There’s a meme going around facebook, about drug-testing for welfare recipients. I saw it yesterday and immediately blocked it, but today I’m still angry enough that I figured I should write about it. Unfortunately, I can’t find it again… I don’t know if there’s a way for Facebook users to find a list of content they’ve blocked.
Even more unfortunately, I could find lots of similar images, because the sentiment is so common that it gets recirculated frequently.
There’s a few different arguments being made here… practicality, that money can be saved by not paying welfare to those who test positive. Fairness, that workers have to be drug tested so everyone should be. A free will argument, that addicts can stop using drugs on a whim when it becomes inconvenient to them. And finally retribution, that people who use drugs should be punished with destitution, starvation, and death.
That’s a lot to unpack, but I’ll start with the easy one. Welfare drug testing is not practical, because it costs far more to conduct the drug testing than is saved by cancelling the benefits to those few who test positive. This is mostly because of the low baseline rates of drug use, even lower in the welfare population than the general population. This makes sense, right? Drugs cost money. It should not be a surprise.
Just like I said yesterday, it’s great when you can avoid a difficult ethical dilemma because the premises are unsound.
On to the fairness issue. The problem with this is that two wrongs don’t make a right. Your employer treats you like crap, and you think the solution is to drag other people down to your level? There are other options. Get a better employer, a better contract, a better lawyer, or a better union. You shouldn’t have to put up with that kind of treatment. I don’t get routinely or randomly drug tested, and I have the constant danger of killing people with a moment’s inattention.
Can people stop? Some illegal drugs aren’t significantly addictive, like marijuana, mushrooms, or ecstasy. With these, you could very well reduce usage by preventing welfare payments. But the problem arises that less addictive drugs are also the least harmful. Those drugs which are the most debilitating, the most harmful, the most expensive to treat, these are the drugs which people would be unable to stop using upon request. In other words, if welfare drug testing worked to reduce drug usage, it would only reduce the use of those drugs that we really shouldn’t care if people use or not.
Retribution… well, that one’s harder to argue with. If someone thinks that addicts ought to starve to death I’m not going to convince them otherwise in a single essay. That shows either a lack of empathy so severe as to be considered sociopathy, or a level of ignorance so severe as to require years of education. Either one, I think, would be better treated by experts than by me.
I’m just here to keep people who ought to know better from clicking Like and Share without thinking about what that actually means.
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