- Joined
- May 18, 2010
- Messages
- 2,481
- Reaction score
- 968
- Location
- Columbia, SC
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Conservative
Please, dude. Due process and "innocent until proven guilty"...those have NOTHING to do with drug testing anybody. Even the 4th amendment is a stretch. There's absolutely nothing wrong with a governing body deciding that those who receive benefits (typically mothers of young children) should be and remain drug free as a stipulation of receiving and staying on government assistance....if done properly, randomly, and without advanced warning. If somebody had thought to piss test my idiot mother before we qualified for food stamps and welfare perhaps I would have ended up in an environment where that money actually went towards clothing, feeding, and providing medical care to me, the minor child. Instead, everything we received was used for drugs or traded for drugs for my mother...and I, the minor child, suffered for it.
I'm not the only kid that happened to. My mother met her dealer and many of her drug-using buddies at the government office where she applied for and picked up her benefits...and all of 'em had children living much the same way I did. Sure, the majority of welfare parents aren't drug users. But if the justification for providing benefits is a societal obligation to the children of the poverty-stricken we're missing a significant chunk of children by not providing investigative social services to monitor the environment in which the children live. That should include checking for the existence of drug use, abuse, living conditions, etc. It is far too easy in this system for children to continue living in neglect because the system isn't really built to do much beyond cut checks.
Government welfare benefits are not guaranteed to you (maybe for seniors, but that's a different story entirely). You have to qualify for them based on family size, income, and/or ability. Why is it such a huge stretch to demand that you also be law abiding and drug-free to qualify?
A very good point. I say drugs more than any other factor is why the cycle of poverty in our poor neighborhoods is so hard to break. Drug use just sucks up someone's will and passion to do much of anything else.