CANBERRA, May 12 (Xinhua) -- The Australian government has announced plans to test sewage water for traces of illicit drugs in order to identify welfare crooks, but the plan has come under fire from experts who have said it will do nothing more than confirming drugs are being used.
Announced in Tuesday's budget handed down by Treasurer Scott Morrison, the plan would involve drug testing welfare recipients who fail to attend their appointments. Guilty parties would not be given cash welfare payments, instead being given a cashless debit card to prevent "under the table" drug purchases.
At the time, Morrison said the plan would allow the government to "support jobseekers affected by drug and alcohol abuse" while also "protecting taxpayers", describing the measures as "a two-way street."
It was later revealed that the government would conduct the drug testing by analyzing sewage water, but experts have raised concerns that the testing would only confirm that drugs are being used, and that they are coming from the "finer leafy suburbs" of Australia's major cities.
John Ryan, who works on the Victoria state government's ice action taskforce, has said the testing would not be able to accurately pin-point how many people were using illicit drugs.
"It might misfire if the government think they can rely on some chemical test of wastewater as we know drug use is expensive and more common drugs such as cannabis are consumed by people in the workforce," Ryan told Guardian Australian on Friday.
"Using the wastewater approach, they will find high amounts in the wastewater of the finer leafy suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney." He said current sewage testing technology was not advanced enough to accurately recognize how many people are using drugs, saying it was more likely to be able to inform testers of how many "standard doses" were being consumed.
"It is not yet developed to the stage where you can identify a high number of users in a community. You can more likely predict how many standard doses of a drug have been taken, which is very different to how many people and which people are using," Ryan said.
"Some drug users might use once every four hours, some might use once every four months."
