Tools like Trey Radel vote for this garbage too stoopid to realize that it's none of his business.  If he actually believed in the policy, he would have resigned at his earliest convenience after his cocaine arrest and returned all his ill gotten drug tainted gains.  Funny, right.

If they want to test people 'suckling' off the government's teet, they should not just focus on the poor folks.  Test every person who the government cuts a check to, including foreign heads of state, all politicians, every banker that received a portion of the bailout, every retiree, and many more.

The problem is once you start testing that many folks and denying them benefits, there won't be anyone left.  It take more than poor folks on welfare to spend the estimated 100 billion dollars a year estimated that America spends on illegal drugs.  Never mind the ones strung out on prescriptions that drug testing doesn't cover...

We are a Nation of users and as soon as we figure it that out, we might be able to start helping folks which doesn't mean taking away the very thing that keeps their families from starving.

FYI:

More than 22 million Americans age 12 and older - nearly 9% of the U.S. population - use illegal drugs, according to the government's 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

That authority, (determining who "appears" to be a user/abuser/addict,) in the case of filling prescriptions for pain medication, specifically narcotic, and/or opiate based meds, is in full force in the State of Tennessee. And, from personally witnessing many, many of such instances, I assure you that the abuses by the dispensers outnumber those by patients/customers by a factor of something approaching infinity to one.

In Tennessee the authority of whether to dispense, or deny, a legal, physician written, Insurance Co. approved script resides with the clerk behind the counter. The law is written in such a way that even if the patient's doctor pleads his/her case via a phone call supplementing the written script, the final decision is reserved for the potentially, functionally,  illiterate school dropout manning the counter. All that is required for the sadistic twit to fulfill his joyfully demented torture of the 75 year old cancer patient having to go home to face a night of unbearable pain is for the employee to simply claim, "in my judgment" the customer is an addict."

There are even dozens (hundreds?) of blogs catering to pharmacy employees where they gather like "Animal House-Like" swine, regaling their sadistic, sociopathic encounters with terminally ill customers/patients. Just type in something like, "pharmacy employees love torturing their customers," and, prepare to get violently sick.

When you actually look into the matter, it turns out that neither is true in the great majority of cases.

And even the idiot we sent to Raleigh realizes that drug testing all of them is spending a dollar to save a dime (or less), just so that we can look "tough on 'whatever'".

Now only if they'd get the same message about "voter fraud" (but of course it's actually valid voting they're hoping to prevent).

Drug testing welfare applicants isn't done for their benefit or to reduce government spending, it's done to belittle them and to enable politicians to posture.