Make Mine Wild. Or Mild.

It's been close to two weeks since Spring Break, but I am still nursing a wicked hangover.

Yes, I have read the Sarasota Herald Tribune article on the EMU homepage for over a week describing Spring Break '06 "Gone Mild." No, Student Life does not need to contact me about another Weather Vane article describing alcohol use. It's not the bottle that has me down. I'm discussing my finances.

I know I am not alone in this particular headache. We've budgeted, scrimped, and saved all year or at least pretended to do so during phone calls home. Then we spent all the money we saved on one week of decadence.

This leaves the financially unstable student two solutions. The student could call up home and, without getting into the details of Spring Break '06, explain how a year of frugal living has resulted in an urgent need for money, or the student can get a job. Both solutions are full of pitfalls, but, being of hardworking Mennonite character, I have chosen the latter.

Finding a job is easier said than done. This is especially true for a philosophy major. After three years at EMU, I still have trouble describing what marketable skills I possess. Thankfully, if my new employer is like one of my previous employers, my lack of skills will not be a problem. I just need clean urine.

The degrading life of entry-level workers (even the well-educated philosophy majors among them) often involves a trip to the bathroom with a cup while a lab tech stands guard at the door. Employers feel they have a right to ensure that my spring break was indeed mild instead of wild. The government agrees and allows Corporate America to harvest my urine along with the blood, sweat, and tears of my diligent labor.

Employers spend millions annually on employee drug testing even though its results are dubious. A study of the federal government's drug testing program estimated that the government spends $77,000 for every drug user it finds. Restated, a sum of money large enough to support a family for a year is spent just to prevent one drug user from being allowed to sweep the floors or bag groceries.

The massive amount of money spent on employee drug testing pales in comparison to the $20 billion annual federal budget for drug control. This money supports random drug testing in schools, military aid to Latin American governments, and numerous failed policies in between. It's amid all this spending that the federal government recently raised the federal debt ceiling for the fourth time in the last five years to over $8 trillion.

It readily appears that the values often harped upon by our politicians are sadly out of place. The government and businesses will spend massive amounts of money that they do not have merely to exclude a small group of workers from the benefit of a job. I readily agree that many people have suffered under the grips of substance abuse, but much of the money spent on drug control does not go to assisting these people. It is spent defining and controlling what recreation is acceptable and what is not.

Though saying so will not get this article on the EMU homepage, I do not care whether your spring break was mild or wild. Nor should the government or businesses be searching for a catchall morality indicator. If these entities invested the money spent on drug control into communities, I doubt they would find as many of the social ills they fear. Our society has many problems to attack. Rampant policing of morality is not the solution to any of these problems.

Contact Galen at galen.wenger@emu.edu