drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare payments

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drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare payments

Post by flyingember »

What’s more, as Jamelle Bouie added, “One of the biggest failures is in Missouri, where the state spent $493,000 on drug testing for this fiscal year. It received 32,511 welfare applications and referred 636 for drug testing. Only twenty came back positive, although nearly two hundred people refused to comply. But even if all 200 were drug users, that still comes to more than $2,200 per positive result, which is more expensive than the median benefit in the state.”

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show ... nd-failure
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by shinatoo »

Read something that said the program in Florida only returned one positive result. I'd like to know how many of those were just pot.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by FangKC »

Florida Welfare Drug Testing Law Blocked By Federal Judge
ORLANDO, Fla. — A federal judge temporarily blocked Florida's new law that requires welfare applicants to pass a drug test before receiving benefits on Monday, saying it may violate the Constitution's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

...

The drug test can reveal a host of private medical facts about the individual, Scriven wrote, adding that she found it "troubling" that the drug tests are not kept confidential like medical records. The results can also be shared with law enforcement officers and a drug abuse hotline.

"This potential interception of positive drug tests by law enforcement implicates a `far more substantial' invasion of privacy than in ordinary civil drug testing cases," said Scriven, who was appointed by President George W. Bush.

The judge also said Florida didn't show that the drug testing program meets criteria for exceptions to the Fourth Amendment.
http://tinyurl.com/6cmjgv5
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by knucklehead »

Drug testing for pot is stupid. Pot stays in the system for three weeks. Coke stays in the system for 3 days. Drug testing litterly drives people towards cocaine.

It has never been about what is good for the person being tested or public health. It is all about money and politics.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by flyingember »

knucklehead wrote:Drug testing for pot is stupid. Pot stays in the system for three weeks. Coke stays in the system for 3 days. Drug testing litterly drives people towards cocaine.

It has never been about what is good for the person being tested or public health. It is all about money and politics.
there's some drugs it's about public health.

Krokodil is a really good example
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by loftguy »

knucklehead wrote:Drug testing for pot is stupid. Pot stays in the system for three weeks. Coke stays in the system for 3 days. Drug testing litterly drives people towards cocaine.

It has never been about what is good for the person being tested or public health. It is all about money and politics.
Knuck, you left out bigotry and hatred. It's a handful of ugly.........

Flyingember???
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by flyingember »

look it up. it's nasty stuff.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by loftguy »

flyingember wrote:look it up. it's nasty stuff.

So is anal leakage. Your insertion of that reference into this thread was pretty random.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by flyingember »

loftguy wrote:
flyingember wrote:look it up. it's nasty stuff.

So is anal leakage. Your insertion of that reference into this thread was pretty random.
really? it's a thread about drug testing for welfare that I started. someone commented that drug testing isn't about public health. I mentioned a drug where testing can provide public health.

assuming the idea works and is found to be legal at some point, the methods are flawed because you can stop using some drugs for a week and pass

thus you don't want to just test during the application period. you want it to be random. llike jury duty you get a call and have to show up the next day, and make that random during the next 1-3 weeks.

and need have a second chance method if you fail, because sending someone to jail costs way more than the costs of welfare
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by KCMax »

Is the point of drug testing to save money though? What is the rationale behind not giving welfare benefits to drug users? I presume its to (a) deter people from using drugs; and (b) not have state money go toward they purchase of more drugs.

I'm not sure the program can be judged through a simple cost/benefit analysis. If it costs more to administer the program than it does in recouping welfare money, but it deters a lot of people from using drugs, isn't it still a good program? I don't know if that's the case, but I don't think the point of the program should be "how much money can we save for the state?"
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

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KCMax wrote:Is the point of drug testing to save money though? What is the rationale behind not giving welfare benefits to drug users? I presume its to (a) deter people from using drugs; and (b) not have state money go toward they purchase of more drugs.

I'm not sure the program can be judged through a simple cost/benefit analysis. If it costs more to administer the program than it does in recouping welfare money, but it deters a lot of people from using drugs, isn't it still a good program? I don't know if that's the case, but I don't think the point of the program should be "how much money can we save for the state?"
OK, here's my take on the testing of welfare recipients for drug use.

Once upon a time, a radio commentator _______________ (insert name here) needed a topic of the day to get his listeners pissed off and angry at the dark skinned mongrel herd that is making America so much worse than it used to be. So, the radio show host spewed some venomous words about "all them people" who are taking money from us and buying drugs with it. Well, the listeners got pissed off and angry, because it was said so by ________ and it was now true. So, some backwoods controlled state legislators made it their mission to make such things not true anymore and laws get passed by said states that make sure them people don't get to spend our money on drugs no more. And we all live happily ever after.

So, why discuss costs? We are insuring the greater good after all.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by KCMax »

Yea, I don't doubt nefarious motives behind the policy and I don't think the policy is necessarily a good one, just that the arguments against it are probably not cost-related.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by FangKC »

There are many problems with drug testing for welfare assistance, they are:

Just because one parent in a household tests positive for drug usage doesn't always mean that they spent welfare money buying drugs. There are many two-parent households that get public housing, food stamps, etc., and they might both be working at low-paying jobs. One parent that doesn't do drugs might be in control of the money in the household. The drug-taking parent might be doing drugs with friends, and spent no household money on the drugs. The responsible parent can't control that. However, the responsible parent in the household might be spending welfare money on exactly what they should be -- food, clothes, utilities, etc.

Spouses keep secrets from each other. How many movies have been produced about suburban soccer moms with secret pill habits? Thus, in the case of denying welfare benefits because of drug testing, the responsible parent and the children are punished by the irresponsible parent's behavior.

What is the responsible parent to do? Throw the irresponsible party out of the house? What about the importance of the "family?" What about conservatives constant outcry about single-parent households? Absent fathers?

If applicants are found positive for drug usage, if they have children, their entire family loses the benefits (depending on the type of assistance they get), so innocent children are also affected, and yet the State takes no active role afterwards in making sure the children are cared for once the parent loses the benefit. The drug-testing legislation doesn't address this aspect. Most welfare benefits tend to favor families with children, because the initial legislation and prompting for welfare benefits was to make sure children were cared for when parents hit hard times. We are also dealing with the issue of addiction here, which is a public health and medical concern. The State does very little to provide help dealing with addiction.

Stopping drug usage is not easy--even for privileged wealthy people. How many times have Lindsey Lohan and Robert Downey Jr. been through rehab?

The public health aspect of this, that is usually ignored, is that a good number of people suffering from addiction issues also have underlying mental health issues, and they are self-medicating because that is the only way they can cope with their mental illness. And what is among the first things to fall under the knife when state legislators cut budgets? Mental health spending.

There are plenty of affluent and middle class people who suffer addiction issues too, but they often have health insurance to provide treatment for addiction.

The policy assumes all applicants for public subsidies and benefits are guilty of drug-taking. So in essence, one has to prove one's innocence.

Only certain abused substances are tested. There is no requirement that the welfare beneficiaries also be tested for liquor and cigarettes. Alcohol is probably just as harmful and more widespread as a "social ill." Why is it wrong to spend public assistance money on marijuana and not vodka, or beer?

Thus, if one is hoping to stop people from spending public money on substance abuse, then why is alcohol not part of the equation? More people are probably abusing alcohol than drugs. The policy singles out one particular social ill, and not others that are just as harmful to society, and the family itself.

It only punishes the very poor, and is selective. There are all sorts of public and tax subsidies and benefits that don't require drug testing. Homeowner mortgage deductions where one reduces their tax burden. Why should any substance abuser get to deduct mortgage interest from their taxes? That's unfair to someone who paid cash for their house and didn't take drugs.

Then there are property tax exemptions for low income people and seniors. The Earned Income Tax Credit. Deductions for medical expenses not paid by insurance. What if you are deducting drug rehab costs to reduce your public tax burden? If you were a coke head, why should you be able to get a tax benefit for medical treatment for substance abuse? What if the tax savings from your mortgage interest deductions are used to buy drugs?

Another is Tax-increment financing for businesses and developers. We hand over billions in public subsidies to people responsible for spending that money who might also be taking drugs or drinking too much. How do we know the public money, that makes their project doable, only allows them profits that they are using to buy beer on the weekends, or maintain their cocaine habit?

Does the policy really correct substance abuse? Do people who smoke marijuana or do cocaine just switch back to alcohol abuse to avoid the penalty?

The other thing I wonder about is that now that states are legalizing marijuana, or considering it, does that mean that marijuana usage is no longer a barrier to welfare recipients, since it's legal like alcohol is.

I can't help but wonder that this policy is more about self-righteous legislators, and voters who support them, are looking for ways to punish already poor people. If they really were concerned about drug abuse, then they would craft the legislation to ALSO help people get treatment for substance abuse, and also provide more funding for social workers to oversee programs that make sure the children don't suffer if their parent loses benefits because of substance abuse. They would also tie ALL public subsidies and benefits to mandatory drug testing. Thus, if taxpayer dollars are spent in anyway that benefits a person, drug testing is mandatory. For example, if Commerce Bancshares gets TIF money to upgrade a building, the bank management and board of directors must pass drug tests. After all, we don't want public tax dollars being used by people who take drugs.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by knucklehead »

I was just trying to make a simple point. Drug testing for pot is stupid. If they want to test for Cocaine, that is another matter. But I doubt if they would catch very many people at all and it almost certainly would not be cost effective.

Who the hell cares if an adult has shared a joint with someone in the past 3 weeks? You would have to be some sort of creep to even think that was significant. Just creepy.

Heck - just cause you test positive doesn't even mean you actually purchased the pot. Testing for pot is basically evil.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by phuqueue »

KCMax wrote:Is the point of drug testing to save money though? What is the rationale behind not giving welfare benefits to drug users? I presume its to (a) deter people from using drugs; and (b) not have state money go toward they purchase of more drugs.

I'm not sure the program can be judged through a simple cost/benefit analysis. If it costs more to administer the program than it does in recouping welfare money, but it deters a lot of people from using drugs, isn't it still a good program? I don't know if that's the case, but I don't think the point of the program should be "how much money can we save for the state?"
Drug testing welfare recipients isn't about saving money or protecting public health, it's about chipping away at the number of welfare recipients through any means possible. A major goal of modern conservative policymaking is to punish poor people for being poor. They use fiscal arguments to appeal to an apparently common sense idea that "if the government doesn't spend money on this program, it will spend less money overall," although this is frequently not true (see eg repealing ACA would actually cost more than keeping it; more nefariously, see Paul Ryan's budgets that slash social spending, supposedly to reduce the deficit, but also slash taxes on the wealthy to such an extent that the deficit would actually increase). Neither deficit reduction nor public health is an important goal of the current Republican party (if they were, the GOP would embrace single-payer health reform), but these are handy things to seize on to bring more people into your corner.

The Star Tribune article linked in the MSNBC piece from the original post makes the same point: “I don’t think anyone is under the illusion that this is about saving taxpayers money,” said Heidi Welsch, director of family support and assistance for Olmsted County. “This is punitive.” In the same article, the Republican who sponsored Minnesota's bill plainly states that his motivation was fiscal: “The question is, ‘What is happening to our dollars?’ ” Drazkowski asked. “Are the dollars going into someone’s veins? Or to the kids? Drug testing addresses that.” Of course, as Fang points out, even if the dollars are "going into someone's veins," they're probably also still going to the kids as well. To simply cut off benefits all together risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Don't expect anyone working on these bills to try to justify or correct that problem, though.

To address your point directly, though, I don't know if there's any data to argue either way about whether drug testing deters potential drug use to any meaningful degree. To show whether the program deters drug use, we'd need to compare the rate of conviction for the welfare-eligible population against the rate of conviction for the recipient population (alternatively, we could look at drug convictions among recipients before and after the testing program went into effect). Drug convictions are not a perfect measure of drug use but it's probably the most reasonable proxy that might be available.

While it doesn't address the point of whether drug testing is a deterrent, the Star Tribune article does give us some useful info about whether the program actually addresses a real problem in the first place:

But DHS data suggest that only a small fraction of people receiving state benefits actually have felony drug convictions in the past 10 years and could be subject to the random drug tests.

Just 0.4 percent of participants in the Minnesota Family Investment Program, the state’s main cash welfare program, have felony drug convictions, DHS records show. That compares with 1.2 percent of the state’s adult population as a whole.


If over the past ten years welfare recipients have been far less likely to use than the population at large, then it seems like money would be better spent on rehab programs for everyone, rather than on testing and punishing welfare recipients. When you consider, in general, how much more likely it is for a poor person to go to jail for the same offense than a rich person, the fact that conviction rates are that far apart suggests that the gap between actual drug usage rates might be even greater, although that's merely conjecture. It's also worth pointing out that all this info pertains only to Minnesota, so it's possible other states are different, but I don't see any good reasons to assume so.

To return to deterrence for a moment, I would also argue that if usage rates are sufficiently low (in this case, convictions don't provide a useful proxy, unfortunately), you do need to consider the fiscal side of testing as well. Certainly if you're actually saving lives, it may be worth the cost, but how many of those convictions are for use of nonlethal drugs like marijuana? There's no data on that, but considering how much more prevalent marijuana use is than use of any other drug in general, I'd bet that a lot of them are marijuana convictions. Now you're spending money to deter people from using something that is basically harmless (or at least no more harmful than legal substances that aren't being tested for) and in the event that they aren't deterred you're pulling their benefits. That seems in the first instance unnecessary and in the second, draconian.

If those Minnesota stats are indicative of nationwide conviction rates then I'd say, more than compulsory drug testing, the strongest deterrent against drug use is poverty. Poor people can't afford to buy drugs and therefore are less likely to use drugs. Hey, maybe Republican policy all along really was just meant to deter drug use.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by FangKC »

I've always wondered about people who are so draconian and punitive towards their fellow citizens. It makes me wonder if they were put under the microscope and all their personal decisions and details of their lives were scrutinized, if a lot of hypocritical things would be uncovered.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by loftguy »

Fang, phuqueuer, and Knucklehead.

Thank you. Your posts speak some wise and life-informed truth.

If I weren't so stoned I would have read them in greater detail...
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by Highlander »

FangKC wrote:I've always wondered about people who are so draconian and punitive towards their fellow citizens. It makes me wonder if they were put under the microscope and all their personal decisions and details of their lives were scrutinized, if a lot of hypocritical things would be uncovered.
I'd actually like to see more draconian punishments than we have now for many offenses regarding public safety. Nothing hypocritical at all. Many European countries have what most Americans would consider draconian punishment for traffic laws - it worked and it worked well. Police didn't have to waste a massive amount of manpower managing traffic; you simply did not drive drunk, drive at excessive speeds or take chances hitting pedestrians with your car. In Norway, the penalties were, respectively, 1 month in jail/1 months gross pay and loss of license for 1 year, 1 month's gross pay and loss of license for 6 months, and about 500 dollars (for not yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks).

Regarding drug testing, it's prohibitively expensive. We have about 2500 people in my office complex, it cost about 2 million per year to conduct random test - and that amounted to each person being tested once every three years or so. I do not think it would ever be cost effective with welfare recipients. Our management finally thought it was a waste of funds and dropped the whole thing.
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Re: drug testing costs MO more than it saves in welfare paym

Post by Demosthenes »

Drug tests are stupid and a waste of time. To pass, all a drug user has to do is stop using for a short time, or get synthetic urine if they smoke pot and don't have enough time. So easy. And of course once the test has been passed the user can go back to using. It's really just a formality, and waste of time.

I really hope that we as a society eventually see the light and legalize drugs. The enlightened nation sees the benefit in taxing and selling all drugs that the populace will undoubtedly use anyway, and spending some of that money to create programs to aid in addiction instead of sending everyone to jail.
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