You Want to Drug Test Welfare Recipients?

[Ex-California]

Still crickets about the massive amounts of money spent on corporate welfare. And, let's face it, welfare for the working poor is a subsidy to the corporations that employ them.

Everyone loves to give billionaires more billions, but some guy trying to survive on $7/hour because that's the only job... yeah, he should just pull himself out of that. How about we ask the billionaires to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and subsidize their own employee training?

No welfare from the state for anybody, or any corporation or business, domestic or foreign, and certainly for any foreign government. ZERO. (Where's the authority in the Constitution otherwise?)

No drug testing by the state for anybody, anywhere, anytime, without a proper search warrant. ZERO. (Where's the authority in the Constitution otherwise?)

All good.

I think we're all in agreement here

[Ex-California]

A homeless gut needs more than an EBT card, and almost guaranteed needs rehab.

So I guess he better pull himself up by his bootstraps so he can afford that rehab, right?

Strawman.

How, you're so opposed to public assistance for food, who's going to pay for the more expensive rehab?

[Okeefenokee]

So I guess he better pull himself up by his bootstraps so he can afford that rehab, right?

Strawman.

How, you're so opposed to public assistance for food, who's going to pay for the more expensive rehab?

He hasn't actually come out against public assistance for food, as far as I've seen. It's the whole government subsidized drug habit that is the sticky issue here.

[Cid]

I mean this shit is getting very real now in many respects. The stigma of the welfare recipient being a black druggy is quickly being replaced by anyone who got prescribed opiates and isn't capable of checking in to the mayo clinic.

I've felt arm-tearing-out-of-my-socket pain in my life, I've passed kidney stones. I was lucky because in both of those instances I got through it with sheer stubbornness and deathly fear of needles.

But fuck if they didn't throw opiates at everything for the last two decades. One time when my shoulder fell out of socket, and I couldn't roll it back in, the fucking emts didn't even give me an option they just stuck me with demerol, and then the fuckers dosed me with valium to keep me from complaining about the IV for a fucking dislocated shoulder. Ultimately this led to the hilarious instance where a doctor, walking by my gurney, asked what the nurse was about to inject my IV with (my mother is by my side now) and the response was, "more Valium." The doctor politely pulled her away and audibly said, "His pulse is at 29." My mother kept it pretty cool up until the same nurse decided to immediately to pull my IV, then yanked the tape off and the needle with it. You wouldn't think with that pulse rate blood would spurt very far, and you would be wrong. On the plus side the nurse was very knowledgeable about how to get blood out of a t-shirt.

Needless to say, we drove an hour in the other direction the next time I needed to go to a hospital.

Anyway, long story long, our expensive ass healthcare system, best in the world!, has been dosing people with legal shit for years to keep people quiet, and when they lose insurance or the doc cuts them off, well fuck, guess you can starve son.

[Okeefenokee]

There was a medicare or medicaid, can't remember, case not long ago where a doctor or a clinic of doctors went to prison for a scheme where they gave pain pills to their patients in return for their patients keeping quiet about the doctor(s) fraudulently billing the government for services and care not rendered. If the patients decided they didn't want to go along with it, the doctor(s) would threaten to cut off their pain pills, which they were then addicted to.

[Hanarchy Montanarchy]

Demanding that we show "evidence" is ridiculous when you take the side of the argument that resists collecting the evidence in the first place.

The old guilty until proven innocent chestnut that is the hallmark of a free and open society.

No. You just posted more straw man nonsense.

I argued that we ought to implement some random drug testing of some kinds of welfare recipients. The only way we truly can know the extent of drug abuse in this population is to test them. You and Kath vehemently disagree with random drug testing these people. Then Kath goes on to claim we shouldn't random drug test them because there exists no evidence of prevalent drug abuse among them (which drug testing would determine).

It's like saying women shouldn't get breast exams because there exists no evidence that any individual woman has breast cancer. But in order to know if she has breast cancer, she needs a breast exam.

Do you not see the problem with that reasoning (and that's a charitable framing of it).

Are women getting state mandated breasts exams to prove they haven't committed the crime of having breasts cancer? Do you not see the problem with that analogy?

Frankly, I was pretty high for our whole conversation, so I went back over it to check for non sequiturs and straw men. Didn't find any, so I think we are having some more fundamental problems communicating.

I don't know if Dr.Y is also a relationship councilor, but we need help StA.

[Okeefenokee]

Took me all of 10 seconds to spot the problem. They required the welfare applicants to pay $25-35 for a fucking drug test. (extreme facepalm)

But this is also part of the problem with these, "experiments." They appear to be intentionally over priced.

Missouri, $336,297 to drug test 446 people. That's $754.03 per person tested.

Tennessee, $23,592 to test an unknown number of people. Kath's article doesn't say how many of the 39,121 people were tested.

And this from North Carolina,

So far, 89 drug tests have been administered at $55 each. The state has contracted Oregon-based Fortes Laboratories to examine the samples. The state has paid $4,895 for the program.

Why does it cost 13 times more to do a drug test in Missouri than in NC? I think you're shooting yourselves with these stats. Better go back to emotional pleading. The numbers aren't on your side.

I don't doubt for a second that testing costs $754 per person. Its a "medical" procedure that requires labs and we all know what medical costs are like

It doesn't cost that much. North Carolina got their tests done by a lab in Oregon for 55 bucks a pop.

[Dand]

Still crickets about the massive amounts of money spent on corporate welfare. And, let's face it, welfare for the working poor is a subsidy to the corporations that employ them.

Everyone loves to give billionaires more billions, but some guy trying to survive on $7/hour because that's the only job... yeah, he should just pull himself out of that. How about we ask the billionaires to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps and subsidize their own employee training?

Nah, fuck that assumption. If there are crickets about corporate welfare it's because no one here supports it enough to defend it.

[Speaker to Animals]

I did not argue we ought to cut people off because they turned out drug abusers. They need help, and with reception of social assistance, ought to meet some basic expectations. If you need assistance for things like food and housing, and we are not talking about a disability or retiree here, then you should not spend money on discretionary items like recreational drugs. By giving them EBT cards, we indirectly increased their funds to fuel their drug habit. Throwing cash at people like this amounts to throwing gasoline on a fire. You don't solve social problems like this at all.

[Cid]

I guess my question is what are we testing for then. You're on a focus drug? Test positive for meth. You're on pain, test positive for opium. You smoke weed... Alright you're just fucked there, which I still don't get. You smoke tobacco, well good on you. You drink alcohol, whelp you're in a shitty situation but we approve of you fucking up your liver rather than getting high.

If the solution is people just get an allotment of food, hey fine, no one is going to eat it because its government food (might as well just say "school lunch" and see how people trip over themselves to get some) but if that's the solution go with that.

But drug testing is weird, even at 55 dollars a pop that's close to half the monthly allowance for someone.