Thread: UA for Public Assistance?

So why not impose a drugs test for being a person in any capacity whatever? Why not try and punish everyone who provides this certain evidence of being a drug user? This is not just a vague, uncertain way of tackling the pettiest end of the drug problem: the drug addict who will sponge off himself by buying small quantities of drugs with his food entitlement. It is about winning political sympathy from others.

Many would consider it practically treasonable for welfare recipients to turn down a chance of becoming really rich, merely because it risked the waste of several uncomfortable years. With a difference in the sort of enterprise - difference which may not mean much to them - some do just that. My own opinion is that as long as customers will pay enough to make it worth a dealer's or courier's while to take a great risk of being caught, the war on drugs is lost. Legalising and regulating the inexpensive supply of unadulterated drugs of predictable strength would avoid much of the drug-induced death and property crime, and virtually all of the gangland murders. It worked with the Volstead Act.

That is just opinion, but I saw quoted, above, the words Hemingway lifted and added to, from the seventeenth-century Graham of Claverhouse, persecutor of the Covenanters: "There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those that have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never care for anything else thereafter." The amount "wasted" on misused food stamps (though food presumably ends up grown, sold and eaten, by people who are unlikely to be rich) is a drop in the ocean compared with that spent on giving the drug enforcement organisations their fix on the above.

The usual thing in developed nations is for the unemployed poor to receive rather more than they do in the US, for them to receive it in money rather than anything as freaky and stigmatising as food stamps or cards, and for a more sympathetic line to be taken by the employed and successful. Or should that be the unemployed or successful? For am I not right in thinking that plenty of more than 40 million Americans who receive it are doing socially useful, demanding jobs? Of course other nations experience abuses, but it isn't as if they don't get anything worth having in exchange. It reduces the feeling that those at different levels in the social pyramid are different species, entitled to prey one upon another.

This issue is about the political capital to be gained by persecuting two widely resented targets: drug users and welfare recipients, whether it has any beneficial effect or not. Of course someone of a different political complexion may have to look for his political capital elsewhere, by doing the same to a different target group. But if it were about the prevention of crime, I know a particularly revolting form of crime, committed by a few, which could be prevented by depriving the innocent of a right which nobody desperately needs. Make everyone use cartridge razors.