Vol. 75/No. 41      November 14, 2011

Judge Mary Scriven ruled October 24 in favor of a lawsuit filed by Luis Lebron, a 35-year-old unemployed veteran who is caring for his four-year-old son and his disabled mother. Lebron is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.

In the three months that Florida’s new law has been on the books, 21,000 people have been forced to take drug tests and pay for it themselves. Thirty-two have tested positive and been barred from state aid.

“Judge Scriven’s ruling made Florida authorities remove all references to the drug test program from its website and stop all the testing,” Maria Kayanan, associate legal director of the ACLU in Florida and lead counsel for Lebron, told the Militant.

“Judge Scriven rejected a pamphlet by Tarren Bragdon that the state submitted,” Kayanan added, “claiming that welfare applicants are more likely to use drugs and that mandatory drug testing will save money. This pamphlet has been advanced in a number of other states to justify adopting similar laws.”

Scriven pointed out that the arguments advanced by the state for their mandatory testing program—that the “war on drugs” requires steps to search out and deny state funds that aid the “drug trade”—could be used by the government to “impose drug testing as an eligibility requirement for every beneficiary of every government program.”

The judge ruled that “such blanket intrusions cannot be countenanced under the Fourth Amendment” to the U.S. Constitution, which protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

While Judge Scriven’s ruling is only a temporary bar to the program, she wrote that there is a “substantial likelihood” that it will be made permanent if the state insists on fighting for continued drug testing.
 
 
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