State’s welfare recipients could undergo drug tests

Drug tests for residents receiving welfare assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families could soon become a reality in three Indiana counties.

HB 1007, which was authored by Rep. Jud McMillin, R-Brookville, passed the Indiana House of Representatives last week and will appear before the Senate Health Committee on Wednesday.

If enacted, the bill will encourage welfare recipients to consent to random drug testing. If they do not consent, welfare recipients could still become subject to screenings under probable cause. TANF is a grant program designed to help recipients find jobs.
But McMillin said the bill is not intended to police welfare recipients.

“It is not designed to just catch people who are using drugs and kick them off welfare,” McMillin said. “We’re not trying to penalize anybody by this, but we are trying to assign consequences for actions. We cannot continue to give people handouts. I would much rather give them hand-ups.”

According to the bill, individuals who consent to random drug screenings and test positive for controlled substances in their urine will not lose their welfare benefits immediately. Instead, they will be required to pass three consecutive, randomly administered drug tests.

But if the individual were to fail those, he or she would lose welfare benefits for six months.

Individuals who did not consent to a random drug test but are issued and fail screenings based on reasonable suspicion will automatically lose their benefits for six months.

“The consent is an effort to take care of any Fourth Amendment problems, but if you don’t consent, you can still be tested based on reasonable suspicion,” McMillin said. “But the failure to consent does not by itself give reasonable suspicion for a test.”

According to data collected by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, most estimates found that 5 to 10 percent of welfare recipients have substance abuse problems. These rates are a few percentage points more than the rate for the general population, but their report highlighted several pitfalls in laws requiring drug tests for welfare recipients.

Without medical review and confirmation testing on initially positive tests, the report said, urine screens cannot distinguish between the illicit use of street drugs and the legitimate use of certain prescription and over-the-counter drugs.

Improper testing procedures and mishandling of samples, the report continued, could also produce inaccurate results.

Currently, no statistics exist highlighting the number of Indiana welfare recipients abusing substances, McMillin said. But he sees this bill as a potential path for welfare recipients to lead themselves out of poverty.

“If we’re going to get our country moving back in the right direction, one of the things that we have to do is enact some meaningful entitlement reform and start giving people a reason to chase the American dream again,” McMillin said.

But under HB 1007, welfare recipients are not the only people who could be required to undergo drug testing. An amendment has since been added to include members of the Indiana General Assembly.

This part of the bill will likely have little effect, McMillin said, because he does not believe a drug-use problem is present in the state legislature. Rather, he said this section would force lawmakers to lead by example.

“If we are going to ask people to subject themselves to drug tests and ask them to consent, I don’t think there’s a problem with telling people in the legislature, ‘Look, do the same thing,’” McMillin said.

— Mark Keierleber