Way back in October, I talked about the fight against a law in Florida that aimed to enact drug testing for all welfare applicants in the state. A suit was brought against the law by the ACLU, and the law was blocked by a federal judge pending the case's results - while no judicial comment was made on the case itself.
Whether this is the same case or just a similar thing that's happening at the same time, I'm not quite certain, but another federal judge has just ruled as unconstitutional a law requiring the drug testing of 85 thousand Florida state employees, this one being the result of an executive order straight from Governor Rick Scott himself.
As I noted last fall, the results from the drug testing that did actually take place never came back positive more than two percent or so of the time, which meant that the money saved by denying those people welfare was actually less than the cost of implementing the tests.
Likewise, the ruling on state employees notes the low positive rate and points out that the government can only mandate drug testing in the presence of a "special need", like safety concerns, or at least "evidence of a drug use problem", neither of which appear to be the case.
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