If less than 0.2 percent of people who have applied for welfare in Tennessee since July 2014 have failed a drug test mandated for some of those who apply, state taxpayers might rightly wonder if the law mandating the testing was worth it.
They would, indeed, if they were told that is the percentage of the 39,121 people applying for Families First cash assistance benefits who tested positive for drugs since the law was implemented in 2014.
That was the conclusion drawn by state Rep. Sherry Jones, D-Nashville, who said the testing's $23,592 cost to date was too much to justify the tests.
But, as in the phrase popularized by humorist Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
In this case, the statistics cited by the Nashville Tennessean from Department of Human Services numbers don't tell the whole story. It's true that only 0.2 percent of the people making applications tested positive for drugs. But only 609 of those 39,121 people were asked to take a drug test, and 65 tested positive. That's 10.7 percent, a sizeable percentage of people applying for cash assistance benefits.
But the figures for those questioning the program's effectiveness get worse.
In addition to the 65 who tested positive, an additional 116 people refused to participate in an initial three-question, written drug screening. Taxpayers can draw their own conclusions about why they refused to participate, but a sound inference would be that many of them either knew they would fail a drug test or had no intention to stop taking drugs even if they received cash assistance.
If those 116 people are factored in, and assuming all of them had a drug-related reason for refusing the drug questionnaire, we could further infer that a full quarter of the people - 181 (the 65 who tested positive and the 116 who refused) out of 775 (the 609 asked to take a drug test and the 116 who refused) either tested positive for drugs or could likely to be assumed to have tested positive.
Twenty-five percent is hardly 0.2 percent, but even if you allow that some of the 116 would not have tested positive for drugs, the percentage still would be higher than the nearly 11 percent who tested positive of those asked to take the test.
Tennesseans should not have to worry that taxpayer money is going to people who continue to use illegal substances or drugs for which they have no prescription. As it is, those who fail the drug screening can still get assistance if they enroll in a drug treatment facility or recovery support group.
So the law is not only important from a fiscal standpoint but also because it might get some users into a program that could save their lives. And it's hard to put a price on saving a life.