In response to public outcry against drug abuse in schools, a voluntary drug-testing scheme for secondary schools will be held in Tai Po.
Write an essay stating whether you support this scheme or not. Justify your views with at least three reasons. Give your essay a title.
Voluntary Drug-testing Scheme – Not the Right Track
On the grounds that more youngsters abuse drugs in schools, the government has put forward a voluntary drug-testing scheme to combat the problem of drug abuse in schools. The scheme has aroused a lot of controversy over its effectiveness and feasibility in public.
In fact, the scheme cannot remedy the situation effectively as it has a wrong focus – it is not a matter of ‘who’ take drugs but ‘how’ and ‘what’ we can do to help drug abusers or prevent the situation from getting worse. Therefore, the voluntary drug-testing scheme is not worth supporting.
With the wrong focus, the scheme, of course, cannot solve the root problem of drug abuse among youths. The reason for youngsters to take illegal drugs is that they want to escape from reality, difficulties and stress as they feel dissatisfied with lives, families and relationships. During puberty, youngsters are emotional and impressionable, they will be easily frustrated when they get poor academic results or when they are ignored by their friends or family members. Feeling depressed, they will finally resort to drug abuse. From the interviews with the drug abusers, people will find out that many of them lack love. Therefore, the major reason for the situation is that youngsters feels that they are lonely and unloved and the ways the government can help are to provide more counseling service and hive more social workers to help these so-called ‘teenagers at margin’ instead of merely checking if the students take drugs or not. Social workers and teachers have heavy workload, so they need more support from government to free them and give them time to take care of the students. The voluntary drug scheme will only add burden to the teachers and social workers but cannot give a helping hand to the students.
Apart from this, the voluntary nature of the scheme will destroy its effectiveness and makes it useless and toothless. The scheme cannot act as software to tackle students’ problems and needs nor can it act as hardware to deter youngsters from drug abuse as the testing process arouses distrust among students but does not involve any legal punishment. Also, as the scheme is voluntary-based, students who take the test will certainly be negative to the test and there is no effect on the drug-abusing students. Even if the students are willing to take the drug test, use of urine sample may not yield reliable results as the urine sample can be diluted by the students secretly and only drugs taken within three days can be detected.
Not only causing a waste of resources, the scheme may even worsen the problem. In order to get rid of the detection, the drug abusing students may play truant or use all sorts of tactics to dodge the detection. In other words, the scheme may push the drug-abusing students to the edge and cause them not to go to school but to hang around with their bad friends. In fact, the majority of the young drug abusers are not students. They need more help from others as they have isolated themselves from society. The scheme is only concerned with drug-abusing students and ignores the drug-abusing youths who do not study any more, so it will not help much in reducing the number of young drug-abusers.
Lastly, there are better alternatives to the voluntary drug-testing scheme which can help remedy the situation effectively. The drug test uses an ex-post approach to solving the problem, but prevention is always better than cure. The problem should be dealt with adopting an ex-ante approach, preventing youngsters from taking illegal drugs. For example, education, advertisement and counseling services can help. Also the drug abusers need help from voluntary workers, drug-treatment and rehabilitation centres which usually lack resources for further development. More and more rehabilitation centres are needed for the drug-abusers. Resources are limited and the government should use its resources wisely.
To sum up, the scheme has failed in every aspect as it is on the wrong track- care and trust are more important than detection. Some foreign countries have proved the scheme cannot work effectively. Why should the government waste the valuable resources on such risky and useless investment?