The most recent issue of Rolling Stone has a story on the White House's ongoing war against marijuana, including an expansion of student drug testing beyond that which has passed supreme judicial muster:

[The] Bush administration believes "extracurricular activity" can be stretched to include any student who parks on campus. "The court did not elaborate on random drug testing of student populations," says Jennifer de Vallance, a spokeswoman for the Office of National Drug Control Policy. "But we think that schools would be on very safe ground to conduct that kind of testing."

Not so fast. In his concurring opinion in the Earls case, Justice Stephen Breyer -- the critical fifth vote -- indicated that one of the reasons why he allowed random testing was that it did not reach the entire student population.

What is the critical threshold? If, for example, a school decides to test all students who compete in competitive extracurricular activities and those who drive to school and park on campus, the testing roster could well reach the vast majority of students. At Noblesville High School in Indiana, which uses such criteria, over 90% of its students subject to testing. Clearly, this is not "universal" and the feds are likely to make the argument that everything short of testing every student is permissible.

DeForest Rathbone, one of the nation's leading extremists who still touts drug testing as the proverbial silver bullet to the problem of adolescent substance use and abuse, is already on record endorsing universal testing.

Given the continued anti-marijuana hyperbole of the Drug Czar John Walters, any tangible manifestation of "reefer madness" is to be found in his wake. To wit, the escalation of marijuana arrests:

Since 1992, according to a recent analysis of federal crime statistics by the Sentencing Project, arrests for marijuana have soared from 300,000 a year to 700,000. The government spends an estimated $4 billion a year arresting and prosecuting marijuana crimes -- more than it spends on treating addiction for all drugs -- and more and more of those busts are for possession rather than dealing. One in four people currently in state prisons for pot offenses are classified as "low-level offenders." In New York, arrests for possession -- which now account for nine of every ten busts -- are up twenty-five-fold during the past decade. In Memphis, marijuana arrests are up nineteenfold, and large spikes have also been recorded in Philadelphia, Las Vegas and Houston.

In California alone, there are 60,000 marijuana arrests per year -- a patently injudicious use of both law enforcement resources and court resources.