5 Reasons Drug Testing Welfare Recipients Is Profoundly Stupid
http://www.alternet.org/5-reasons-drug-testing-welfare-recipients-profoundly-stupid
Making people pass a urine test before they can have food is for their own good, Walker insisted in September, telling the Huffington Post, "We're trying to help people who are in need of our assistance to get jobs (...) because the best thing we can do with them is to make sure they get the skills and education they need, and make sure they are drug free if they have an addiction, to get back in the workforce."
In fact, drug testing people who need government assistance hits pretty much every measure of extraordinarily bad policy: it doesn't work, it burns tax money, and it aims to solve a problem that doesn't exist. ...
Conservative lawmakers continue to exploit the myth that all poor people are blowing taxpayer money on all kinds of exciting and nefarious things. But most low-income people spend their money on necessities like food. "There's no reason to have extra suspicion of people simply because they are poor," Williamson points out.
Social science and addiction researchers haven't been able to precisely gauge rates of substance use and abuse among low-income people compared to the general population. The data is imperfect, based on self-reporting, and does not always differentiate between very different groups who live below the poverty line. But researchers largely agree that there's no evidence that substance abuse among aid recipients is a big problem that warrants the privacy intrusion of drug testing someone just because they're poor.
= new reply since forum marked as read
