On Monday, the Wyoming state Senate rightfully defeated House Bill 82, a bill requiring people enrolling in Wyoming’s POWER program to first submit to and pass a drug test before receiving benefits, by a 17-13 vote. POWER is the state’s version of the temporary assistance to needy families program.

The measure was advanced to the Senate by a 37-23 margin in the House.

In an election year punctuated by campaign rhetoric regarding the evils of class warfare and adherence to Constitutional principles, a proposal like House Bill 82 always seemed like rather quizzical behavior.

The bill followed a growing and troubling national trend that has seen roughly half of the nation’s state legislatures introduce some form of screening legislation. Sponsors of the Wyoming measure asserted the proposal would help ascertain if there was a significant drug problem among benefit recipients.

Had they been paying attention, they would already know that answer. A parade of research studies across the nation have shown that the rate of drug use among welfare recipients in the United States is consistent and statistically similar with the rate of illegal drug use across all demographics.

From its inception, House Bill 82 was founded upon a flawed premise. The nation’s drug problem cuts across all income groups equally. Legislation that specifically targets one segment of the population wrongly casts a cloud of false suspicion and helps feed a misguided stereotype that already persists regarding the poor and drugs.

That doesn’t help our broader effort to curb the use of illegal drugs. It also fails to help state and federal programs designed to help the poor move out of poverty from actually reaching their target group.

The state Senate also rightfully recognized what its House counterparts did not. Passage of House Bill 82 would have ultimately steered Wyoming on a collision course with an inevitable constitutional challenge. It was a challenge the state would have lost.

Incidentally, that’s not our opinion — that was the ruling of Federal Judge Mary Scriven last October when she blocked Florida’s version of mandatory drug testing for welfare recipients over constitutional concerns. It also was the opinion of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down a Michigan law requiring drug testing of welfare applicants in 2003.

In both cases, the decisions were predicated upon the findings of the Supreme Court’s 8-1 majority in the 1997 case of Chandler v. Miller. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, writing for the majority in that case, observed that drug testing is an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment, which the state can impose only in exceptional cases when there is a public-safety need.

Ironically, Chandler v. Miller was a case brought to strike down mandatory drug testing for candidates seeking state office in Georgia. If ensuring elected state officials are drug free fails to meet the definition of a public-safety need, do we really need to speculate how the court would view drug testing for those merely trying to survive?

We’re all in favor of attempts to minimize and ultimately eliminate the usage of illegal drugs in society, but such efforts need to be based on reality rather than founded upon coffee shop misperceptions. They need to recognize the universality of the drug epidemic. Most of all, they need to be constitutional on their face.