tisonlyi

OK, Wikipedia isn't the last word. It does, however, reference its sources, which happen to include one or two journals of medicine or science

But as for other sources... Just one swift googling yields:

How about a university? Medical Mystery: Can Poppy Seeds Influence Drug Tests?
Straight Dope? The Straight Dope: Will poppy-seed bagels cause you to fail a drug test?
Snopes? snopes.com: Poppy Seed Drug Test Results

Oh, and mythbusters is indeed listed as CONFIRMING THAT POPPY SEEDS CAUSE FALSE POSITIVES.

Wikipedia! OH NOES!

Should you want to watch the episode, i'm sure it'll be out there on the tubes or via a torrent of some sort.

How about an article in the New York Times?

So that's that taken care of, eh? Poppy seeds can and do produce false positives.

On to the reviling of those less fortunate than yourself.

I totally agree with you that people on govt support shouldn't be using that money to support a drug habit.

They also shouldn't be using that money to pollute their bodies with poisonous fast food, tobacco, alcohol, pump toxic fumes into the air and pollute my , purchase goods produced outside of their home nation, pay for the electricity to watch dumb shows on TV that degenerate their minds, so on and so forth.

People on welfare should, in effect, become slaves to the state that has so shamefully succumbed to their pitiful desire for a decent existence... _They should_ be ashamed to exist.

Why then do we not set up a whole new system of poor houses?

No family support, no comforts, no sex, no human relationships, no chit chat, combined with an excess of labour and bare minimum of sustenance. That'll surely motivate those in and out of the institutions to engage in behaviour that will most certainly keep them from the poor house! Good, honest, Christian, protestant behaviour! PLUS! Those too useless to find decent employ outside of the institutions for the almost criminally self-negligent will not be allowed to breed for the duration... Thus reducing the surplus population and our need to support them into the never-ending future.

No need for further support, no opportunity for immorality, no possibility of liberties which might encourage some to live a life less rigorous than one's own. Most satisfactory on all levels.

That is, unless you somehow hit hard times. Even Emperors have ended up paupers.

All testing for drugs will do is add cost, bureaucracy and a heavier hand of state-ist authoritarianism to a system that is already a fiscal hindrance and burden to individual liberties.

Even if you leave aside the idea of false positives...

EXPENSE. AUTHORITARIANISM. CAPRICIOUS BUREAUCRACY. GAMING (either to prove innocence or guilt).

All of that little riff back to victoriana may seem strange and offensive, but this rot starts with what they call 'means testing' on this side of the pond, you can only have benefits if you really really need them. Got a house? Sell it. Got a tiny income not enough to support yourself? well you'll have to give that up. Married benefits being less than the combined income of two single people? logic dictates divorce. etc. etc. 'Workfare' has existed in several forms, being utterly compulsory for the young, and always completely useless, expensive and bureaucratic.

These kinds of initiative have only ever increased the overall cost of the system while the restrictions, punishments and denouncements for being poor and/or unfortunate become ever more intolerable over time...

Those Victorian poor/work houses were allowed to exist because those who wielded some power allowed themselves to think of the less well off as almost sub-human. 'Other'. Certainly not something they themselves could ever come close to... So any sort of assistance at all was Christian Charity to an excess and utterly resented by those who made the decisions.

There begins the bind. Treat people like animals and they'll almost all act like animals. Treat people with decency and _some_ will take advantage. I think the cost of those (almost universally ineffective) illiberal policies to eliminate immorality are too steep in terms of mutual brutalisation. The brutalisation of the poor at the hands of the powerful and the brutalisation of the one who wields the whip by their own selfishness.

Frankly, as a total aside, you could reduce drug and drug-related crime dramatically simplyby offering addicts their chosen poison free gratis. A lot less expensive than the costs of crime, insurance, police, justice and prisons... plus a lot less medical costs over time treating the effects of street drugs.

An essay before i realise it, and rambling.

__________________
"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." - Winston Churchill, 1937 --{ORLY?}--