[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 65 (Monday, May 23, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: May 23, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
DRUG ABUSE
Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I take the floor today to discuss one of the
most pressing issues facing us in this Nation today: Our country, our
communities, and our families. I raise my very serious concern about
the Clinton administration's lack of leadership in combating a real
source of crime, disruption and dangers in American society, a scourge,
if you will. I am here to talk about the great and growing problem of
drug abuse.
According to a poll by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, 7 in 10
Americans see drug abuse as a greater problem now than it was 5 years
ago. Only 5 percent believe elected officials are doing everything
possible to solve the problem.
Now, on other issues, I have watched the President, assisted by his
pollster, Stan Greenberg, eagerly respond to citizens' concerns. That
is why I am so surprised, at a time when the President has been very
vocal about the dangers of misusing guns, there has been no comparable
rhetoric on the equally, if not more, deadly misuse of drugs.
President Clinton's deafening silence on the death issue is, most
unfortunately, consistent with his administration's abdication of its
responsibility to fight at the front lines in the war against drugs.
Since taking office, the President has slashed the Drug Czar's office
by 84 percent and slashed the State Department's international
narcotics matters budget by 32 percent over the last 2 years.
In its current budget, the administration seeks to eliminate drug
enforcement grants to State and local governments. These enforcement
funds support many important drug fighting initiatives including
multijurisdictional drug teams that have disrupted State and regional
trafficking networks across the country, street-level enforcement teams
that shut down neighborhood drug dens, police in the community, drug
courts, prosecution programs, drug crime laboratories, and treatment
for drug offenders.
I also read in an op-ed piece by Lally Weymouth in the Washington
Post last Friday that the Clinton administration has stopped providing
real time information on potential drug flights in Latin American
countries which we, in the past, have worked out as a means of
assisting those countries which are dedicated to helping eradicate drug
production and export from their countries. At a time when the
administration says that we are going to work with source countries, it
makes no sense for us to stop providing the real time information that
has been so vital in helping combat those dangers.
Now, all of these efforts which have gone on in the past and which
are being restricted or eliminated now cannot be replaced simply by
having cops walk the beat in major cities. It is simply not fair to ask
law enforcement to fight a war on drugs at the local level even as we
take away some of their effective weapons against interstate and
international drug operations and cartels.
Last month, I had the opportunity to address an outstanding group of
law enforcement officers, local, State, and Federal, who have worked
together in the last several years to combat the scourge of drug crime
in southeast Missouri. I told these law enforcement officers it had
been suggested that we cut the Federal law enforcement activities and
use some of those moneys to provide local law enforcement support,
maybe providing them enough funds for another cop on the beat.
All of these officers--and this is State and local as well as
Federal--said that it was impossible for them to carry on the battle
against drugs if they did not have the strong interdiction efforts that
the Federal Government puts forth, along with the coordinated
assistance of all of the Federal agencies given a responsibility to
deal with drugs, from the Customs Service with their interdiction
activities and their ability to identify drug runners at the border and
follow them to the sources.
They said that they could not achieve any kind of success in the
battle on drugs if we took away the assistance that the Federal
Government provides in dealing with interstate and international drug
conspiracies.
I received a letter in response to my request, authored by the chief
of the Cape Girardeau Police Department and Sheriff Norman Copeland, a
30-year veteran of the Missouri Highway Patrol and well respected
officer and now the elected sheriff of Scott County. It is signed by
sheriffs, by county, by city police chiefs, and by a member of the
State highway patrol.
They state in that letter that they:
* * * voice our concerns about what appears to be a casual
and unconcerned attitude toward the drug problem among
leaders in Federal Government. As frontline observers, we can
state unequivocally that the alarming rise in domestic crime
across the United States, both violent and nonviolent, is
primarily due to illegal drugs, their distribution, use, and
addiction to drugs. We believe with passion that no one can
calculate what the enormity of the drug problem would be
today if no drug interdiction or education programs had been
in place for the last 5 years. Further, there is a dire need
to maintain and fine tune the programs that are now in place.
The so-called war on drugs has only been waged seriously for
the last 5 years, although it has taken us approximately 30
years to reach such epidemic proportions --and it may take
that long to remedy it. Our belief is that it doesn't matter
if we win or lose this war, but is it right or wrong to fight
it? We believe it is right to want to live in a community
that is drug free, in a home in which we feel safe, and be
able to tell our children it is wrong to abuse their bodies
with illegal drugs. Winning the war is not as important as
fighting the war. We support these beliefs as a group and
they are shared by all of law enforcement in southeast
Missouri.
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that this letter be printed in
the Record, along with an article, endorsed by many of the law
enforcement officers, by Alan Foust, Coordinator of the Southeast
Missouri Task Force which appeared in the Trooper Association Magazine
entitled ``Legalized Drugs.''
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
Police Department,
Cape Girardeau, March 30, 1994.
Hon. Christopher S. Bond,
U.S. Senator, Russell Office Building, Washington, DC.
Dear Senator Bond: I would like to express my appreciation
for being invited to discuss concerns among law enforcement
officials with you on Tuesday, March 29. I have followed your
career throughout your public life and have nothing but the
greatest admiration for you and your efforts on the part of
the citizens of Missouri.
I would like to briefly summarize some of the thoughts that
I shared with you yesterday. Myself and Lt. Jim McNiell of
the Missouri State Highway Patrol were invited to Key West
Florida as guests of the Assistant Secretary of Defense to
tour military installations utilizing reserve components. As
a part of the briefing we were given an opportunity to talk
to Commander Joint Task Force Four personnel who have the
counter drug mission responsibility for tracking couriers
into the United States, as well as U.S. Coast Guard personnel
that do the actual High Seas interdiction, search and
seizure. All of the people we spoke with are dismayed at the
impending cuts to these efforts and the negative impact it
will have on counter drug operations.
I am also concerned about the amount of money being taken
from law enforcement efforts and being funneled into drug
treatment programs. My personal belief and the thoughts
shared by many of my contemporaries is that drug
rehabilitation is a naturally occurring process and no amount
of federal dollars can speed up the process.
We also would like to take this opportunity to voice our
concerns about what appears to be a casual and unconcerned
attitude toward the drug problem among leaders in federal
government. As front line observers, we can state
unequivocally that the alarming rise in domestic crime across
the United States, both violent and non-violent, is primarily
due to illegal drugs, their distribution, use, and addiction
to the drugs. We believe with passion that no one can
calculate what the enormity of the drug problem would be
today if no drug interdiction or education programs had been
in place for the last five years. Further there is a dire
need to maintain and fine tune the programs that are now in
place. The so called war on drugs has only been waged
seriously for the last five years, although it has taken us
approximately thirty years to reach such epidemic
proportions--and it may take that long to remedy it. Our
relief is that it doesn't matter if we win or lose this war,
but is it right or wrong to fight it. We believe it is right
to want to live in a community that is drug free, in a home
in which we feel safe, and be able to tell our children it is
wrong to abuse their bodies with illegal drugs. Winning the
war is not as important as fighting the war. We support these
beliefs as a group and they are shared by all of law
enforcement in Southeast Missouri.
We want to personally thank you for your support of law
enforcement--specifically the support you have given to the
Southeast Missouri Drug Task Force--the establishing of the
United States Attorney's Office in Cape Girardeau, and the
recent opportunity you gave us to speak to you to in Cape
Girardeau.
Sincerely,
Norman Copeland,
President, Cape Girardeau County Sheriff.
Chief James W. Leist,
Secretary/Treasurer, Sikeston Department of Public Safety.
Sheriff Gary Schaaf,
Board Member, Perry County Sheriff.
Chief Bill Adams,
Board Member, Poplar Bluff Police Department.
William F. Ferrell,
Vice-President, Scott County Sheriff.
Chief Howard H. Boyd, Jr.,
Board Member, Cape Girardeau Police Department.
Chief Robert Ritchey,
Board Member, Charleston Department of Public Safety.
Sergeant A.W. Foust,
Coordinator, Missouri State Highway Patrol.
[From the Trooper Association Magazine]
Legalize Drugs?
(By Alan Foust)
I have been a state narcotic investigator for eight years,
assigned for over two years to deep-cover narcotics and
afterwards to several short term undercover investigations in
which I was directly exposed to the drug culture. For the
last four years I have supervised a narcotics unit and been a
trainer to others in narcotics investigation. I have
experienced the drug problem in every conceivable fashion
except as an addict, and I have uniquely experienced their
pain as well. I guess you could say I am a front line
observer that has a unique perspective and insight into the
drug culture and related social problems. I have developed
some hardened ideals about the drug problem that are in stark
contrast to the ideals of some editorialists and others who
advocate the decriminalization and legalization of drugs.
I hear the arguments that the drug war is like the Vietnam
war and unwinnable; that the problem is too overwhelming;
that drugs are no worse than alcohol and should be legalized;
that decriminalizing drugs ``would cut street crime by 75
percent''; that drug interdiction and education efforts are a
total failure.
And I have to ask, if we did legalize drugs, would we
legalize all drugs in any purity and sell them to any
individual? Or would we have restrictions on youth, pregnant
mothers and professionals such as doctors, police officers,
airline pilots, et cetera? Would we sell pure heroin and pure
cocaine? Would we legally sell crack cocaine? Or would we
just sell the cocaine and let the street dealers convert it
to the smokable form of crack as they do now? How do you
establish an acceptable, legitimate source of harmful drugs
in a society as complex as ours without restrictions? Can an
acceptable system be set up without black markets controlled
by the criminal element who have traditionally taken
advantage and made money from society's weaknesses?
Is the drug problem similar to the alcohol abuse problem
and the related failure to prohibit alcohol consumption? I
have met many functional alcoholics, people who have drank
for years, but I have never met a functional drug addict.
Drugs are an acid that eat the mind, and in a very short time
consume the user's life until nothing else exists. I have
intimately known many individuals that have met this monster
and according to their own testimonials, they have all lost
the battle.
Is it even a drug problem? Could it simply be a crime
problem, an economic problem or is there an underlying cause
that we fail or refuse to recognize? In 1991, 707,502 babies
were born to single white women, representing 22 percent of
births. Sixty-eight percent of all black births and often
some 80 percent of all births in inner-cities are born to
unmarried mothers. Illegitimacy is probably the single most
important social problem of our time--more important than
drugs, poverty, illiteracy, welfare or homelessness--
because it drives everything else. In the next decade I
believe we will lose large portions of some of our major
inner-cities, not due to drugs, which is a side note, but
because of a larger social problem consisting of a large
culture of unsocialized male adolescents where physical
violence and immediate gratification is common place. If
we continue to support illegitimacy through social welfare
programs this condition will worsen and consequently so
will the drug problem.
As Americans we are part of an impatient, quick-fix
society. We traditionally become intensely interested in
short-term problems and causes. But in longer relationships
we become bored turning our attention to newer and more
pressing issues. In 1962 only one-half of one percent of the
U.S. population used an illicit drug and that included
marijuana. Though it varies according to the statistics you
use, we now have about 35 million drug users. It has taken us
30 years to reach this epidemic level of drug abuse and we
have only recognized and decided to fight a limited war
against drug abuse for the last ten years. Five years ago
there were no television commercials telling us that cocaine
can kill and the seriousness of marijuana use is still not
shared with the public by the media even though there have
been over 3000 separate scientific studies documenting its
devastating effect on the body (far more research has been
done on cannabis than any other illegal drug). And where is
the empirical evidence that the drug interdiction efforts
have failed? Who can accurately answer the question of how
big and how bad would the drug problem be if we had not
developed and maintained our interdictions efforts to this
date? Is thirty-five billion dollars a year too much to spend
on law enforcement (we spend more than that on personal
toiletries each year)?
Instead of making a vain attempt to parallel the drug war
with a fighting war that ended almost 20 years ago, one that
we still, for some reason, use for validation, we must
instead maintain our moral imperative and ask the question,
what is right? Is it right to tell our children one day that
it is wrong to use drugs and to tell them the next day that
we were wrong and it is alright to abuse and violate their
bodies with drugs? Is it right to give up because we might
lose the war or is it more important to fight the war no
matter if we win or lose, no matter if it take another thirty
years to win? We all have the responsibility to do all that
we can about the situation we have allowed to happen. If
every affected element of our society--parents, schools,
business, law-enforcement, the judiciary, legislative bodies,
public health, the military, the media and entertainment
industry--made a determined decision that drug abuse was
absolutely unacceptable in our society and worked together in
searching for the roots to the problem and relentlessly
provided solutions for those problem areas, we would win this
war. And I ask, what is the alternative?
Mr. BOND. Mr. President, I am sympathetic to arguments that a
comprehensive drug policy requires drug treatment on demand, and I am
committed to finding ways to help those who have the courage to kick
their addiction, but I would point out that these law enforcement
officers have shared their belief that ``drug rehabilitation is a
naturally occurring process and no amount of Federal dollars can speed
up the process.''
It is certainly not scientifically accurate, but I would just state
to my colleagues that in the hearings in the Labor, HHS Appropriations
Subcommittee, when we had before us the Commissioner of Social
Security, we inquired about the effectiveness of the SSI, supplemental
security income payments to drug and alcohol abusers. We asked if they
knew what the rate of success in treating them had been under that
particular program. As I understand it, the example that they cited was
a study of 197 people who had been on the program.
As I recall the statistics, they said that of the 197 people that had
been on for 3 years, 20 percent had actually left the program; 10
percent died; 10 percent went to prison; and 1 person was cured. That
raises a real question in my mind about the efficacy of our current
programs to deal with the problem of drug abuse by rehabilitation
alone.
I cannot stand by and watch the Clinton administration cut funding
for drug-related crime fighting and interdiction by nearly 2 percent
below its 1993 levels. Such cuts merely send a clear signal to drug
cartels that we are backing off the fight, in order to treat the
wounded.
Drug interdiction and other supply initiatives are vital parts of
helping our country become drug-free. Representative Charles Rangel,
former chairman of the House Select Committee on Narcotics, and
Representative Benjamin Gilman, former vice chairman of the committee,
argue persuasively that if interdiction is allowed to lag, the result
inevitably will be more and cheaper drugs on the street. Exclusive
reliance on demand-side measures ignores the relationship between drug
availability and drug use.
And hard numbers demonstrate that drug interdiction is working.
Between 1987 and 1991, 552 metric tons of cocaine were seized in Latin
America alone; during the same period, the percentage of cocaine users
in the United States dropped by more than half. Less easily quantified,
but no less important, is the deterrent effect of interdiction. The
threat of drug seizures by U.S. authorities deters importation or
manufacture of an indeterminate but by no means insignificant amount of
drugs. Similarly, interdiction imposes added costs of traffickers for
the shipments they do make, and results in drugs on the street being
more expensive, and therefore less readily obtainable.
But I fear that the President's abdication of leadership on the drug
issue extends far beyond these economic realities and the numbers on a
budget sheet. President Clinton, who has been willing to use the
Presidency's bully pulpit in a variety of visible and creative ways,
has exhibited obvious reluctance to tell our Nation's youth--strongly
and unequivocally--that drug use is as wrong as it is illegal. And we
need his leadership now. According to a 1994 Monitoring the Future
study, the proportion of teenagers who believe that regular marijuana
use is risky has fallen from 79 percent in 1991 to 73 percent in 1993,
even as the proportion of eighth graders using marijuana has increased
by 50 percent in the last 2 years, from 6.2 to 9.2 percent. Using the
Presidency's bully pulpit is one of the most effective ways to
counteract the softening social norms against drug use. I suggest that
the President use his next appearance on MTV to do just that.
Opponents of the Reagan administration's policy attempted to make fun
of Mrs. Reagan's program of ``Just Say No To Drugs.'' But, at least,
Mr. President, somebody was trying to get the message across. Now we
are not hearing that message.
I fear President Clinton's credibility in arguing effectively against
drug use is seriously impaired, as long as he continues to support a
Surgeon General who has repeatedly advocated drug legalization. His
continuing expressions of confidence in Dr. Joycelyn Elders must lead
Americans to wonder just how committed he is to ensuring that drug use
both remains illegal and frowned upon in pop culture. His influence
here is immeasurable, and he can make it either a positive force or a
negative force. This leadership vacuum on the part of the President and
the Surgeon General becomes all the more deplorable in light of the
fact that drug use is known, and has been amply demonstrated, to have
harmful effects on human beings. One need look no farther than the
tragedy of the crack baby epidemic which rages every day in the
hospital delivery rooms of America. Far more quickly and to a far
greater extent than either alcohol or tobacco, illegal drugs like crack
cocaine form addictions that cripple the drug user--physically,
mentally, and spiritually. Many of those in the throes of a drug
addition can think of nothing but how they will satisfy an insatiable
need for another ``hit'' of their drug of choice. Mothers desert their
toddlers, children kill their parents, young men and women throw away
promising futures--all because of a degrading obsession. Indeed, the
Office of National Drug Control Policy reported this year that the
crack epidemic tripled the number of New York City's child abuse and
neglect cases in the late 1980's.
To make drugs cheaper and more readily available is to promote to the
social pathology and human tragedy of physical and mental illnesses
caused by drug usage. This fact alone, in my view, is sufficient
argument to reject any efforts whatsoever to decriminalize drugs. I
only wish that the President would step forward and affirm his
agreement with this conclusion--if indeed he shares my conviction on
this point.
In conclusion, contrary to what many would suggest, drug abuse is a
hardly victimless crime. A 1991 survey of State prisons reveals that
fully one-third of State prison inmates say that they were under the
influence of drugs when they committed a crime for which they were in
prison. One in four women and one in six men actually committed the
offense for money with which to buy drugs.
Mr. President, from my own experience as Governor of the State of
Missouri, we estimated that anywhere between two-thirds and three-
quarters of the inmates of our State prisons were drug users, either
having committed crimes directly related to drug use, or under the
influence of or use at a time when they were abusing drugs.
Clearly, this is a problem that we all face. We must work together
quickly and vigorously--even as we reach out with compassion to those
who are addicted--to ensure that we can catch and punish those who
profit by bringing these illegal drugs into our communities.
There is no substitute for continuing the effort. Drug rehabilitation
alone is not going to be the answer. When the President tells us he is
going to rely on interdiction in the source countries, the activities
in cutting off the information sharing on airline flights, the failure
to increase significantly the money spent on drug abuse activities, and
drug suppression in other countries belies the notion that they truly
believe that that can have an impact.
As the men and women who are on the frontline of drug abuse fights
will tell you, there is no substitute for strong interdiction efforts,
and a strong Federal partnership with State and local law enforcement
officials who, without the Federal Government's help, are unable to
stem the growing menace of drug abuse and drug crime in their
communities.
Mr. President, I thank the Chair.
____________________