Annotated Bibliography: Should Applicants Receiving Government

Assistance be Forced to Random Drug Testing?

Annotated Bibliography: Should Applicants Receiving Government

Assistance be Forced to Random Drug Testing?

Introduction

Recent legislative measures by National Council of State legislation NCSL (2012), in various States of America, for providing assistance to the needy families, implement necessary condition of drug testing requirements. This includes a number of people, who are unemployed, looking after their kids, on medication, and various other people who face financial difficulties. Drug testing requirement for these people was based on the belief that there is high rate of drug abuse in the people who receive government assistance and they spend their money on drugs (www.ncsl.org). There are various responses for these legislative measures, both positive and negative. To understand and evaluate, whether this legislative measure and drug testing procedure for the applicants receiving government assistance is good or not, this study deals with the views of different researchers on this issue.

Thesis Statement

This annotated bibliography provide a conclusion based on the argument, should applicants receiving government assistance be forced to random drug testing?

Discussion

Increase in drug abuse is one of the major concerns for the Government, to ensure that there must not be any such problems in these states, there are various measures to prevent drug abuses. This provides that there are a number of positive and negative attitudes towards this prevention. For example according to the organizations like American Civil Liberties Union ACLU, it is totally against the human rights to implement such conditions. According to ACLU, drug testing for the applicants receiving government assistance is “unconstitutional, scientifically unsound, fiscally irresponsible…and…unfair” (www.aclu.org). Gupta (2011) also provide negative views about the drug testing in US, because according to her arguments there is already very low number of positive test in these people. Only about two percent of people were found negative for the test (Gupta, 2011). According to research conducted by Crew and Davis (2003), it is suggested that the research conducted by Florida, failed to poof the reliable estimates for the drug abuse by these beneficiaries for TANF.

According to Spencer (2012), there is positive impact of implementing drug testing as there is decrease in the number of people using drugs and more States are implementing this policy in their states. Experiment conducted by Kravitz and Brock in 1997, on undergraduate students at an urban university provides impact of drug testing on these ...