Why Drug-Testing Welfare Recipients Is Wrongheaded and Nasty: Two Important Reasons

January 5, 2015

By now, most people have heard that drug-testing welfare recipients is a total waste of tax-payer money, yet the republican-led Michigan senate approved legislation that would burn another half-million dollars on such a scheme.  Just before 2015, Governor Rick Snyder signed the measure into law.  

Of course, beyond the waste of tax-payer money; the blatant, classist double standard (Has anyone at Goldman Sachs ever had to submit to a government-mandated drug-test?); and the humiliation individuals under “suspicion” must endure, such drug-testing schemes are wrongheaded and nasty for (at least) two broader, ideological reasons.

1.  The current means-tested system is bogus; we need a Universal Basic Income.

Currently, people in the U.S. must make the case to a giant, overworked, often cruel bureaucracy that they are indeed poor enough to receive our miserly state benefits.  It’s a system that is not working well, morally or economically.  Poverty and its accompanying social problems persists at an unacceptable rate for a wealthy, developed nation.  Once upon a time, prominent figures on the left and the right, from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Milton Freidman, demanded an end to means-tested welfare in favor of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI, sometimes referred to as Guaranteed Basic Income).  Now, decades later, the idea is gaining new traction, again on both the left and right. 

I hope we in the U.S. will continue to inject UBI into our national discourse, in favor of means-tested benefits for low-income earners, because I agree with UBI supporters, such as anthropologist David Graeber, who claim that once people no longer need to worry about their basic survival, they will be free to work on a range of projects in the arts and sciences which matter to them.  We all will benefit from the attendant breakthroughs.  

One knee-jerk objection to UBI I’d like to head off at the pass: Would Universal Basic Income cause inflation?  The answer: NO.

2.  The War on Drugs is bogus; we should move towards decriminalization.

In Michigan, lawmakers want to cut-off benefits for low-income earners who use marijuana, but why not do the same for those who use alcohol or caffeine?  The difference is nonsensical and arbitrary.  The mentality of the War on Drugs – with its billions in wasted resources and unjust racial disparities in criminal sentencing – is nonsensical and arbitrary.  Glenn Greenwald has illuminated as much in his work with the Cato Institute.  In 2009, he authored a report for Cato on drug decriminalization (note, that’s not all-out legalization) in Portugal.  His findings, echoed in a 2013 article in Der Spiegel, reveal that because Portugal has chosen to redirect enormous state resources away from arresting, prosecuting, and imprisoning people, and instead has devoted those resources towards treatment and harm reduction programs, they have had some of the most successful outcomes in the entire world.

On both counts, UBI and drug decriminalization, we see some agreement on the left and the right because such policies constitute much more ethical choices, compared to our current systems, and they also make economic sense.  It is this confluence of morality and economics which led Utah to try the novel idea of giving its homeless population homes, which has turned out to be a successful policy.  I hope more Americans, perhaps you reading this, and your neighbors, help those working now to turn the tide of our society in a more morally and economically viable direction.

Unfortunately, the Governor of Michigan and his republican-led senate have not yet caught the spirit.  With the rest of the country, they still perpetuate our broken means-tested model and our backwards, ineffective drug policies, the rotten consequences of which low-income earners often bear the brunt.  But when it comes to harmful policies for the poor, more and more people are beginning to recognize the truth in one of those slogans scrawled on a Parisian wall during the May 1968 student-worker movement: “This concerns everyone.”

H. W. Honeycutt, a Michigan native, is the author of “Universal Basic Income and Disability,” published by Red Lion Press.