From the Raleigh News&Observer
Applicants for North Carolina’s cash and worker-training welfare program would have to undergo a drug test to qualify for benefits and pay for it upfront under a bill approved Monday night by the Republican-led state Senate following debate on whether such a get-tough strategy goes too far.
Senators agreed in a largely party-line 35-15 vote to pass legislation that would demand testing for applicants and recipients for the state’s Work First program. …
The current law already requires local social service agencies to screen for substance abusers using experts or doctors in addiction fields, but no drug testing is required. …
“Our drug problem that we have in this state is not something that we can just stick our head in the sand and hope it goes away,” said Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell. …
But Democratic speakers called the measure mean-spirited. …
Sen. Angela Bryant, D-Nash, asserted that the bill is also unconstitutional because applicants are being forced to submit bodily fluids for testing even when there’s no suspicion that the person is a drug user.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/04/22/2843236/nc-senate-oks-drug-testing-requirement.html#storylink=cpy
Just another example of how the always hypocritical GOP, who mouth slogans about ‘freedom’ and ‘individual liberty’ are primed to use the force of government against the individual. These knuckle-draggers want to decide when people can divorce, what a doctor can or cannot do with their patients, institute voter suppression, insure the unfettered access to guns by criminals and the mentally unbalanced (while preserving the profits of the gun manufacturers) and on and on.
The politicians who are responsible for this egregious violation of individual privacy should be required to pee in a cup in public before they get a paycheck from taxpayers.
I had to chuckle when I read the part about bodily fluids- very “Dr. Strangelove” -esque.
Yeah, and what Dionysis said too. Hypocrisy at its’ finest.
I always like to play a little game called “Substitute ‘Guns’ with ‘Drugs”, as in
“Our (gun) problem that we have in this state is not just something we can stick our heads in the sand and hope it goes away.”
This one’s fun too- “(Drugs) don’t kill people, people kill people”
Of course, the rabid weasels that pushed this Big Brother initiative made sure they would not be subjected to the same indignities themselves. The Senate used a parliamentary trick to avoid even a vote to include themselves in this, while the bill’s chief sponsor, Republican Jim Davis, whined and sniveled that “he’d be willing to submit to a drug test so as long as he wouldn’t have to pay for it if he passed the test.”
Notice that he has no problem with the most impoverished paying for this test up front, but he wants to make sure the $100 cost is not borne by him, but by taxpayers. And also note his intriguing comment “…IF he passed the test.”
That pretty well says it all.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/NC-Senate-OKs-drug-testing-requirement-for-welfare-4454601.php#ixzz2RTdsJWKg