This is a solidly-Repuke newspaper in a solidly-Dem city, so I tailored the letter for the audience.
On the topic of drug-testing welfare recipients:
We must wonder why Representative Craig Blair has decided to declare war on West Virginia’s poor. Blair’s reasoning for his attempt to broadly increase government power is that, since private employees are often drug-tested for their jobs, why shouldn’t recipients of public assistance also be drug-tested? Well Representative Blair, there are quite a few reasons. Please let me explain a few.
Firstly, private employers get to do a lot of things that the government doesn’t have the power to do. The Constitution does not limit what standards and rules employers can set, save for ensuring that there can’t be racial discrimination in hiring. The Constitution does, however, limit what the government can do. Specifically, the Constitution protects people from “unreasonable search and seizure.” We are protected from our government to a much greater extent than we are protected from private employers and individuals, and for good reason—if we feel that an employer’s rules are unfair, we can always choose another employer. But we cannot choose another government. This proposed legislation will have the practical effect of completely revoking the Constitutional rights of needy people, permitting the government to invade the body privacy of people who have done nothing wrong, and who often have no other alternative to feed their families than government assistance (especially considering the Republican-caused financial meltdown currently in progress.) I suspect that the Supreme Court will likely toss it out, which makes Representative Blair’s blatant power-grab an enormous waste of taxpayer dollars to boot.
Some of us might say, well if the poor and the unemployed have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be worried, right? Wrong. There are literally hundreds of non-drug substances that can cause false-positive drug test results, including things like poppy seed muffins, asthma medications, cold medicines, NSAIDs like ibuprofen and naproxen, vitamin supplements like riboflavin (which is often in the form of hemp seed oil,) and defective testing kits. A defective test can be remedied with a re-test, but a false-positive caused by a legal substance cannot without expensive blood testing or hair testing. For those who think that it could never happen to them: it could. Is Representative Blair honestly proposing that West Virginia throw away its tax dollars on costly blood-testing for the sake of some Food Stamps? Has West Virginia become a wealthy nanny state when we weren’t looking? Since when did drug dealers start taking the Food Stamp EBT card? Or Medicaid, for that matter?
Blair even wants to drug-test in order for working people to get their unemployment benefits. I think that Representative Blair has the mistaken idea that unemployment benefits are “welfare.” They are not. Employees contribute to the unemployment insurance premiums that their employers pay, and collect when they lose their jobs. Unemployment is more like Social Security than welfare—you pay into the system, and then you get back your fair share when times get hard. Why does Representative Blair believe that West Virginia’s working people deserve to have their Constitutional rights revoked just because they’ve fallen victim to a job loss? Hundreds of thousands of West Virginia blue-collar working people are waiting to hear his answer. Why should we have to give up our Constitutional rights to privacy in order to collect the money that we worked hard to earn? What’s next—drug testing in order to get your paycheck, with any failed tests leading to a forfeiture of hard-earned pay?
One must wonder why a Republican, supposedly from a party of “small government,” is so determined to vastly increase the government’s power over us. Thanks to the Bush administration’s stupid and selfish financial policies, millions of us stand to become unemployed, poor, and in need of that assistance in the near future. I have a suggestion for Representative Blair and his Republican colleagues across the United States who wish to drug-test the poor and the unemployed: let us know when you’ve drug-tested Wall Street bailout recipients, corporate leaders, and every other robber baron who’s benefitting from the government largess that we, The People, are paying for. After all, they’re getting a heck of a lot more taxpayer money than poor people and unemployed people could ever hope to get, and they’re getting it thanks to a situation that Blair’s own party created during the past eight years by letting the wealthy do whatever they wanted without oversight or regulation. In the meantime, lay off of the poor and the unemployed working people, before you find yourself standing in that unemployment line right along with us. We see what you’re trying to do—and we’re not going to fall for it. You cannot pit the “little people” against each other in order to distract us from what the irresponsible rich have done to this country. Poor people are not to blame, and West Virginians know it.
Brandy H*****
Morgantown, WV
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