Should Welfare Recipients Be Tested for Drugs? >
Only Winners Are Companies Making the Drug Tests
Suggesting welfare recipients are worthy of suspicion unfairly singles the group out for disdain
December 15, 2011
About Joy Moses:
Joy Moses is a senior policy analyst with the Poverty and Prosperity program at the Center for American Progress. Prior to joining American Progress, she was a children and youth staff attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.
Drug-testing participants in government benefits programs is bad policy.
Stereotypes are often attached to families who need temporary help from government benefits programs. But suggesting that they are drug users or otherwise worthy of suspicion unfairly singles the group out for disdain. And it opens the door to cutting funds that provide basic subsistence to vulnerable children and their mothers.
[Democrats, Republicans Switch Roles.]
This treatment is all the more absurd when one considers all the other people who receive government funds but aren't required to submit to drug testing. There are also stereotypes about Wall Street drug use, but Congress didn't ask those folks to pee in a cup before bailing them out.
There is no justification for drug testing social service beneficiaries. There hasn't been enough research and different studies have produced different results. In Florida, the most recent state trying a drug testing requirement, it was shown that Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF (the former AFDC or welfare program), applicants were actually less likely than the general population to abuse drugs.
Drug testing also costs money. During this period of elevated poverty, governments at all levels are slashing the budgets of vital services that help low-income families weather temporary setbacks. And yet conservatives who complain about spending on the poor want to devote more resources to new efforts? These new expenditures would not be directed at helping low-income people, but at policing them (or harassing them, depending on how you look at it). The only winners in that scenario are the companies manufacturing the drug tests.
Many of these policy proposals are aimed at suspending or ending the participation of mothers who test positive. There are far better policy options available. We could invest in social workers to diagnose and treat the underlying causes of unemployment. Maybe it's more education, child care, or—for a much smaller group of mothers—drug or alcohol rehabilitation that's needed. Helping mothers is far better for their innocent children than simply drug testing them—and then kicking families that fail to the curb without concern for whether they will be able to do basic things like eat or have shelter.
- GOP: Drug Tests for Unemployment Applicants.
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- Mort Zuckerman: 5 Sure-Fire Ways to Create More Jobs.
- Other Arguments
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#11015215
Yes — We ought to provide aid on the basis of reciprocal obligation
ROBERT RECTOR, Senior Research Fellow in Domestic Policy at the Heritage Foundation
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#2721197
Yes — Why pay someone not to work when he has voluntarily taken himself out of the hiring pool?
JACK KINGSTON, U.S. Representative, Georgia's 1st District
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#3616175
Yes — We are overdue to renew welfare reform efforts and make additional gains
DAVID VITTER, U.S. Senator, Louisiana
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#4452256
Yes — Require drug testing only of welfare applicants with a history of substance abuse
LAWRENCE M. MEAD, Professor of Politics and Public Policy at New York University and Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
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#5412683
No — Drug testing welfare recipients is an intrusion into private lives not consistent with U.S. values
PETER CAPPELLI, George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School and Director of Wharton's Center for Human Resources
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#6240607
No — Welfare recipients are no more likely to have drug problems than anyone else
MATTHEW BODIE, Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development at Saint Louis University School of Law
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#7277649
No — The assumption that people on public assistance use drugs at a higher rate than the general population is erroneous
VANITA GUPTA, Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union
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#9250659
No — Drug testing perpetuates myths and scapegoats the unemployed
CHRISTINE L. OWENS, Executive Director of the National Employment Law Project
