At the last annual conference of the Drug and Alcohol Testing Industry Association (DATIA), a powerful lobby that pushes for increased drug testing, keynote speaker Robert DuPont addressed a packed San Antonio Marriott: "If they test positive," he shrieked, "they go to jail that day! No discussion! No discretion!"
DuPont was once the director of the federal government's notorious drug misinformation campaign, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, while simultaneously serving as the White House drug czar under Richard Nixon. After he helped implement the War on Drugs, DuPont teamed up with Peter Bensinger, himself an ex-Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) chief, to found their very own corporation that, they boast online, "provides a full-service solution to drug testing management." Today, they spend their time lobbying for the expanded use of drug tests and the continued prohibition of cannabis. Bensinger, DuPont and Associates isn't the only moneyed interest pushing for pervasive bladder invasion. At the DATIA conference, a representative of LabCorp, a drug test manufacturer that grew out of Roche Pharmaceuticals, remarked that he's looking forward to mandatory drug testing of all potential welfare recipients inevitably becoming "a huge market of drug testing." His colleagues at LabCorp are fighting their darndest to usher in that era, focusing their lobbying interests on Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who led his Party's effort to expand mandatory drug testing to anyone applying for welfare after receiving a total of $15,000 from the drug test lobby.
Perhaps the most helpful legislative puppet of drug testing corporations is Congressman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), who led his Party's successful effort to amend federal rules that had disallowed states from drug testing applicants for unemployment benefits in February of 2012. Camp owns upwards of $81,000 in stock of LabCorp and Abbott Laboratories, another corporation that deals in drug tests.
Since 2011, there has been a troublesome upsurge in states debating drug testing applicants for welfare and other benefits. Today, seven states require welfare applicants and recipients to submit to urine analysis.
This month, welfare drug testing bills have moved through the legislatures of Arkansas, North Carolina, Texas and Kansas. Texas and Kansas have learned from the errors of Florida's and Georgia's bills, which were deemed in violation of the Fourth Amendment as searches devoid of reasonable suspicion. Last Tuesday, the Governor of Kansas signed his state's bill into law. Today, Republican lawmakers are reviving the hysterical, racially charged rhetoric of "welfare queens" that characterized conservative America's support for Reagan's War on Drugs and his own gospel of drug tests, first made clear in a 1989 White House report. Ostensibly to "save the tax dollars of regular hardworking Americans," lawmakers throughout state and federal government have responded to the endless stream of fat campaign donations that the private drug testing lobby has floated to Washington, despite the fact that potential public assistance recipients are no more likely to use illegal drugs than any other segment of society.
But requiring the poorest, least politically powerful and most disenfranchised Americans to submit to drug tests, which in turn makes those same people even poorer and less visible, is a logical outgrowth of the Drug War. In many states, drug convictions entail denials of public housing, food stamps, welfare checks and unemployment benefits, voting disenfranchisement and difficulty finding employment. Testing programs, just like incarceration, only exacerbate the illnesses of the few would-be recipients who do suffer from drug addictions by further impoverishing and marginalizing them. The history of the Drug War is replete with phony logic and exploitative motivation. It is in the prohibitionist spirit that today's lawmakers are pushing for expanded mandatory drug testing of their most impoverished and desperate constituents. Because in the backwards world of the War on Drugs, there's no better way to help the poor and hungry than by making them poorer and hungrier.
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Jonathan Green is a sophomore majoring in philosophy and American Studies. He can be reached at Jonathan.Green@tufts.edu.
