A few years back, when I was in school, there was talk of schools in my area introducing compulsory random drug testing. My brother's school was all for it. My school held a debate, in which I was speaker for the upper school. Thankfully the staff agreed that it was a gross violation of privacy, completely unneccessary (How many teenagers smoke a little pot, grow out of it, and carry on completely unharmed? Why criminalise them and likely make the progress of their lives much worse?), and not the job of teachers in the first place. But it shocked me as a teenager, that many of my fellow students, especially the younger ones (age 11-15, when I was 16/17), were supporting the idea on the basis that everything would be 'safer', as well as the 'nothing to hide' arguement. It astounded me that they could be so close-minded to the potential misuse of supposedly 'random' testing (and misuse of results, if a straight A student came back positive would senior staff want to have that negative influence on the school records?), that they weren't offended by the assumed criminality places upon them by such testing, that they didn't even know their rights to deny being touched (my advice was that if a student was asked to take a drug test, to tell the teacher asking that they did not consent, that they did not want to be touched and would consider such testing against their consent to be assault, and that the teacher should consult their union). It does worry me. And in my school we did read Animal Farm... a lot of people thought it was just a story about animals. This was not in a 'rough' or 'poor performing' school, but a grammar school supposedly taking in the top 20% of the area (I disagree with the grammar system, but that's another story!).