A friend of mine wrote this note on Facebook and I wanted to pass it along to get the word out. He makes a well informed argument and I feel that this point here is strong and informed. Read it and see what you think afterwards.
" I have noticed a number of folks on Facebook have decided to become fans of REQUIRING DRUG TESTS FOR WELFARE (like thirteen thousand in one group), and I find this disturbing for a few reasons. First, allow me to say that I assume that this also means that we’d deny benefits to those who tested positive (I know, assumptions are dangerous, but I’m interested in an argument against that assumption). My initial gut response was “what a great idea- let’s make sure that we cut the life line to people who might be dangerously addicted to drugs! That’s exactly what I’d do to ensure my feeling of safety while walking down the street. Wouldn’t it be comforting to know that there were almost instantly a bunch more people who are desperate and starving for a chemical, dropped into a situation where they might very well choose to inflict harm on another person or their property? What a great way to help soothe my moral outrage at the fifteen bucks of my tax money spent yearly on people getting welfare!” It should also be said that I can’t whip up sustained outrage over welfare at all. Do I see various government assistance programs abused sometimes? Sure. Just like everyone else, I see people using EBT cards who are wearing two hundred dollar shoes. I see the people who live next door and clearly never go to work sitting in their living room in January. How can I see them sitting in their living room? Because they have the door hanging open when it’s 22 degrees outside. A recent visit from the Laclede Gas man confirms my suspicion that that means they’re on assistance- he says he sees that all the time. But with everything else that’s wrong with the world right now, this just isn’t one of the things that makes me really, really angry. It’s an irritant to be sure, but not one that gets me bent out of shape to the point that I’d suggest trampling on anyone’s Fourth Amendment rights or anything.
And that was my second thought about this: civil liberties are very important to me, and the basic idea of the Bill of Rights is that these are absolute rights that are guaranteed to us not by the government, but by the simple fact of our birth as human beings. Drug testing, especially random testing by the government strikes me as a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. Let’s review the fabulous Fourth, shall we?
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
In order to be searched, there has to be an oath or affirmation that you’ve done something wrong- and that requires probable cause. I’m not sure that asking for welfare benefits is probable cause to assume that you’re on drugs. If you feel like you might want to pose that old favorite: “well, if you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear”, please don’t. I’ve never understood the morality of that one, on this or any drug testing issue. Should an employer be allowed to come over to your house and look in your sock drawer too? I mean, what if you’re hiding drugs there? How about periodic surprise strip searches at your job? I mean, if you’re not hiding anything, what do you have to fear? I’m confused by people who would fight you if you looked at the contents of their wallet, but quietly submit to having their own blood scrutinized under a microscope. It’s a right, for the love of god. Rights are inalienable, and ignoring them just because you know you’re not guilty of whatever the powers that be have made illegal this week is the first giant step into slavery and subjugation. (And not forgetting the cry for smaller government all over the datashpere these days, let’s not forget that it would be the government taking away an inalienable right to allow its own citizens to sign up for a program.)
A question for those who feel strongly enough to click “Join this Group”: is this some sort of epidemic of which I’m unaware? Are the great majority of welfare recipients mooching, strung-out junkies milking the system? Not at all, says a report from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Six percent of welfare recipients satisfied the diagnostic screening criteria for illicit drug dependence (i.e., their drug use impairs their functioning in significant ways). Six percent? Seriously? According to the peer-reviewed journal for the American Academy of Family Physicians, 8-12% of doctors will develop a substance abuse problem at some point in their careers. That’s right- according to these stats, the folks on welfare have less common incidence of drug problems than the people who treat us when we’re ill. Why is there no Facebook group for you to express your outrage over the fact that the person who will make sure you don’t die when you go in for that routine surgery isn’t required to take a drug test?
And my last problem with this is that it’s just moralizing, and totally counterproductive. Drug testing tells us absolutely nothing about the ability of a person to do a job, it only tells us that their body is metabolizing a certain substance. It can’t even tell us when the drug was ingested. Counter to the common (and wrongly) held belief that welfare is a cakewalk that finds people skating on the system for life, it is actually a program that gets people back into the workforce, thanks to the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. According to a Washington Post article from 2008, the definition of welfare is now “a finite program built to provide short-term cash assistance and steer people quickly into jobs”. It is a program whose goal is to move people from lives of destitution and poverty into more meaningful lives through developing skills. Finding out that they smoked pot sometime in the last month only becomes an issue if they are clearly impaired on the job, and in no way suggests that they aren’t going to be able to do a job. And while we’re at it, why not test for everything that might suggest that the candidate has some sort of impairment or addictive behavior? Alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, cold medicine… can you imagine the results if we decided to take people who tested positive for any of these off the work rolls? Or deny them benefits? And how are they so different, especially alcohol? Back in 1992, a report counted 14 million Americans had a problem with drinking- that was 7.5% of the population at the time. Imagine a 7.5% across the board layoff. But to continue to use the analogy correctly, we’d have to lay off those that use alcohol regularly, as they would simply test positive for alcohol consumption- and that’s 50% of the population.
Why don’t we use the time and resources that we would put into this counterintuitive witch hunt into more infrastructure projects that people who are unemployed can sign on to? We can make our country stronger, our workforce better, and our national ethic something that history will be proud of, rather than something that will embarrass our descendants the same way that McCarthyism embarrasses modern Americans and The Inquisition embarrasses present-day Catholics. And is this even an issue? You bet. Right now several states have rules on the books making drug testing for welfare mandatory, and several more are considering it. "
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