San Francisco mayor London Breed on Tuesday proposed a policy that would require the city’s welfare beneficiaries to submit themselves to drug testing and treatment in order to receive entitlements.
Breed portrayed the move as a step toward reducing the city’s drug and homelessness crises, arguing that the status quo is unacceptable.
“We need to make a significant change,” Breed said at a news conference announcing the initiative. “No more ‘anything goes’ without accountability; no more handouts without accountability.”
The county’s Adult Assistance Program guarantees homeless San Franciscans $105 per month, and according to the city’s Human Services Agency, 52 percent of the dispossessed population in the city struggles with substance abuse. In 2022, about 25 percent of all San Franciscans who died from drug overdoses were homeless.
San Francisco’s homelessness problem has been well documented. Last year, as National Review reported, “the city counted 7,745 homeless people,” over half of whom were unsheltered. The city has received hundreds of complaints from encampment-dwellers alleging that municipal workers “are violating their rights by conducting homeless-camp sweeps without notice and trashing their belongings rather than bagging and tagging them . . . so far in 2023, the city has received more than 100 claims from homeless residents, most seeking $10,000, the maximum allowed in small-claims courts.”
It remains to be seen whether the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will take issue with Breed’s proposal, which is not the only measure San Francisco has taken to address its homelessness problem in recent days. After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that people who decline shelter should not be classified as “involuntarily homeless,” Breed announced a plan to clean up and clear out encampments across the city. The ruling came after a December injunction from U.S. Magistrate Judge Dana Ryu stifling the San Francisco government’s “ability to enforce laws against sitting, lying, or sleeping for people who are ‘involuntarily homeless.'”
Drug testing for welfare recipients is not a new idea. In fact, during Senator Rick Scott’s (R., Fla.) time as governor of his state, he signed into law a 2011 measure requiring all Floridians seeking government benefits to undergo urinalysis. A federal appeals court ultimately struck down Scott’s welfare restrictions, which he helped push through the state’s legislature, in 2014, and progressives maligned the law as being discriminatory. The Florida branch of the ACLU said the measure was “patriarchal, racist, and mean-spirited,” and that the state could not “treat an entire class of people like suspected criminals simply because they’ve asked the state for temporary assistance.”