If you're on Food Stamps in Cabell and Wayne Counties, your life is about to change.
Paper Food Stamps are about to be replaced with plastic Debit Cards.
Welfare workers claim the cards will cut down on theft and fraud because ID 's
are required to use them. Food Stamps are now often traded, sometimes for drugs,
officials say.
Other states, including Tennessee have already been using plastic cards.
After officials study how the program works in Cabell and Wayne Counties, the
rest of the state will switch over in 2003.
While the government calls it progress, not everyone is buying it. Dawn Perry
is a cashier at a Huntington Supermarket who dreads the new system. "I worked
in Tennessee when they started it. You have to get an ID for every sale, and get
a verification. On the first and fifteenth, the phone lines are jammed with authorization
calls or they crash. The lines get backed up, and other customers get pissed off.
And they always take it out on the cashier."