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Health & Fitness

Drug Testing Welfare Recipients

If we give our government the right to strip Fourth Amendment rights from anyone who benefits from public assistance programs, we may all live to regret it.

At first read, it sounded reasonable until I realized that, unfortunately, most of the people getting public assistance are single women with children. Not to mention it's already a given in most welfare programs that if a recipient is suspected of using drugs—because of current behavior or past history of abuse—he or she will be referred for treatment or screening. The whole issue began to smack of unreasonable search and seizure. Just because you’re seeking public benefits doesn’t mean you don’t have the same kind of protection from unreasonable searches as anybody else. If we give our government the right to strip Fourth Amendment rights from anyone who benefits from public assistance programs, we may all live to regret it.

Besides, there are plenty of ways to beat a drug test and people that use know that. Focusing on poor people is easy because they rarely fight back.

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The obvious question the Florida governor needs to be asking himself is if all the people in his state have access to quality schools, resources for higher education and/or training, justice, healthcare and employment? Seems to me that ensuring these things would be a much better use of the proposed drug testing money.

The phrases "I don't have to pay for their habit" or "Not with my tax dollars" is simply never true. Whether through the government agencies providing financial assistance or the tax dollars paying for the justice system that handles the crime related to drug use, or the cost of cleaning up parks and cities drowning with homeless or unemployed people with addictions, you are paying for them and it is just a technicality of the allocation of your money.

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Do you want to support the welfare program or pay for the social toll of these violators when they take their problems into the streets? Either way you pay. That is the cost of living in a society.

It also got me to thinking about the wealthiest among us and how we "little people" pay for rich people's drug problems. Sure we do! They run large corporations and while sniffing the magic white powder make big mistakes that cost lives and money. It's just a larger scale abuse.

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