Blame the Welfare Crowd!

Blame the Welfare Crowd!

By: Ryan Young

Oh Bill! Another caller on the open line calling for cuts to welfare recipients. 90% of them scamming the system said Bill. If they can cut jobs and services they can cut all the people taking advantage of the welfare! I cringed at the thought of the collective heads of hundreds or maybe thousands of uneducated curmudgeons nodding in agreement. After all, that is the way people like Bill have been taught to think. Only a lazy bum would be on welfare right? 

As a single father who has worked since age 15 and recently fell through the cracks myself, I could tell Bill a thing or two about how the system works. If people like Bill actually educated himself by talking to some of the 15 people he described as scammers in his neighborhood, then people like me wouldn’t have to write blogs explaining how silly their logic is. I would tell Bill that I don’t get everything paid for by the government. I get help with rent (max $550 a month!) and prescriptions for the kids, but I pay my own power bill and my own phone bill. I don’t have cable because I can’t afford it. I don’t have a social life. I buy my own groceries and I have to pay for all of the extras that come with having three children in school. My bi-weekly pay after the power bill comes out is $211. Do the math Bill. That is $422 a month left over to raise three children. I don’t know how all these welfare crowd types are living as high on the hog as Bill describes. Maybe he can put me in contact with them so I can seek their advice!

Now I won’t disagree with Bill that there are a fair number of people in receipt of income support that could probably be working. I would also have to agree that there are certainly families that have multiple generations living on the system. We all know the type of people he is referring to. Most towns have at least a few, but throwing the number 90% out there is a little much don’t you think Bill? Like any government system, people will always find a way to scam but I personally think it a very unfair assumption to publicly state that all but 10% of income support recipients in the province are receiving their pittance legitimately. C’mon Bill, time to turn off the radio and come back to reality.

Never mind the fact that Bill has no idea what the personal situations of most of these people are. He doesn’t care if they are unable to find child care, or if they have an addiction, or maybe a disability that keeps them from working. People like Bill would only be happy if you had to go declaring your personal business to him and every other curmudgeon by wearing a placard on your chest pronouncing you a lazy bum! People like Bill are so struck by jealousy at the fact that someone might be getting something from the government that they are not that they feel compelled to lash out and make absurd statements. Bill doesn’t care that a single parent with three children is living on less than $1000 a month including their rent. It doesn’t hurt him that those kids will never get to eat a $9 cauliflower because they are eating dented cans of snap peas and diet cola that they got from the food bank. No, people like bill don’t like to think about those things because they do not support the narrative that they want to believe.

All of these things make me angry but the thing that makes me angriest is where people like Bill point his finger. Cut em all off! Let em fend for themselves! They are the ones to blame for what is wrong with this province! I wish people like Bill would stop to think for a minute about the words they say and how foolish they sound to anyone who has had the misfortune of falling through the cracks. Why is it that the finger is always pointed at the bottom and never at the top? It is the elected officials and bureaucrats who make the rules. They are the ones who put up barriers where they should be building bridges. They are the ones who encourage three generations of welfare recipients because it is easier not to act than to do shake the boat and something different. I wish people like Bill would call open line and say, you know I wish the government would do more for people to help get them back to work. I wish the government would support our vulnerable citizens and help to build them up into productive members of society instead of sinking deeper and deeper into bad health and depression by the endless cycle of a dead end system. The Bills of the world need to wake up and realize that the problem does not lie with the single mom of the single mom. It lies with the lack of courage of bureaucrats and members of government to create strong policy that supports the people at the bottom and encourages them to believe in themselves.

Bill was a real caller, but he is also a metaphor for all of the people who feel the way he does. It is always easier to blame the person at the bottom than to take on the top. I guess it is hard to see the point of view from the bottom unless you have been there.

Should We Drug Test Welfare Recipients?

Should We Drug Test Welfare Recipients?

By Ryan Young

(Originally Published at http://risingtidenl.blogspot.ca/)

Should we drug test welfare recipients? It is a hot question that evokes an emotional response in many people. Anyone who has a Facebook account has seen one of those memes where somewhere that has decided to drug test welfare recipients and that we should do it here. Yes, we probably all know someone who fits the bill. Too lazy to work. Sitting home all day and getting drunk and high on the taxpayer dime. I won’t deny that this does happen and I certainly understand the emotional reaction people get when they think of people “living it up” on their hard earned tax dollars. But is that really the case? Does it happen as often as we think? What are the causes? And what happens to the most vulnerable users when the plug is pulled and the safety net is gone?

Addiction is no simple issue and certainly there are no simple answers. We are only beginning to scratch the surface on the root causes. For half a century we have been hell bent on treating drug use as a criminal and moral issue instead of a public health issue. Even the most conservative estimates show that the United States has poured over a trillion dollars into its war on drugs, with the net result being that drugs are more prevalent now than when Nixon first declared war on recreational drug use nearly fifty years ago. History has shown that increasing prison terms for drug users only drives the trade even further underground and the availability of drugs on the black market makes it easier for youth to get access to them.  Furthermore, people who have developed a problem are often afraid to seek help lest they end up in jail.

So what happens when we pull the plug? Firstly we will see a wave of addicts clogging up medical facilities when they are unable to procure their drugs. Addiction IS a disease and people WILL get sick when they are forced to go cold turkey. Without support, many will soon become homeless and in many cases will turn to crime to feed their addictions. Those who get caught will end up in prison, but at what cost to society? The cost per month to house a prisoner can be from five to ten times higher than the cost of sustaining them through social welfare programs, and in many cases the drugs are even more accessible in prison than they are on the streets. In turn we also will need more police resources to combat the rise in crime, which will cost the government even more money, not to mention the cost of the tests themselves which are certainly not cheap. So where does that leave us? What is the point? What are the real costs to society from such a “cost saving” measure?

In 2014 Tennessee introduced drug testing for welfare recipients on a large scale. Out of nearly thirty thousand applicants only 55 tested positive. That works out to about 0.19%, far below the national drug use average of 9.4%. With an average cost of two hundred dollars per test, the program turned out to be a big waste of taxpayer money and is now under review. A total of 7 states have introduced similar programs at a total cost of over a million dollars. Not surprisingly, the results are very similar across the board. In every case the number of positive tests was far below the national average for drug use. The evidence seems to suggest that the popular conservative myth of the rabid drug users living large on the taxpayer dime just doesn’t appear to have any factual merit. In Florida, their testing program was ruled unconstitutional and discontinued, proving that there are strong moral as well as financial arguments against these drug testing programs.

At the other end of the spectrum, Portugal decided to decriminalize all drugs in 2001. Despite the popular american drug  myths, the country was not run into the ground by drug fueled hooligans. In fact, things got dramatically better. The lifetime prevalence of drug use dropped dramatically, as did the number of drug related deaths. This wasn’t just because of decriminalization but due to the fact that Portugal coupled their new drug law policies with new health policies that recognize addiction as a public health issue, and they began to treat it accordingly. They shifted drug control from the Ministry of Justice to the Ministry of Health and instead of building new prisons they invested in rehabilitation centers and health clinics. They introduced a guaranteed minimum income program to expand the social welfare program which helped to lift many people out of poverty and beyond the siren song of addictive drugs. Major changes in policy, and even more importantly, the resources available over the past fifteen years, are a major factor in Portugal’s positive results with their drug policy.

Just this week Ireland has made “a radical cultural shift” in its drug policy. Small amounts of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, and heroin will be decriminalized and safe injection sites will be set up for intravenous users. Moving from shaming addicts to providing them with a support network will be the basis of the new policy shift. Some dispute the opening of injection sites on the grounds that it promotes drug use, but the minister responsible stated that by opening safe injection sites they would aim to prevent vulnerable individuals from exposing themselves to further risk. This is indeed a radical shift in thinking from the traditional anti-drug establishment. While the program has many opponents, many more are praising it as a long awaited step towards lowering HIV/AIDS rates and breaking the cycle of drug and alcohol addiction in Ireland.

So what lessons can we learn from places like Tennessee, Portugal, and Ireland? Abandoning our most vulnerable citizens is not only morally questionable, but it doesn’t seem to make smart financial sense either. Many welfare recipients claim that the cost of recreational drugs are out of their reach, even if they wanted to do them, and the low numbers of positive results back up those claims. We have also learned that when it comes to reducing drug use among the poor, the best path is by empowering people caught  in the system to take control of their own lives. Creating programs that address the root causes of addiction and treating people like human beings has been proven to do much more for drug users than any prison term ever could.

So what can we do here at home to combat our increasing addiction problems and all of the bad elements that go along with it? As tragic as the recent shooting death of Mr. Wellman was, it is a sad indicator of the way things are going under the current system. Our approach to drug use and addiction is simply not working. If we want to seriously address the issue and make progress we need to look past the status quo and find new ideas to tackle this problem. It is time to heed the lessons of those who have gone before us and start to rethink our approach to drug use and addiction in this province. Only by changing our attitudes will we ever make headway and see real positive change.