Urinvestigations

NEWSWEEK HASN'T done a cover story on drugs for a while now, so the drug hysteria of this past summer must be fading. You would think that politicians, who are supposed to be hip to the mood of the people, would know this. As election day approaches, however, many candidates for public office around the country have focused on drugs as they grope for something--anything--on which they can take a strong stand and win the affections of the electorate.

It doesn't take much political courage or gumption to come out against drugs. "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and cocaine" does not a campaign slogan make. Obviously, no one will get elected to office defending drug use. But some politicians apparently think they can get elected merely by railing against it.

Take, for instance, former Delaware Governor Pierre S. Dupont IV, who recently declared his candidacy for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. It seems fair to assume that he used his announcement speech to express his vision of an America under a Dupont Administration. If that's so, his vision is an ugly and ignorant one.

The centerpiece of Dupont's speech was a clarion call that all public high school students be tested for drugs. That's a comical proposal, and what's almost as funny is that it came from a man whose family runs a conglomerate with the slogan "better living through chemistry."

AROUND THE COUNTRY, candidates in local elections have been trying to score points against their opponents by daring them to come clean and submit to a urinalysis. Just last week Republican Clark Abt dared Joe Kennedy to fill up a cup to the dotted line. Kennedy is no political theorist, but he knows a principle when he sees one and rightly refused to play Abt's game.

Kennedy obviously has nothing to worry about by refusing to enter, in Garry Trudeau's phrase, "a pissing contest" with his opponent. But not all candidates can be as secure in their races as the heir apparent of America's First Family.

In South Carolina's gubernatorial campaign, Republican Carroll A. Campbell threw down the urinalysis gauntlet in a challenge to Democrat Mike Daniel. Daniel, now the state's lieutenant governor, refused and accused Campbell, a congressman, of "McCarthy-like tactics."

Drug-testing imbroglios have also broken out in campaigns in Virgina and Arkansas, with candidates of both parties racing to get their specimens to the lab before their opponents. One of the few voices of sanity amid the madness has been that of Senator Ernest Hollings. The South Carolina Democrat refused his challenger's call to take a drug test: "I'll take a drug test as soon as my opponent takes an I.Q. test," he said. Case closed.

As expected, pollsters for both candidates in South Carolina's gubernatorial contest claimed their guy had benefitted from the exchange on testing. What's interesting, though, is that for the first time in the campaign, Daniel's pollster found the Democrat to have a lower negative rating among likely voters than Campbell. If that isn't campaign malarkey, it would seem voters there are either impressed with Daniel's principled stand or disgusted with Campbell's slimy tactic. Or both.

WHAT GIVES? Isn't the drug menace the topic of concerned conversation at PTA meetings across the land? Apparently not. Reports of the electorate's preoccupation with drugs seem to have been greatly exaggerated.

When they promise to "rid society of drugs," politicians are merely striking a pose as ardent defenders of some "American" value. But there are other values people depend on their government to defend and protect, and perhaps many Americans fear they would be trampled upon in the hysteria to cleanse this country of drugs. If they don't, they should.

Consider the notions of individual rights that lay behind American's being presumed innocent until proven guilty. Interestingly, Ronald Reagan, who often gets misty-eyed when the topic turns to the precious liberties Americans enjoy, does not think that this peculiarly American values is worth preserving in the battle against drugs.

Last summer, he announced plans to establish a mandatory drug-testing program for key government staffers, as well as a "voluntary" one for all federal employees. The President himself took a urinalysis and, though the results were not disclosed, presumably passed.

Nearly one-quarter of America's largest private employers have beaten Reagan to his own policy. They already require their employees to take drug tests, and now Reagan wants the federal government--the nation's largest employer--to get into the act. Attorney General Edwin Meese III sees nothing wrong with such testing. And Secretary of State George Shultz, who last year said he would resign if forced to take a lie-detector test, also had no qualms about taking a drug test.

IF DRUGS AREN'T good, why is drug-testing bad? Well, the Constitution protects Americans from unreasonable searches and seizures--it's right there in the Fourth Amendment. The farcical idea now being spread by overzealous advocates of drug-testing is that those who have nothing to hide have nothing to worry about.

These are the same Dirty Harry-type clods who get all worked up when some bad guy "gets off" because his constitutional rights were violated. What they forget--or don't care to understand--is that the Bill of Rights exists to shield the innocent from such harassment. The umbrella of its liberties extends to the guilty to protect better those of the innocent--those who have nothing to hide.

"The constitutional proscription against unreasonable search and seizure is not limited to only those who are suspected of criminal behavior," wrote the judge in a New Jersey drug-testing case. "Instead," he continued, "all searches...must satisfy constitutional reasonableness standards." In fact, it would seem more important that the protection the Constitution affords to those suspected of wrongdoing extend even more emphatically to those never even under a cloud of suspicion.

An ordinance passed last year in San Fransisco prohibits random urine-testing except when an employer has reasonable suspicion that a specific individual is a substance abuser who also threatens the safety of his co-workers. That's a fair law, because its writers understood that those who have nothing to hide because they have nothing to fear lack also one other thing. Even if they're candidates for public office, they also have nothing to prove.