[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 94 (Tuesday, July 19, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: July 19, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                          DRUG WAR SURRENDER?

 Mr. D'AMATO. Mr. President, I rise today to review the current 
state of what used to be called the drug war. I have spoken before on 
this topic and urged the Clinton administration to take sensible steps 
to advance the progress that past administrations have made. It now 
appears that they have retreated from past progress and undermined both 
domestic and foreign counterdrug efforts. It is time to ask if the 
Clinton administration has surrendered in the drug war.
   Anyone who is serious leader in counternarcotics will say that the 
drug war will be won or lost on the demand side. They will also agree 
that supply side efforts must be sustained and effective to shield 
demand side efforts against being overwhelmed by the easy availability 
of cheap, high purity drugs.
  President Clinton has said all the right things. On the demand side, 
he said we would focus on ``* * * the most tenacious and damaging 
aspect of America's drug problem--chronic, hard-core drug use and the 
violence it spawns.'' On the domestic supply side, he said:

       We will continue with strengthened efforts by Federal law 
     enforcement agencies--in concert with their State and local 
     counterparts--to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy drug 
     trafficking organizations.

  On the foreign front, he said:

       International drug trafficking is a criminal activity that 
     threatens democratic institutions, fuels terrorism and human 
     rights abuses, and undermines economic development. Antidurg 
     programs must be an integral part of our foreign policy when 
     dealing with major source and transit countries, equal to the 
     worldwide commitment that the United States devotes to the 
     promotion of democracy, human rights, and economic 
     advancement. (1994 National Drug Control Strategy).

  The problem is not what he has said, but what he has done, or in many 
cases, not done. Rather than attempting to review and assess the 
totality of the national drug control strategy and each of the 
component policies and programs intended to implement that strategy, in 
today's remarks I will highlight what has happened to a few key parts 
of our counterdrug effort. These parts are those that, if fully funded 
and well-run, would produce the greatest leverage or synergy in the 
drug war, and are the critical links in any effort to draw together all 
of the vast resources of the United States for a coordinated, 
sophisticated, smart counternarcotics effort.
  While the Office of National Drug Control Policy [ONDCP] cannot be 
said to be a success, at least it played a modest but necessary role in 
coordinating the policies and budgets of the major agencies involved in 
the drug war. However, to keep a campaign promise to cut White House 
staff, President Clinton cut ONDCP's staff back from 146 staffers to 25 
staffers, undercutting its ability to use its only effective leverage 
to shape the counterdrug program--its authority over drug program 
agencies' counterdrug budgets. The staff cuts effectively ended ONDCP's 
ability to analyze agency counterdrug budgets, much less monitor their 
execution and enforce coordination. In addition, the new director of 
National Drug Control Policy, Lee P. Brown, has been practically 
invisible on the national stage.

  On the demand side, President Clinton's accurate rhetorical focus on 
hard-core drug users is not matched with policies or programs capable 
of turning his rhetoric into reality. Hard-core drug users are the 
source of the cash flow that is the foundation of the cocaine cartels 
and heroin rings, and breaking their habits--and stopping their 
payments for illegal drugs--is the key to making real advances against 
illegal drug use.
  We do not have either an adequate scientific understanding of how 
illegal drugs work on the human central nervous system, or an actual 
medical treatment for either cocaine or heroin addiction. Methadone is 
not a curative, it is merely a palliative. The availability of workable 
medical treatments for cocaine and heroin addiction is a key to success 
with the hard-core addict population.
  In fact, while experts argue over actual percentages, few addicts 
choose to become clean and sober voluntarily, and few of those who try 
to permanently change their addictive behavior actually succeed. 
Relapse is a serious problem. If workable medical treatments were 
available, treatment programs, whether voluntary or as the result of 
criminal justice system processing, would have a much better chance of 
success. This success would be a key to cutting the cartels' cash flow.
  With this in mind, the provision of $81.5 million for basic 
biomedical research and $68.9 million for neurobehavioral research in 
the administration's fiscal year 1995 budget request is totally 
inadequate. This request represents, respectively, 0.6 percent and 0.5 
percent of the total of $13.2 billion total funding request for 
counterdrug activities. Worse, the basic biomedical request doesn't 
even keep up with the fiscal year 1995 Biomedical Research and 
Development Price Index, which projects an increase of 4.1 percent in 
costs. The basic biomedical research request represents an increase of 
3.8 percent over the fiscal year 1994 request, but represents an actual 
decrease in purchasing power of the account of 0.3 percent. While the 
neurobehavioral research account has gone up by 8.3 percent over fiscal 
year 1994, this represents only a 4.2 percent advance over inflation in 
the account.
  In contrast, the administration is asking for a $360.3 million, or 
14.3 percent increase in its drug treatment account, and a $448.2 
million, or 28.0 percent increase in its education, community action, 
and the workplace account. This $808.5 million increase in these 
accounts funnels money into activities that, while helpful, are not 
critical. Worse, most of the funds going into those activities are 
coming from supply-side activities that were, in many cases, just 
reaching a resource level that allowed sporadic effectiveness.
  On the supply side, action against drug trafficking organizations 
begins in source and transit countries with good relations with these 
nations' governments. From friendly, cooperative relations flow a 
series of policy, legal, and resource allocation decisions that 
comprise active counternarcotics programs that are coordinated with 
U.S. efforts.
  Without even discussing program or resource specifics in this area, 
the single most important fact is that on May 1, 1994, the United 
States ceased providing real time aircraft radar track data to Colombia 
and Peru. This essential assistance was halted because of a legal 
opinion that provision of such data to countries with active policies 
of using lethal force against suspected trafficker aircraft constituted 
a violation of a Federal criminal law, specifically title 18, United 
States Code, section 32, Destruction of Aircraft or Aircraft 
Facilities.
  This cutoff of radar data angered and confused the Governments of 
Colombia and Peru and, coupled with other developments, threatens to 
sour relations with governments that are critical to our efforts 
against cocaine trafficking. Despite a reported decision by President 
Clinton that would allow us to resume providing this radar data if 
Colombia and Peru agree to certain conditions, we have not, as of 
today, resumed sharing this information.
  The net result of this situation is that the people who do the actual 
counternarcotics work in, respectively, the home country of the cocaine 
cartels and the major cocaine producing country, are denied critical 
information they need to do their jobs. This allows the cartels to move 
product from Peru to Colombia and to ship it from Colombia north to the 
United States with much less risk of interception by law enforcement. 
Thus, supply side forces are unable to do their jobs to protect demand 
side efforts from being overwhelmed by an incoming tide of cheap, high 
purity cocaine.
  In addition, other events have taken place that downgrade the 
emphasis on joint cooperative counternarcotics efforts by U.S. defense 
and law enforcement agencies. Defense Department participation is being 
reduced in almost all areas. The way to determine how much it is being 
reduced is to compare the fiscal year 1995 DOD counternarcotics budget 
request by category with what was actually appropriated in fiscal year 
1993. The reason why this is important is that the fiscal year 1994 
appropriation was so reduced that it gives the false impression that 
the fiscal year 1995 request represents growth in DOD's commitment to 
the drug war, at least in a few categories. Comparison with the fiscal 
year 1993 levels reveals that DOD's resource comment reveals a cut from 
$1.14 billion in fiscal year 1993 to $874.0 million, a reduction of 
$266.5 million, or 23.4 percent. Moreover, key components of the 
effort, such as interdiction, received even deeper reductions. 
Interdiction funding is down from $631.5 million in fiscal year 1993 to 
$427.8 million fiscal year 1995, a cut of $203.7 million or 32.3 
percent.

  Mr. President, I don't know very many government programs that can be 
run efficiently with such dramatic resource reductions. Everything that 
I hear leads me to believe that these resource reductions have had a 
pronounced negative impact on the effectiveness of DOD counterdrug 
operations--at least until the radar data decision led to the 
suspension of many of them.
  This sequence of events has disjointed our interdiction efforts, 
which to function well, must be an integrated whole with end-to-end 
connectivity. The process starts with, hopefully, intelligence that a 
drug flight will soon be airborne.
  Armed with this intelligence, U.S.-operated radar, either airborne or 
ground-based, acquires radar tracks and performs the critical sorting 
function--identifying the one track that is the suspect aircraft out of 
all of the tracks of ordinary commercial, private, and military 
aircraft that are in the air on legal business. Then, that suspect 
track is provided first to host nation forces for any action they might 
decide to take.
  If the suspect flight proceeds north toward the United States, long-
range interceptors are vectored to intercept and follow the subject 
aircraft. If the suspect aircraft lands in Mexico, host-nation 
apprehension forces are vectored to the landing site to arrest the 
traffickers and seize the aircraft and its cargo. If the suspect's 
aircraft heads into the Caribbean to make an airdrop to waiting 
smugglers' boats, host-nation or U.S. Coast Guard or U.S. Navy vessels 
with LEDET's onboard are vectored to the airdrop site to intercept the 
boats, arrest the traffickers, and seize the cargos. In that case, the 
long-range interceptor then follows the airdrop aircraft back to its 
origin, and the radar track is again provided to the host nation for 
any action they may choose to take.
  If any link in this complex chain of intelligence, sensor data, 
communications, operations, and logistic support for these activities 
is broken, the whole interdiction process fails. According to the 1994 
National Drug Control Strategy, the DOD counterdrug program's two 
principal objectives are: ``First, disrupting narco-trafficker 
operations--by forcing the drug cartels to seek alternate means and 
routes for the delivery of illegal drugs, at increased risk and 
expense, and second, assisting drug law enforcement agency [DLEA] and 
host nation interdiction operations.'' The decline in resources and the 
dispute over radar track data has frustrated achievement of these 
objectives and, indeed, represents a serious step backward from a 
situation in which we were beginning to achieve sporadic success.
  The administration's fiscal year 1995 budget requests for the Federal 
Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration 
reflected serious reductions in agent personnel and support personnel, 
reductions so large that they would have immediately damaged domestic 
law enforcement efforts against drug trafficking. The Senate and House 
Appropriations Subcommittees on Commerce, Justice, and State, the 
Judiciary, and Related Agencies acted to block these reductions. The 
Senate bill provides for the hiring of 436 new FBI special agents and 
311 more DEA special agents, restoring both agencies to their peak--
fiscal year 1992--strength.
  Against this background, it is only possible to conclude that 
President Clinton is presiding over our surrender in the drug war. 
Foreign policy blunders, resource cutbacks in key areas, and what I 
suspect is malign--not benign--neglect, lead me to that judgment. It is 
a judgment that is fraught with peril for the United States.
  As I have said before, success in the drug war depends upon creation 
of a popular culture that deglamorizes and delegitimizes drug use; 
availability of effective medical treatment for those who want to break 
the cycle of addiction; strict and fair enforcement of U.S. drug laws; 
a cost-effective monitoring and interdiction program to defeat drug 
transportation networks; and friendly, cooperative counterdrug programs 
conducted with host nations in source and transit countries against 
cartel and heroin rings. When we do those things, and do them smartly, 
we can defeat the scourge of illegal drugs and take a long step toward 
restoring domestic peace and tranquility in our own country.
  When we fail to do those things, violent crime surges, medical costs 
rise, industrial, commercial, and transportation accidents rise, the 
efficiency of our economy goes down, and faith in the ability of 
government at all levels to meet the basic needs of our citizens is 
undermined. U.S. surrender in the drug war doesn't mean lower costs, it 
means higher costs for more cops, more prosecutors, more prisons, more 
emergency room visits, more shattered families more public assistance. 
It doesn't mean less crime and violence, it means more, It doesn't 
produce a more tolerant civil society, it produces loss of faith and 
loss of confidence and a retreat into more and more extreme local 
measures to defend families and communities against this treat.
  Mr. President, Congress cannot run the drug war. Only the President 
can do that. We cannot save the executive branch from all of its 
mistakes. We cannot turn around popular culture--culture that seems 
again to be looking favorably on drug abuse.
  This speech is an alarm bell--a ringing alarm that is intended to 
awaken those who are concerned about the drug war and its progress, and 
who may have been misled by administration rhetoric into believing that 
we are making progress. We are not making progress, we are sliding 
backwards, losing ground that will be very expensive in time and in 
money to regain, if we can regain it, because part of that ground 
consists of confidence of people in U.S. policy.
  I call upon my colleagues to again refocus their attention on the 
drug war, and to ask the searching, probing questions that will confirm 
the problems it is now facing. After we hear the answer to those 
questions, we must act to restore and, to the extent that we can, 
commitment to the drug war. If we fail, the American people will hold 
us responsible.

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