Cite as: 532 U. S. 67 (2001)
Opinion of the Court
and off of drugs, the immediate objective of the searches was to generate evidence for law enforcement purposes 20
in order to reach that goal.21 The threat of law enforcement
20 We italicize those words lest our reasoning be misunderstood. See post, at 86-88 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment). In none of our previous special needs cases have we upheld the collection of evidence for criminal law enforcement purposes. Our essential point is the same as Justice Kennedy's—the extensive entanglement of law enforcement cannot be justified by reference to legitimate needs.
According to the dissent, the fact that MUSC performed tests prior to the development of Policy M-7 should immunize any subsequent testing policy despite the presence of a law enforcement purpose and extensive law enforcement involvement. See post, at 98-100. To say that any therapeutic purpose did not disappear is simply to miss the point. What matters is that under the new policy developed by the solicitor's office and MUSC, law enforcement involvement was the means by which that therapeutic purpose was to be met. Policy M-7 was, at its core, predicated on the use of law enforcement. The extensive involvement of law enforcement and the threat of prosecution were, as respondents admitted, essential to the program's success.
21 Accordingly, this case differs from New York v. Burger, 482 U. S. 691 (1987), in which the Court upheld a scheme in which police officers were used to carry out administrative inspections of vehicle dismantling businesses. That case involved an industry in which the expectation of privacy in commercial premises was "particularly attenuated" given the extent to which the industry in question was closely regulated. Id., at 700. More important for our purposes, the Court relied on the "plain administrative purposes" of the scheme to reject the contention that the statute was in fact "designed to gather evidence to enable convictions under the penal laws . . . ." Id., at 715. The discovery of evidence of other violations would have been merely incidental to the purposes of the administrative search. In contrast, in this case, the policy was specifically designed to gather evidence of violations of penal laws.
This case also differs from the handful of seizure cases in which we have applied a balancing test to determine Fourth Amendment reasonableness. See, e. g., Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U. S. 444, 455 (1990); United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U. S. 543 (1976). First, those cases involved roadblock seizures, rather than "the intrusive search of the body or the home." See Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U. S., at 54-55 (Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting); Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U. S., at 561 ("[W]e deal
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