title:  Michigan Has Been Drug Testing Welfare Recipients; You Won’t Believe How Many Tested Positive
text: The state of Michigan has, since the GOP takeover of 2010, been a petri dish for libertarian Republican policies, and nearly all of them have been complete and total failures.While most of the nation knows about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, in which the town s residents are drinking lead-filled water because Republicans insisted on changing the source of Flint s water in a money saving exercise.There have been fewer headlines about another of Michigan s experiments. People who occasionally need help from the government have long been demonized by Republicans. It s assumed that somehow, just because someone is poor, they are somehow pulling something on the rest of us. Clearly, that makes no sense at all, but the stereotype lives on. Most predominantly, Republicans insist that poor people must, just must, have substance abuse problems, so before being given the most paltry sustenance possible, they must be tested. That s what Michigan is doing. They are drug testing some welfare recipients. Guess how many positive results came up? None, not a single one.This wasn t done on a particularly large scale. Republicans passed a new law two years ago that allowed the state to drug test any welfare recipients that might be suspected of drug abuse. After the law passed, Michigan did one intelligent thing: they tested it. For one year beginning in October of 2015, they tested 27 potential substance abusers out of 443 welfare recipients.DHHS conducted the pilot in Allegan, Clinton and Marquette counties between Oct. 1, 2015, and Sept. 30, 2016, the report said.Although a total of 443 people in those counties were either receiving or applied for cash assistance during those 12 months, previous court decisions limited the actual drug-testing to individuals who failed a substance-abuse screening test.The report said that 27 of the 443 people were identified as potential substance-abusers. Of those 27, 10 were already getting treatment through Community Mental Health, three had their cases closed for other reasons and 14 went through the screening test.Source: Michigan LiveOne of those tested  was found by a clinician to have a reasonable suspicion of use of a controlled substance and require a substance use test.  The person agreed to the test, but the case, for some reason, was closed prior to the test. Not a single other person even raised a red flag.These results are hardly surprising. In states where they have enacted drug testing for welfare recipients, the results have been similar.It s doubtful these results will do much. Republicans feel that poor people must be punished, that any assistance must be micromanaged, while corporate welfare needs no oversight whatsoever.In 2015, despite lack of evidence that programs in other states accomplished their goals, three more states have implemented similar regimes. And a ThinkProgress survey of the 10 states that now have these programs in place found that they continue to be expensive and not especially effective. All told, states spent another $850,909.25 on the testing regimes in 2015 to uncover just 321 positive tests in more than one state, none at all.This came after a February 2015 ThinkProgress examination of the seven states that had implemented drug testing programs for TANF applicants and/or recipients. At that time, those states had spent about $1 million to create and implement a complicated system of screening and urine testing and found just 407 drug users.In other words, this supposedly fiscally conservative position is not at all about saving money. It s expensive and punitive. But hey, it s Trump s America, where being an unscrupulous billionaire gets you the presidency and being legitimately poor labels you a criminal.Featured image via Sean Gallup/Getty Images