Drug Testing for All Welfare Recipients?

Should all welfare recipients be tested for drug use? I'll admit, it's an issue that has a lot of knee-jerk supporters right from the get-go. After all, who wants those incredibly lavish welfare payments given out to drugged-soaked slackers who lay around in their penthouse suites on our tax dollars, watching their big-screen tvs, leaving home only to drive their Cadillac down the block to meet their connections and get more buckets of chicken to feed the munchies? You know the type: Ronald Reagan made her famous 30 years ago.

Several states -- e.g., Florida, Missouri, Illinois -- are jumping on this bandwagon, as is the federal government in the form of a bill introduced last year by Utah's Orrin Hatch, a Republican, naturally (you remember them, the party of state's rights and getting the government off our backs?). All this despite the fact that actual proof that it is actually a problem is so scant as to be invisible -- in fact, according to the NIAAA, the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse among recipients mirrors that of the rest of society.

But as we know, facts are never allowed to get in the way of a "sexy" piece of legislation that will garner instant support. Especially among RepubliCONS who will use it as a wedge issue to show that Democrats are a bunch of "weak on crime" sob sisters who will squander our hard-earned tax dollars on the unworthy (the "unworthy" being pretty much everyone who is on public assistance and unemployment...in other words, the very people who actually need it.)

But nowhere in this discussion can I see any acknowledgment that there still can be -- even after all the time the professional medical-experimentation people have had to "perfect" their tests -- false positives, as well as the little-talked about false negatives. Equally absent is anything except some vague lip service that if the welfare recipient does test positive, she will get a "referral" to some kind of unstated and unspecified drug rehab.

Apparently no distinction is being made as to the type of drug involved, either. It's one thing to spend your entire welfare check on a $500 rock of cocaine, and it's another thing entirely to smoke some homegrown weed from your own windowbox. Either one will land you in hot water and a new role as an unwilling participant in that vague rehab program, which itself probably has barely enough money to operate with the clients it already has, who likely want to be there...

And also absent is any discussion about all welfare recipients being tested.

Like the CEOs and boards of directors of corporations who owe their success to the injudicious application of corporate welfare payments from us ("we the people") to the already bloated coffers of the über-rich, in the form of our tax dollars going to support Big Oil and General Electric (see Corporate Welfare: The Shame Page for more). When even the WTO, itself a bastion of corporate interests, complains about US corporate welfare, it ought to be signal that there really is a problem...

Drug testing for CEOs? Yeah, like that's gonna happen. Don't we have plenty of other problems, ones that are more pressing, more critical, to worry about than whether a welfare recipient is "on drugs"?

Gimme a break.