On Monday we got some great news in Florida: following an ACLU lawsuit, the state will no longer be allowed to make people applying for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) take a drug test in order to get the assistance they need.
The court reaffirmed that testing urine for drugs is a search, that application for a public benefit cannot depend on an unconstitutional condition, and that the state of Florida had fallen woefully short of establishing any need to conduct suspicionless testing.
The judge's order also chastised the Florida legislature for failing to heed lessons it should have learned in a state-commissioned pilot study of TANF recipients in Florida: they are no more likely to use illegal drugs than the population at large.
The ugly stereotypes that warp public perception of welfare recipients have no basis in fact or science. Those who need help are no different than you or me. They are not children of a lesser god, exiled to a Fourth-Amendment-free zone to be treated like suspected criminals.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform/victory-florida-no-illegal-drug-testing-welfare
