority opinion, the Fourth Amendment shields society
against state action that "diminishes personal privacy for a symbol's
sake."

Justice Ginsburg noted further that the testing program was poorly
designed to identify candidates who use drugs or deter drugusing
candidates from running, since it allowed candidates to select the dates
of their tests.

In a troubling decision two years ago, the Court approved random drug
testing for student athletes based largely on its concern for the
athletes' safety and the public's interest in deterring drug use among
minors. In earlier cases, the Court upheld testing programs for railroad
crews and for Customs Service employees involved in drug interdictions.
But the Court, as Justice Ginsburg stressed, has never endorsed a
blanket drugtesting program that was not linked to protecting public
safety or deterring known drug abuse. Yesterday's decision holds that
critical line.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company