While I was researching more on drug testing welfare recipients and participants I found that many websites are saying that instead of saving money by terminating drug users from government aid, the government spending more money to drug test these people, so my question is ...

How much money has the government spent on drug testing welfare recipients?

http://www.tampabay.com/news/courts/florida-didnt-save-money-by-drug-testing-welfare-recipients-data-shows/1225721
In this article I found out that only 2.6% of welfare recipients in the state of Florida failed their drug test. In other numbers only 108 people out of the 4,086 welfare recipients failed the drug test.
These numbers are surprisingly low, before gathering information about this issue I would have put my bet on a lot of people failing the drug test. maybe just because of the people in my personal life that I have encountered but this has led me to think that we cant judge everyone the same or make the same assumption about all the people in the same socio economical class.

Florida's law stated that welfare participants had to pay for their drug screening and if they passed they would get their money reimbursed if they didn't they had to be on a year probation period before being able to re apply for welfare
This makes total sense to me because if you support drug testing welfare participants then this ideology that they have to pay for their drug screen in order to prove they are clean makes sense and especially because if they fail, the money that was spent on the drug test came out of their pocket
BUT .....

Since only 2.6% of those welfare participants failed then that only means that taxpayers spent $118,140 on reimbursing those people that passed their drug test this equals to $35 per drug test.
So now it is easy to take the side of the people who say that drug testing welfare recipients is a waste of time and money and in a ways is unconstitutional.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2015/02/26/3624447/tanf-drug-testing-states/
When searched for money numbers as to how much has been actually spent on drug testing welfare particpants I came across this website and it had this information:

• Missouri spent $336,297 - From January 2014 -December 2014
• Oklahoma spent $385,872 -From November 2012 - November 2014
• Utah spent $64,566 - From August 2012- July 2014
• Kansas spent $40,000 - From July 2014- December 2014
• Mississippi spent $5,290 - From August 2014- December 2014
• Tennessee spent $5,295 - From July 2014- December 2014
• Arizona spent $499 - 2010-2014 

The total amount that all of these states spent on drug testing is $837,817
The total amount of welfare participants tested in all of these states is 219,744
and the total amount of welfare participants that tested positive in all of these states is 427

Now after reviewing this information its hard to say that this is helping "save money on welfare" if the outcome of spending so much on drug testing isn't what the government thought it would be.
I am personally surprised because like I previously mentioned I would of thought that the number of people that failed the test would be higher.

How ever there is still people that debate that it isn't about the money but doing what is right and fighting against those who abuse the governments aid...
But in this case is it worth it to fight these 427 people when we could have used the $837,817 into other things like helping public schools?

The amount of if's and but's on this dilemma can go on for ever...