Welfare and Drug use

I got an email that questioned the fairness of randomly testing wage earners for illicit drug use but not testing welfare recipients. The gist of the email, that was supposedly a letter to an editor of some newspaper somewhere, was that if we wage earners were tested in order to earn the money that was given to the welfare folk, why shouldn't they be tested in order to receive our money? Off the cuff, I agree wholeheartedly with the premise, and I am not afraid to say it, here on this never-read-blog, or in public. Then I realized that if this bog was ever going to receive any attention at all, I probably shouldn't write off the cuff, I should research y subjects, give the reader that comes back this far some meat to digest. So I did a Thompson-Gale search with the terms "welfare" + "drug use". Too many articles to read them all, but I found one that supports the premise, just not in the manner that one would expect.

It turns out that giving a welfare check to an injection drug user kills them. Yeah, a study done by Chris Riddell and Rosemarie Riddell, published in the Journal of Human Resources found "…an increase in the likelihood of an overdose in the days following heck arrival,…" There ya go, a liberal progressive reason not to give drug users free money, it kills them. Now, there may be some out there that see this as simply another vast right wing conspiracy to rid the nation of low-income drug users, but, it is actually a direct result of both the New Deal and the Great Society. I will personally lay the deaths of these druggies at the feet of Johnson, with his now 4 generations of welfare takers. Heck, I don't want to see anyone die, even the drug addicts that make our cities unsafe for law-abiding citizens, and here we have a great way to keep them alive…Stop giving welfare to drug addicts!