I'm a substance abuse counselor and I don't think people should be drug screened in order to receive assistance. My views are based primarily on drug addicts rather than occasional users. Costs and treatment lengths are also based on the agency I worked for and the knowledge I gained from interviewing with agencies within my county. YMMV.
If someone tests positive on a drug screen it doesn't necessarily mean they don't legitimately need financial assistance. Recreational users don't do drugs on a daily basis. Some might only do them once a month or even less. Think of it like you would a social drinker; many of them only have a drink or two at special occasions and often times their friends will pay for the drink if they are unemployed. Many recreational users are the same way, they only do a drug at a special occasion. Due to their financial situation; a good friend will be the one to get them high. Good friends will also give the person with no to little income some of their drugs if they have enough to spare. So, it is quite possible that the person failing the drug screen does not spend so much as a penny on drugs and still legitimately needs the financial aid to help them put food on the table and pay other bills. Especially in the case of single parents.
There are currently many addicts receiving assistance and many others that will need it; because, through no fault of their own, became unemployed. Yet, they'll be denied because of their addiction when it had nothing to do with their change in financial status.
I've heard, and read about, how most people throughout the country (including politicians of all parties) bitch, moan, and groan about how it's not right that insurance companies deny coverage to individuals with preexisting conditions. Denying assistance to someone solely based on being an addict is no different than what the insurance companies are doing. A bit hypocritical don't you think? It's also my opinion, that it's also discriminatory in practice because you're denying someone something based on a legitimate medical condition. Like it or not, addiction is a legitimate disease.
Many addicts are impoverished and not solely because of their addiction. Many are on probation and paying rather hefty sums in court costs, probation fees, and public defender fees. This does not help their impoverishment.
Then, you have to take into account they also have to pay for any court-ordered substance abuse counseling. Many agencies make the client pay for their weekly and/or random testing too. None of which is cheap. Counseling varies from $25 per week and up, per group. The drug screens, IIRC, cost them either $15 or $25 and upward. That's $40 - $50 per week based on 1 group and 1 drug screen per week, for a minimum of 12 weeks.
Though that's the minimum, the counselor can assess more than 12 weeks and more than one group per week if they feel the client needs it; and many times they do. Should they fail a drug screen they can have the results sent to the lab, but if it comes back with a positive result, that's another $25 hit they have to take.
There is also the slip/lapse factor. (not to be confused with relapse) Every addict has at least one. I've never met or counseled one that hasn't. Nor has any counselor I know. After they slip, (and providing their probation officer follows our recommendation to not violate them), they have to restart the entire program over. This only further adds to their impoverishment.
Yes, some will spend the money on drugs and alcohol, but some won't. By denying financial assistance to all that fail a drug test, especially the ones that had a slip, you're unjustly punishing the one's that are honestly trying. Overall, by denying addicts the assistance they need, you are actually financially hurting them even further, rather than helping them.
The agency I worked for had our counties drug court contract, and is also the largest substance abuse agency in the county. I digress. By populous, my county is one of the 10 largest in the state of Florida. So, it's not like we're small. Two of my responsibilities there included ordering the drug screening materials and testing the clients.
The test panels range from a single panel dip, to IIRC as many as 32 or more. Obviously the more panels on the dip, the more they cost.
We used, single and 6 panel dips, with 6 panel being the norm. A single purchase order, not including PH strips to test for validity, the urine cups, and temperature strips, were costing us a small fortune.
The cost for the state would be significantly larger than what we were spending for our 3 offices. You're looking at the state spending millions of dollars rather than the few thousand each month. The cost to the state would inflate even more if it were to send each individual specimen to a lab for testing, rather than ordering the panels, and doing it on site. Then there's also the training costs involved they'd have to pay. It's not fiscally responsible for the state to incur these types of liabilities when it claims to not have money for things like education.
Conducting drug screens is also quite time consuming. Most of the state offices that handle welfare are understaffed. We only had 16 people working for our entire company. With 2 females, and 2 males doing the screens, it would take on average, up to 3.5 hours to screen everyone in the main office. We did on average between 40-50 people a night. There's paper work involved, then even more paperwork when someone challenges the results of a positive test. You also have people that can't go when you need them too, so you have to wait on them. This all makes the entire process time consuming. There are only a limited amount of welfare offices in any given county and it's usually not very many. These offices are fairly busy throughout the day and they are already having a hard time keeping up with the case load. Drug testing would only further encumber their already understaffed offices. To put it simply, the don't have the time, nor do they have the man power to do this. The state would have to hire a considerable amount of people to be able to efficiently do this.
Employees and benefits cost money. They would be looking at having to spend millions of dollars in addition to the aforementioned I listed above. This money has to come from somewhere and the best way to get it would be to raise your taxes. The biggest reason(s) I hear supporting mandatory screening and anti socialized health care are, "I don't want to have to pay higher taxes to support drug addicts on welfare" and "I don't want my taxes to raise to have to fund health care." Yet, you're willing to risk a tax increase to fund a mandatory screening process for welfare. Sounds like more hypocrisy to me.
Another thing that has to be factored in is, most of the commonly used drugs are out of your system on average between 3-5 days. Marijuana is the biggest exception. It takes between 4-6 weeks on average. The addict that wants to cheat the system and get the "free money" will endure the hell of detoxing for a few day in order to get that check. There are also many ways to successfully mask a drug screen. These 2 facts also make mandatory drug testing impractical.
To you naysayers that say things like "we overlook drug use." No we don't, we have some of the harshest laws on the planet when it comes to drug offenders. We also have more people in jail/prison for drug charges than any other crime.
You seldom hear of people getting mad at someone for having Cancer, Diabetes, Lupus, Heart Disease, etc, people are sympathetic towards them. If you have the disease of addiction, its quite the opposite. People think you're scum, they also shun and ostracize you. We as a society need to change the backwards mentality we have towards addicts. Addiction is no less a disease than any of the aforementioned ones in this paragraph.
