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from the unreasonable-searches-and-seizures dept.
Via Common Dreams, the American Civil Liberties Union reports
[December 3], a three-judge panel at the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a 2011 Florida law mandating that all applicants for the state's Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program submit to suspicion-less drug tests violates the Constitution's protection against unreasonable government searches.
[...]The 11th Circuit panel's order rejects arguments made by attorneys for the State of Florida that government has the authority to require people to submit to invasive searches of their bodily fluids without suspicion of wrongdoing, stating "the warrantless, suspicionless urinalysis drug testing of every Florida TANF applicant as a mandatory requirement for receiving Temporary Cash Assistance offends the Fourth Amendment."
[...]A 2012 review of the TANF mandatory urinalysis program found that the state of Florida spent more money reimbursing individuals for drug tests than the state saved on screening out the extremely small percentage.
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Thursday December 04 2014, @08:41PM
I think you're misapplying moral hazard here.
With respect to welfare and other assistance programs, the moral hazard is the perverse incentive to work less/not at all. For example, imagine if I get $500/mo in public assistance if my income is less than $500 a month, but I get no public assistance otherwise. My incentive is to keep my income at $499 a month, so I get the assistance, even if I'm capable of earning $800 a month, because $999 > $800. I created an incentive to behave poorly (deliberately earn less).
You're right that policy makers try to address such hazards. This is why such programs are temporary, and why you might have a "job search" requirement. There is indeed moral hazard risk in public assistance in general.
However, a drug testing regimen doesn't really speak to such a hazard. There's no "perverse incentive" going on to artificially take more drugs. It would be hard to argue TANF perversely incentivizes drug use, which is what you'd usually be talking about with a "moral hazard" risk.
At best, I guess you could argue that access to TANF reduces the risk of a hardcore drug user starving to death, so it removes the "incentive" from getting into drug treatment so you don't starve. As a policy lever, I don't think "let's bring back the risk of starvation!" is the one you pull to help drug abusers (especially since those are the people LEAST likely to respond rationally to such a risk).
I think it's far more likely this specific policy is borne of a prejudice that "If you give poor people money, they'll just spend it on drugs!" combined with the paternalism of "those are MY tax dollars and so I have the right to demand you only spend them in a way I approve of!"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by keplr on Thursday December 04 2014, @09:06PM
If we really cared about good policy and not moralizing, we'd simply have centers where drug users could go and get free drugs administered safely, in a clinical environment, supervised by medical professionals who gently encourage treatment for addiction. You're going to pay for these people one way or another. Our current way of "paying" for them is to have a massive, militarized, police force and clogged legal system treat them like criminals. There's also the cost of cleaning up after the crimes they commit stealing to get money to buy drugs, ruining property by turning it into undesirable and dangerous drug dens. Think about the extra insurance and security that has to be paid for against these problems. This might make a certain kind of person feel good--those dirty junkies are getting what they deserve--but it's much more expensive, not just in pure dollars but in wasted human potential. Think of all the man-years that are lost employing people as extra police that are only needed because we've chosen a non-optimized social policy.
If they actually care about saving money, as fiscal conservatives claim they do, why don't they support the first option? Of course, summarily executing drug users on the spot, Judge Dredd style, would be even cheaper yet. I'm sure there are fiscal-conservatives advocating for this option. At least they're logically consistent with their stated intentions.
I don't respond to ACs.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hoochiecoochieman on Friday December 05 2014, @03:33PM
What you describe exists in Norhern Europe. Here in Portugal a Socialist government tried to create a similar program in the 90s to control the damage that an out-of-control heroin epidemics was causing. All the conservatives became hysterical about it and started brainwashing all the Joes and Janes of the country.
It was really hard to bring anyone in this bandwagon. Most of the people, even the left-leaning ones, were all about: "Ugh, drugs bad" ,"Ugh no junkies shooting smack on my buck", "Uga uga".
So, it didn't happen. And the Portuguese Joes and Janes went on happily living their lives, watching the junkies shooting up in front of their children's schools, being mugged by srynge-toting junkies, watching people that can't even read driving brand new BMWs, and watching the government spend millions of their taxes in police, prisons, courts, etc. 90% of people in prison are there because of drug-related offenses. Aind't that a joy? At least, the government is not spending tax money in the so called "shooting houses". That would be too easy. Look, it could actually solve a lot of problems. We know we don't want that.
Fortunately, the epidemics slowed down and started to recede by itself. The vision of all the living corpses walking around killed any appeal that heroin had had in young people. We still have a lot of drug problems, but nothing compared to the 80s and 90s.
Conservatives live in a fantasy world. To solve things, they have to see outside of their boxes filled with prejudice, ignorance and irrational fears. They can't. And unfortunately, the conservative mumbo-jumbo is a lot more appealing to the stupid masses than any solution based on rationality.
In this particular case, it wasn't even about beliefs. The right-wing politicians that attacked the "shooting room" solution were just picking an easy subject to attack the Socialist government of the time. They knew they were being stupid, but they couldn't care less. They would cause any harm to anyone if that could bring them just a little bit of political leverage.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Thursday December 04 2014, @10:05PM
You can easily imagine someone getting food stamps to cover the food so she can still spend her meager income on drugs - and indeed most of us have probably met someone like that, at one point or another. In that case, one could argue that the food stamps are causing her (and the child!) harm, not benefit.
But obviously either that is a much smaller percentage of the population than the legislators must have imagined, or perhaps these expensive tests are not all that effective. And the Constitutional infirmity of the measure should have really been obvious anyway.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by sjames on Friday December 05 2014, @01:36AM
Actually, by the time an addict reaches that point, the food stamps aren't the reason the drug use continues. Without them, addict and child would starve while the drugs continued.