As a young person whose single mother used government programs to keep me healthy and fed, I’ve seen enough to know that the poor are not drug-addled miscreants.
I’m glad a proposed legislative bill has a clause to give benefits to the children of failed drug test takers, but the insinuations that people are poor because of drug problems are wrong. The poor are no more likely to abuse drugs than the middle class or upper class.
It’s actually been found, by a 2007 study, that kids that come from a family with more money tend to do more drugs. They do not start as young as their poorer counterparts, but quickly catch up and even surpass them as they get older. According to California’s Healthy Kids Study, this is because of the larger amount of disposable income.
So where does the demonization of the poor come from? Mostly the idea of the “welfare queen” perpetuated by former President Ronald Reagan, who gave such anecdotes like, “She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands. And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names. Her tax-free cash income is over $150,000.”
It is so exaggerated and false that it would be laughable if people didn’t believe it. I will never understand why a man getting a bunch of steaks on a Hoosier plus card will anger people more than our government spending more than every other country in the world combined on military.
Drugs are too easy a scapegoat. If we really want to stop drug use, let’s give people incentives to not do drugs like good paying jobs and having something to lose. Drugs are often the reaction to adversity, not the cause of it.
Are we not going to give money to people who are drinking? Going to the community court the other week, alcohol and alcoholism related things seemed to be the majority subject of the caseload. If we’re going to be fair about people not wasting taxpayer money on things that aren’t good for them, that should definitely be a stipulation in the proposed bill.
Besides, let’s not pretend like our drug policy is perfect. There are plenty of people who might have had a puff of marijuana, but are not drug addicts. Smoking a little bit of weed makes you an addict as much as me not cleaning my room makes me a hoarder.
I’m glad that we are being proactive about helping the needy, and getting addicts off hard drugs is a great first step. But before we start down this slippery slope of denying certain people benefits to survive, we need to think about what we’re doing.
What do you think the drug addicts denied benefits are going to do if we deny them food? Just going to roll over and starve? We shouldn’t live in a country where people have to choose between starvation and a potential prison sentence.
Editor’s note: Views expressed in this column are the writer’s and not necessarily those of the Recorder Newspaper.
Join the conversation
Teens, if you want your voice to be heard, email us at newsroom@indyrecorder.com. Tweet us at Twitter.com/indyrecorder, or write us on Facebook.com/IndianapolisRecorder to tell us your thoughts in this series.
