Wisdom on Wednesday... Do I Have Any Left?

I am officially on summer break, I just finished up the last of my Sociology section on drugs and society and now have 31 days before I have to get back on the train. I celebrated with a cup of milk and 3 pecan sandies. Hoping for the best as this was a particularly hard section due to my lack of zeal for public speaking. It was a a day full of humidity and heat ..and Thai food..and Starbucks..and kids going for Cheetos  knowing I was chained to the computer taking finals... Many of my "friends" on Facebook seem to be pretty excited about the fact that Florida will now be drug testing applicants for welfare and that it will be used as a condition for their approval of benefits. Yes on the surface when you think about a program such as this it sounds like a good idea, after all they drug test many people who are employed in corporate jobs don't they? I think that the after effects of a bill like this are going to have many detrimental consequences on families for 2 very important reasons.Many of the men and women who are seeking family assistance are not occasional users but rather they are addicts, and if you believe in the medical model like I do then you will look at these people as being sick and in need of treatment. There has been no definitive research showing that these addicts are selling their food stamps for drug money, the fact is most addicts who are either low income or who are within poverty level don't buy their drugs in the first place. They steal them, work within the drug trade for them or are given them..this we know with a fair amount of certainty. Nowhere is it recognized that these people need not only assistance but they need help. Recovery and treatment should be a condition of receiving benefits, a tandem program, if someone were to test positive they should be enrolled in a mandatory treatment program plain and simple to continue to be on welfare. This benefits these families as a whole and it also benefits society. By denying them benefits we not only hurt the innocent children by taking food out of their mouths but we also deny the addict assistance and these people will be even more likely to turn to crime, drug dealing and prostitution..the other American economy ..just to survive.What states spend on drug  treatment programs is far less than what they save, and this is true all across the board.If programs like this were to be decentralized, they can potentially do untold harm on Society. Secondly those who are not addicts can be considered to be occasional users. You may find it surprising to learn that 75% of people that use heroin for instance are not physically addicted to it.Are we going to take food out of the mouths of their children too? I agree their should be stipulations on welfare, fact is I can go on all night about this but what are we achieving by doing this other than to stroke the conservative ego after all alcohol is more deadly than marijuana and cocaine for that matter and is responsible for drunk driving accidents that kill people in the thousands every year and rips lives a part on a much larger scale and by and large more people in America today are alcoholics than they are drug addicts but that's okay..and why should we allow benefits to them and not the marijuana user when the simple fact is marijuana should be legal and the only reason that it isn't is that the government stands to loose a considerable amount of money if it ever were to be decriminalized and the majority of people in America aren't educated or know enough about it in the first place to have valid ideals about it? So what do I say to the people that support this bill? Nice try, go back to the drawing board and come again. That's it for tonight..I am going to turn on The World According To Paris and turn my light switch off for a while...