Welfare Drug Testing

In our area, drug use is an epidemic. The drug of choice is heroine. Have you ever been around anyone on heroine? It's tragic.

Heroine is 97% addictive on first use. That means after first use, most people cannot stop without intervention. It is also extremely lethal because overdose comes too quickly. Emergency personnel carry Narcan to reverse overdose and save lives.

Everyone here knows someone who is or has been an addict, from what I've seen.

You can also imagine that leads to a lot of resentment amongst many hard-working, tax paying citizens. There is a push here, and I'm sure elsewhere, to require drug testing before welfare benefits are given. They want benefits to be refused for anyone who tests positive for drugs.

I sort of get it. They are creative. They trade benefits for drugs or drug money. It's a viscous cycle for addicts.

But there's a side that everyone is missing. Drug testing might be the answer, but a simple denial of benefits isn't the answer.

Like usual, I find myself on the opposite side of popular social belief and for good reason.

When I was younger, my family was poor. My mom worked part time jobs or not at all. She was a sorry example of a stay at home mom, but that's what she did when we were young. She didn't go to work full time until I was in high school.

My dad worked a factory job and usually in management. However, his pay was low. Not nearly enough to support a family of five.

For a lot of years, we were on welfare. My mom used to go once a month and stand in line for bulk items. She got cheese, rice, peanut butter and whatever else was offered. Sometimes those were the only things in our house to eat. She got a small amount in food stamps. She used those to buy things for her and my dad.

My dad was involved in drugs. I don't know exactly what his usage was like, but it'd be odd for him to not have used at all.

Granted, it wasn't much, but welfare fed us kids a lot of our younger years. We got handouts from my grandma. She'd buy cereal and milk. When my mom worked at the grocery store, we'd get meats that we're going bad or other items that couldn't be sold.

I have to believe that if drug testing were a requirement back then for welfare, ours would have been denied.

The problem with this methodology is that the people who would suffer the most are the kids. We wouldn't have gotten fed.

Stopping welfare benefits for families when the parents are drug users only complicates life more for innocent children. We would effectively make children deal with drug using parents on empty stomachs.

The theory is flawed. If there is mandatory drug testing, our government needs to be prepared to remove and care for children when the parents test positive. I'm not sure that our government agencies are ready for that influx of foster children. The courts would be inundated and the children would get shoved back in the home and without food.

I share all of that to give you something to think about. Think about those things when you are electing politicians who want to pass bills on this. It's coming. It's an ongoing issue that has to be addressed. Make sure your asking your local politicians who's going to feed the children before they deny benefits.