Negotiating the Florida Drug Tests

Negotiating the Florida drug tests – mean spiritedness and Florida’s teavangelists.

Rick Scott appeared on CNN this morning to argue for Florida’s newest Reagan emulation. All welfare recipients must now submit to a drug screen in order to receive benefits.

The good teavangelists of Florida seem not to know that illegal drugs have half-lives and clearance rates that any serious substance abuser will know about. It is entirely possible to indulge in something illicit on Friday and test negative for that something on Monday.

As a retired clinical laboratory scientist, who supervised a forensic drug-testing lab, I have many concerns about the reliability and accuracy of mandated drug screens, particularly those available at $10/ person. What are the qualifications for testing personnel, who may collect urine and initiate a chain of custody, will collection be observed and who may observe collection, what drugs will be included in the panel, and at what limits of detection? Will recipients and applicants be required to pay for confirmation of positive screening tests? What facilities will be authorized to collect, analyze, and report such results.

These are all valid concerns. It is very easy to invalidate a chain of custody. Testing by non-licensed facilities and personnel should be forbidden.

While I have no doubt that some welfare recipients use illegal substances, so do many others who receive funding from Florida. Will athletic scholarship holders be required to undergo such testing as well as be tested for performance enhancing drugs? Will prison guards undergo testing? Will legislators and their staffs be subject to drug testing, to include ethanol during working hours?

There is no clear evidence that the poor abuse drugs at a significantly higher rate than do the wealthy. Will bankers and investors be tested for cocaine before they trash the economy yet again and receive bonuses for doing so?

This is essentially a continuation of Reagan’s attack upon welfare queens. Now that the teavanagelists and GOP have shipped all the jobs overseas they want to enact yet another obstacle in the paths of the poor seeking to survive in today’s economy. I watched Governor Scott trying to defend this law today. He had no documentation beyond an unnamed study... His contempt for the poor of Florida was instantly evident. He is decidedly mean-spirited, a man who is squarely in the pocket of lobbyists and demagogues.