Georgia Drug Use: Unemployment and Drug Testing

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the myriad of workers in the U.S. who have been receiving unemployment compensation. Several extensions of unemployment payments have enabled some workers to receive checks for long periods of time – up to two years or more. Several ideas have been proposed to ensure that each recipient of a check is not using illicit drugs.

In the State of Georgia, Representative Michael Harden has proposed HB 1389 that would require random drug testing of those who receive unemployment benefits as well as other government assistance. The law would require the cost of testing to be deducted from the recipient’s check. In Harden’s plan, the Georgia labor commissioner would be responsible for conducting annual random screens.

For those unemployed persons who are drug free, this would simply be a once a year random drug screen involving a urine sample. If a test is positive, the unemployment or government subsidy recipient would be retested. The second positive test would mean no more checks. Refusing the test would be seen as a positive test as well. Harden said that since most employed persons are drug tested, this would ‘level the playing field’ by testing the unemployed in the state. Georgia’s unemployment rate is 10.8 percent, one of the highest in the U.S.

On the federal level, Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah proposed an amendment to the jobs bill that would require anyone receiving unemployment or welfare benefits to get drug tested before they get their checks. Hatch claimed that this would reduce the nation’s debt by reducing the number of unemployment benefit and welfare benefit recipients. Almost 10 million people in the country are receiving unemployment checks, and over 4 million receive temporary aid for needy families.

Senator Hatch’s proposal would be difficult because it does not require random drug screening. Random drug screening is more valid at showing who is using drugs than scheduled screens. In random testing, the recipient must provide their urine sample within hours of notification. Since most drugs stay in the body for only a couple of days, any illicit drugs that they have used recently would show up. On the other hand, scheduled drug tests provide time for abstaining and using a great variety of products that claim to rid the body of drugs.

If those receiving checks merely had to be tested on a particular date when they went to pick up their checks, they could abstain from drugs for a few days, allowing for a clean screen.

This topic is controversial, yet, 50% of employers today require drug testing for employment. Drug testing is growing in popularity and offers a ground floor way to assist in the prevention of drug abuse. The jury will be out for sometime, but watch the news as this type of thought gains more notoriety.

1970s American Culture Sociology Documentary Films: Health, Education, Fashion, Drug Use – In the Western world, social progressive values that began in the 1960s, such as increasing political awareness and political and economic liberty of women, continued to grow. The hippie culture, which started in the latter half of the 1960s, waned by the early 1970s and faded towards the middle part of the decade, which involved opposition to the Vietnam War, opposition to nuclear weapons, the advocacy of world peace, and hostility to the authority of government and big business. The environmentalist movement began to increase dramatically in this period. Novelist Tom Wolfe coined the term Me decade in his article “The “Me” Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, published by New York magazine in August 1976 referring to the 1970s. The term describes a general new attitude of Americans towards atomized individualism and away from communitarianism in clear contrast with the 1960s. Wolfe attributes disappearance of the “proletariat” with the appearance of the “lower middle class”, citing the economic boom of Post-War America as affording the average American a sort of self determination and individuation that ran alongside economic prosperity. Wolfe describes this abandoning of communal, left, and New Deal politics as “taking the money and running.” He traces the preoccupation with one’s self back to the aristocrat. The nature of the “chivalric tradition” and the philosophy behind “the finishing school” are inherently dedicated to the building and forming of personal …

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