Arizona Drug Tested Welfare Recipients — Here Are the Shocking Results
When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker announced his candidacy for
the Republican presidential nomination on July 13, he peppered his
34-minute speech with
a laundry list of deeply conservative policy prescriptions. Among them
was a requirement — much like the one in the state budget he signed less than 24 hours before the event — that welfare recipients pass a drug test before collecting public assistance benefits.
"In Wisconsin, we enacted a program that says that adults who are
able to work must be enrolled in one of our job training programs before
they can get a welfare check," he said. "Now, as of the budget I just
signed, we are also making sure they can take a drug test."
The Republican romance with legislation meant to complicate
the process of delivering aid to low-income residents or, as critics
argue, defame and shame them, can be traced back to 2009. In November of
that year, newly arrived GOP Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona announced that the cash-strapped state would begin testing adults if the state had "reasonable cause" to believe they were getting high.
"We don't want people who are abusing drugs to be on welfare," GOP state Rep. John Kavanagh told the Arizona Republic in 2009, "because that means that the taxpayers are subsidizing and facilitating illegal drug use."
But an examination of Arizona's experiment reveals a
flawed policy that has failed to accomplish its stated goal of saving
the state money, and has instead done little more than further
stigmatize poverty and marginalize the poor.
The results are thin: According to USA Today, more than 87,000
welfare recipients went through Arizona's program in the three years
after it began. The total number of drug cheats caught was exactly one —
a single positive result, which saved the state precisely $560.More..........
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