ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, December 15, 1995 TAG: 9512150100
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: The Washington Post
President Clinton will require all people arrested on federal charges to face drug tests as a condition of bail and will encourage state and local law enforcement agencies to adopt the same policy, White House and Justice Department officials said Thursday night.
Clinton, faced with accusations that his administration is soft on drugs, has approved an executive order directing Attorney General Janet Reno ``to develop a universal policy requiring federal arrestees to submit to drug testing before decisions are made on whether to release them ... pending trial,'' according to a draft of the order.
Under the order, which is scheduled for public signing ceremonies Monday, anyone arrested for any federal offense would be asked at initial detention to submit to a drug test. Should that person refuse, Justice Department lawyers could seek a variety of sanctions, such as asking for detention pending further court proceedings.
Clinton's order directs Reno ``to take all appropriate steps to encourage the states to adopt and implement the same policies that we are initiating at the federal level.''
Under the terms of the order, about 60,000 people a year in federal custody would face the choice of a drug test or detention without bail. If state and local jurisdictions heed Clinton's recommendation, hundreds of thousands of people across the country would face that same choice, greatly expanding the scope of routine drug testing.
Justifying the new policy, the president's order states, ``We should implement testing and sanctions as a way to reduce the level of drug use in the population of offenders under criminal supervision, and thereby reduce the level of drug use and criminal behavior.''
Currently, drug tests are performed at random on a small percentage of federal inmates and routinely on convicted felons who are on probation. As part of a small pilot project, federal prosecutors recently have experimented with the testing of people who have just been arrested, federal officials said.
The blanket approach in Clinton's new order seems certain to provoke court challenges on constitutional grounds. The Supreme Court has said that drug urine tests are ``searches'' within the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches. But in decisions last term and in 1989, the court said the government was justified in requiring such tests under specific circumstances.
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