Drogtestning av elever på gymnasieskolan. Integritet eller övervakning?

The aim of this study is to examine different Swedish municipal upper secondary schools and their attitudes towards drug prevention by drug testing of students, and how come the implementation of drug tests largely distinguishes between different schools. More specifically it aims to find out how come some schools execute numerous of drug tests whilst other don´t execute any, what the benefits versus the disadvantages of testing are and how the schools handle the voluntary aspects of the tests. With a qualitative approach I choose three different municipal upper secondary schools in the same town of Sweden, the one that executed the most drug tests, one that didn´t execute any and one that executed some. From each school I interviewed one headmaster to represent the board of school and a school counselor and/or a school nurse to represent the students care ward, and the form of the interviews where semi structured. Theories used to explain the different approaches of the schools are Foucault´s pastoral power, Bentham´s Panopticon and the utilitarianism. The study showed that attitudes towards drug testing in schools vary a lot both within schools between school board and care ward, and between different schools, and so did the attitudes towards personal integrity and autonomy. All but one of the respondents were (more or less) pro-drug testing as a method of drug prevention, but the attitudes between the pro-testing respondents did vary in questions regarding the benefits of the tests and the voluntary aspects of them. The main conclusions of the study were that both Foucault´s theory of pastoral power, Bentham´s ideas of the Panopticon and the utilitarian point of view gave ways to explain and understand the relationship between the school, the students and the society, and the school´s role as an institution to form, reform and protect both students and the society from the harms of drugs