When my mother was my age, she found herself unexpectedly a single mother of three small children. Having relied on my father for financial support, she no longer had the capacity to care for three children without public assistance. For my mother, steeped in Maine values of independence, hard work, and self-reliance, it was extraordinarily difficult and embarrassing to ask for help even though she desperately needed it. A suspicionless drug test would only have compounded the humiliation.
A few people have asked me recently why the ACLU opposes drug testing for public aid recipients. Many people wonder why they should be subjected to random drug tests in their private sector jobs when public aid recipients aren't. In some cases, private companies are allowed to test employees for drug use in order to protect public safety. In other cases private companies, unfortunately, just don’t hold themselves to the same standard of privacy that the Constitution limits our government.
Furthermore, opposing drug testing for public aid recipients simply makes fiscal sense. The cost of administering these tests far outweighs the cost savings of booting people off public assistance. The cry for these policies reflects a fallacious stereotype: that those who need assistance are more likely to use drugs. While an estimated 8% of the general population uses drugs, only 2% of the applicants for the Temporary Assistance program in Florida were screened out because of positive drug-tests: Florida saved nothing by drug testing welfare recipients. Further financial disincentives include tests costs, personnel training, and the expense of implementing an appeals process for false positives.
Drug use is nearly identical across class and race, with middle class white people using some drugs at higher rates. (As I’ve blogged about here and here, this makes the racial disparities of war-on-drugs prosecutions particularly disturbing). However, random drug tests disproportionately impact the poor and, given racial disparity in income and wealth, communities of color. To suggest that public aid recipients are using drugs is discriminatory, punitive, and insulting to those struggling to make ends meet during one of the worst economic climates in decades.
In the end, judges in Michigan and Florida have ruled that it is a violation of the 4th Amendment to not have individualized suspicion before mandating a drug test. The constitutional rights of poor people are no less sacred than everybody else’s.
