Legal Issues of Mandatory Drug Testing of Athletes This paper

This paper will discuss the legal issues involved in the mandatory drug testing of athletes. The first part of the paper will examine the issue of state action with regard to federal constitutional protections. The second part of the paper will discuss the privacy issues arising out of the Fourteenth Amendment. The third part of the paper will look at the issue of search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The last part will briefly discuss state constitutional law concerning privacy.

The controversy over the mandatory testing for drugs in sports concerns both types of athletes, professional and amateur. As will be seen, courts have treated professional athletes as employees who have agreed to forego certain rights, since they have signed employment contracts which often provide for drug testing. Amateur athletes, on the other hand, represent a special situation, since most are nominally under the control of schools and they have not promised to play in return for consideration. Consequently, mandatory testing of amateur athletes tends to constitute a greater infringement of certain personal rights than does mandatory testing of professional athletes.

There are three main areas of concerns which are affected by drug testing in general. First, does an individual have a privacy interest in the bodily fluids which must be withdrawn in order to conduct a test? Second, does testing violate an individual's Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable sear

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court noted that participants in interscholastic athletic programs had a diminished expectation of privacy with regard to urination on account of the locker room atmosphere. There was an element of communal undress and the physical examinations which are integral to almost all athletic programs required athletes to provide urine samples for medical tests. All of these circumstances reduced the expectation of privacy with regard to urinalysis. There is no specific case concerning the application of the right of privacy under the federal Constitution to the case of drug testing of athletes. It has been suggested that such a case could be made, outside of the usual Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. This would require the due process analysis developed over the past century. The first matter would be to determine whether the right at issue was a fundamental one, or one which is "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty." If it is, then the government must show that there is a compelling state interest which supersedes the fundamental right of the individual. In this case, the governmental interest would be the protection of the public welfare, in the guise of the protection of the at

Category: Government - L