Cite as: 536 U. S. 822 (2002)
Ginsburg, J., dissenting
district's policy of randomly testing the urine of its student athletes for illicit drugs did not violate the Fourth Amendment. In so ruling, the Court emphasized that drug use "increase[d] the risk of sports-related injury" and that Vernonia's athletes were the "leaders" of an aggressive local "drug culture" that had reached " 'epidemic proportions.' " Id., at 649. Today, the Court relies upon Vernonia to permit a school district with a drug problem its superintendent repeatedly described as "not . . . major," see App. 180, 186, 191, to test the urine of an academic team member solely by reason of her participation in a nonathletic, competitive extracurricular activity—participation associated with neither special dangers from, nor particular predilections for, drug use.
"[T]he legality of a search of a student," this Court has instructed, "should depend simply on the reasonableness, under all the circumstances, of the search." New Jersey v. T. L. O., 469 U. S. 325, 341 (1985). Although " 'special needs' inhere in the public school context," see ante, at 829 (quoting Vernonia, 515 U. S., at 653), those needs are not so expansive or malleable as to render reasonable any program of student drug testing a school district elects to install. The particular testing program upheld today is not reasonable; it is capricious, even perverse: Petitioners' policy targets for testing a student population least likely to be at risk from illicit drugs and their damaging effects. I therefore dissent.
I
A
A search unsupported by probable cause nevertheless may be consistent with the Fourth Amendment "when special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement, make the warrant and probable-cause requirement impracticable." Griffin v. Wisconsin, 483 U. S. 868, 873 (1987) (internal quotation marks omitted). In Vernonia, this Court made clear that "such 'special needs' . . . exist in the public school con-
843
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