Why drug tests flunk
If the Supreme Court rules in favor of drug testing in public schools, will students come clean? Kids at schools in Indiana, where drug tests rule, say no way.

According to the students at rural Rushville Consolidated High School, there are a dozen ways to pass a drug test. You can march down to the local video store and buy a packet of "Karma" urine-cleansing powder. You can toss salt in your urine sample or drop in a strand of hair coated with hairspray. More often than not, it's simply a matter of choosing the right kinds of drugs, say the teens -- Ecstasy and alcohol disappear from your system within hours; marijuana can take up to 30 days.

Some of these methods -- such as the hairspray and the salt -- sound more mythic than magic, but whatever the kids are doing, it seems to work. The drug testing vans roll up to the Rushville campus every few weeks, and 25 students are randomly asked to produce a urine sample; yet hardly anybody is ever caught with drugs in their system. And it's not because they aren't doing drugs.
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