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Programs of drug testing welfare recipients have been introduced in a number of states of the USA and in New Zealand. The practice has also been proposed but not implemented in Canada and the United Kingdom (Wincup 2014). Recently, legislation was prepared to introduce drug testing of welfare recipients in Australia, and more US states have drafted legislation. Stated aims of these programs include: to identify people with drug problems in order to refer them to treatment, with the longer-term aim of facilitating their gaining employment; to prevent welfare payments being spent on illicit substances; and protecting the children of people dependent on drugs (see, e.g., Bolen 2014, 86; Schaberg 2012, 575). But these different aims imply quite different responses to drug test results, and ambiguity surrounding what these programs aim to do complicates attempts to evaluate their success.
In this paper, we argue that programs of drug testing welfare recipients1 are not ethically acceptable. We approach assessing the programs’ ethical acceptability as a question of proportionality. This is an appropriate approach because drug testing imposes some costs and burdens on welfare recipients, for the purpose of achieving aims thought to outweigh those costs and burdens. Thus, their ethical acceptability relies on an assessment of the worth of their aims, considered in relation to the costs and burdens.2 Since the proportionality analysis allows an ethical assessment that does not rely on any particular position about welfare rights or government paternalism, this approach may have a broader appeal than ethical assessments made from such positions (though it may also be consistent with some such assessments).
We first briefly overview information on existing programs, in section 1. In section 2 we explain our approach to evaluating the ethical acceptability of these programs. The approach implies that for ethical acceptability, a program of drug testing must meet three criteria: (1) that the program can plausibly be expected to meet its aim(s); (2) that its aim(s) are sufficiently important to justify its costs and burdens; and (3) that it is not substantially more costly and burdensome than feasible alternatives. This implies the need to further clarify what the aims of drug testing welfare recipients are, undertaken in section 3; and to examine empirical studies relevant to whether...