Is Florida Becoming the Scariest Place on Earth?

So a lot of the state - level political bickering these days seems to center around the idea of testing people on welfare for drug use. As a follow-up to the post a couple of days ago about conditional probability and drug testing, this just seems like an incredibly expensive program with few benefits, but let's see what the experts say. As of July 1, residents of Florida have been required to be drug-tested to receive their welfare benefits. According to Governor Rick Scott, the program will pay for itself and is needed because people on welfare are notorious drug users. But the Tampa Tribune reports that according to the Department for Families and Children which runs the program in Florida, the state is seeing a fail rate of 2% through the first two months of the program. According to the 2009 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, performed by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services, 8.7 percent of the population nationally over age 12 uses illicit drugs. The rate was 6.3 percent for those ages 26 and up. That seems a tad higher than the 2% use rate among welfare recipients in Florida. Welfare recipients must pay for their own drug testing, but are reimbursed by the state if the test proves negative. So a welfare recipient must shell out $30 ($60 if he/she ends up being a false positive - and remember that more than two-thirds of the positive tests are false positives) to be eligible to receive welfare. Estimates in Florida so far show little savings for the state in what they spend on welfare. Adam Cohen of the Yale School of Law (not exactly a hotbed of liberal thought) , in a Time Magazine op ed piece entitled "Bad Policy, Even Worse Law", writes, "If Florida and other states are really concerned about drug use, they should adopt stricter laws and better enforcement policies aimed at the whole population, not just the most vulnerable. But these laws are not really about drug use. They are about, in these difficult economic times, making things a little harder for the poor."   

As Cohen states, the problem with Florida's law is that it isn't about drug use. It's about bullying.  And it's about bullying a group of people who don't have the resources to fight back.All the research I have read about student achievement has stated that the single most defining statistic in whether students pass the standardized tests is the poverty level of the families involved. It would seem that if we care about kids, attacking poverty should be our approach, not attacking food - stamp recipients. I guess that's why the Occupy Wall Street movement has struck such a basic chord for me. There is plenty of money out there to help people out, to create the jobs that would lift people out of poverty and give them a sense of hope. But the private job creators have other uses for that money - bonuses for the banking execs who received bail-out money, stock-options, and a record dividend paid out to the shareholders of BP.   

In Ohio, there is a big push to pass this odious piece of legislation about drug-testing welfare recipients. In a marvelous counter-strike, Ohio Democratic legislator Robert Hagan has taken it to the next step.  Rep. Hagan’s bill would require statewide officeholders, legislators, members of Gov. John Kasich’s jobs board and recipients of federal bailout money to pay for their testing for un-prescribed pharmaceuticals, illegal drugs and alcohol. Officials testing positive would have to undergo treatment or be booted from office.    

Now that seems a little more fair - everybody who gets state or federal money gets tested - farmers who get crop subsidies, executives whose companies get state contracts, legislators and legislative boards. I like that idea much better.