Drug Testing

The mania for drug testing people on welfare, unemployment, or Medicaid continues this year. A Mississippi solon wants to drug test anyone receiving public benefits, and other states are moving ahead, too.

A Republican congressman from Georgia has introduced a bill that would mandate drug screening assessments for unemployment applicants and drug tests for those assessed as having a "high probability" of being drug users. But he cited only apocryphal evidence for any need for such legislation.

Newt Gingrich laid out a hard-line approach to drug policy targeting US drug users as well as Mexican cartels in an interview Saturday.

A Florida federal district court judge has issued a temporary restraining order blocking Florida's welfare drug testing program.

A Missouri technical college's plan to force students to take suspicionless drug tests is on hold after the ACLU of Eastern Missouri filed suit and won a temporary restraining order.

Caught in a glaring lie about drug use among South Carolina job seekers, Gov. Nikki Haley is forced to concede she was full of it.

A Missouri technical college is the first public college in the country to demand mandatory suspicionless drug testing of students, and it will likely be the first in the country to be sued for it too.

Between now and the seating of a new Congress after the 2012 elections, drug reform is going to be a tough slog on Capitol Hill. But that doesn't mean reformers are going away, or that there aren't battles to be fought and won.