Question for Floridians

[ChuckJ]

Anyone here know how many public assistant recipients were drug tested as a result of the Welfare / drug testing law in Florida?

[Linda]

I binged the answer for you, because I had no idea..

https://www.aclu.org/blog/criminal-law-reform-racial-justice/just-we-suspected-florida-saved-nothing-drug-testing-welfare

The article was written in 2012

In the four months that Florida's law was in place, the state drug tested 4,086 TANF applicants. A mere 108 individuals tested positive. To put it another way, only 2.6 percent of applicants tested positive for illegal drugs — a rate more than three times lower than the 8.13 percent of all Floridians, age 12 and up, estimated by the federal government to use illegaldrugs. Now might be a good time to remind folks that in the debate over the bill, Gov. Rick Scott argued that this law was necessary because, he said, welfare recipients used drugs at a higher rate than the general population.

[DefiantSix]

4,086, out of how many thousands of recipients?

If that doesn't sound like a cherry-picked sampling, then I don't know what does...

[ChuckJ]

Thee 4,086 number is the only one I could find before I posted the question.

I also found that in 2003 there were just under 115,000 people in Florida receiving public assistance.

[J P Sousa]

4,086, out of how many thousands of recipients?

If that doesn't sound like a cherry-picked sampling, then I don't know what does...

There is a science to sampling.

I worked for a county that ran a Federal Job Training program. I was put in charge of an office that was supposed to check for compliance with Federal regulations. The person who did it before me found very little in the way of non compliance. I researched " random sampling methods ", and found a book of "random numbers" which I used to review applications. I don't remember the actual number of bad applications but it was substantially more than previously found.

I have more respect for "random numbers". Some may point to "computer generated random numbers", but I have read computers don't really produce TRUE random numbers. That may not be true anymore but at the time it was a concern.
.

[DefiantSix]

I could always be wrong, but this sounds to me like a bureaucracy who - due to their own inertia and concerns that it may negatively impact next fiscal year's budget if it turns out that as many of the recipients as the lawmakers believe couldn't pass a whiz quiz - doesn't want to implement the drug screening at least as much as the recipients don't want their gub'mint goodies dependent upon passing a whiz quiz, and so they selected as many as they were reasonably sure could piss clean, seeded a few known positives, in order to make it look like the sampling might be truly "representative", and proceeded to do their best to structure the results so as to undermine the lawmaker's argument, so they'd shut up and leave them alone to their bureaucracies.

[docstew]

4,086, out of how many thousands of recipients?

If that doesn't sound like a cherry-picked sampling, then I don't know what does...

If I have to pee in a cup on a regular basis to get my gov't check, so should they. If I test hot, I lose my gov't check. So should they.

We, as a society, should not be subsidizing illegal behavior, and public assistance for those who participate in illegal behavior is a de facto subsidy.

[obumazombie]

If you want less of something, tax it.

[thundley4]

If I have to pee in a cup on a regular basis to get my gov't check, so should they. If I test hot, I lose my gov't check. So should they.

We, as a society, should not be subsidizing illegal behavior, and public assistance for those who participate in illegal behavior is a de facto subsidy.

I have to pee in a cup for my non-government check just to pay taxes so those idiots can sit at home.

[Texacon]

Another question to ask would be; how many dropped from the roles rather than piss in the cup?

KC