[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 41 (Monday, March 6, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H2703-H2707]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
NOTIFYING MEMBERS OF HISTORIC MEETING ON THURSDAY, MARCH 9, 1995,
REGARDING AMERICA'S RENEWED WAR ON DRUGS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 4, 1995, the gentleman from New Hampshire [Mr. Zeliff] is
recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. ZELIFF. Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure to offer this special
order tonight on a subject which is of major importance to all of us.
Remember the drug war? Remember when casual use was condemned, not
discussed in the same breath as legalization? When the Nation's
commitment to interdicting drugs wasn't shrinking? When Presidents and
First Ladies spoke out, especially to children, about the dangers of
drug use?
Well, I do, and so do many of my friends and colleagues in this
Chamber.
That is why, as chairman of the House Oversight Subcommittee on
National Security, International Affairs and Criminal Justice, I will
be joined by Democrats and Republicans in holding historic hearings on
March 9. Our
[[Page H2704]] singular and united purpose: To re-awaken the Nation. To
refocus our great Nation on the renewed need for engaged, outspoken
national leadership. From the very, very top.
Sadly, there is a growing consensus that our current approach is
failing. In 1993 and 1994, respected annual surveys of 51,000 high
school students and 8th graders told a depressing story: Gains made are
slipping away.
We are in the midst of a major reveral--both in youth use and
attitudes.
After a steep drop in monthly cocaine use between 1988 and 1991, from
2.9 to 1.3 million users, and a similar drop in overall drug use
between 1991 and 1992 from 14.5 million users to 11.4 million users.
The latest numbers reveal drug use up for all surveyed grades for
crack, cocaine, heroin, stimulants, LSD, non-LSD hallucinogens,
inhalants, and marijuana.
For example, in 1994, according to the respected Michigan University
study, twice the number of 8th graders were experimenting with
marijuana as did in 1991, and daily use of marijuana by seniors was up
by half just from 1993.
If that were not enough to show our current failure, the nationally-
recognized Drug Abuse Warning Network has just reported that drug-
related emergency room visits in 1994 were up 8 percent over 1993, now
standing at their highest point ever.
Does this matter? You better believe it does. The Columbia University
Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse [CASA], headed by a former
Carter Cabinet Secretary, expressed it this way.
If historical trends continue, the jump in marijuana use
among America's children from 1992 to 1994 signals that
820,000 more of these children will try cocaine in their
lifetime. Of that number, about 58,000 will become regular
cocaine addicts and users.
These numbers only scratch the surface. Drugs kills kids. They steal
opportunity, crush dreams and ruin lives.
This has not changed, even as their acceptability has crept back.
What we need in 1995 is leadership--real leadership--something that has
been sadly absent.
Let me be clear. Leadership is needed from both sides of the aisle,
and from both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
The Nation must again talk about this scourge, educate kids, go after
the drug traffickers who have enjoyed freer reign with reduced
interdiction. Less money was spent on interdiction in 1994 than in
1993, and less in 1993 than in 1992. We must collectively revive the
Nation, restore the momentum, and recognize that this is a war won
every day--one child at a time.
That's what Thursday's hearing is for. And we are calling in the
leaders in this fight. Our first speaker will be someone who has been
working privately on this issue for a decade.
She is flying from her husband's side to deliver what we understand
will be her most significant address on this issue since she addressed
the United Nations in 1988.
We will listen intently, because she is a uniquely dedicated leader
to drug prevention and the creator of a national foundation to halt
drug abuse. We will also listen because she is a former First Lady,
Nancy Reagan.
She will be followed by a former Head of the Drug Enforcement
Administration under both Presidents Clinton and Bush, Judge Robert
Bonner.
{time} 2115
At Bonner's side will sit a former Drug Czar, Dr. William Bennett,
who promises new thinking and a crisp critique. Both men drive one
point home: Presidential leadership is essential, especially in re-
finding a commitment to international interdiction. With Bonner and
Bennett, John Walters, and other veterans of the drug war, I would also
point out the solidarity of purpose represented by the recent article
from Joseph Califano, ``It's Drugs, Stupid.''
We need bi-partisan effort and a bi-partisan call to national
leadership. Califano's ideas are not the only ones on point.
We will be joined by a former Coast Guard Commandant, Paul Yost,
predecessor to President Clinton's national coordinator for drug
interdiction.
We will also hear from President Clinton's Drug Czar, Dr. Lee Brown.
Just how has the Nation gotten so far off track? Why has there been so
little presidential leadership on drugs?
And from both sides of the aisle: How will President Clinton's 1995
Annual Drug Control Strategy address the 1993 and 1994 slippage?
Prevention must not be left out. Teaching and interdicting are both
important; they lean upon each other, two sides of a dam restraining
the in-flow of illegal drugs.
Major national leaders on prevention will also speak, including the
widely-heralded Partnership for a Drug Free America, BEST Foundation,
Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America, and Texans' War on Drugs.
There is only one point: Drugs destroy lives, and our Nation must now
remember what President and Nancy Reagan so plainly taught.
You cannot stop drugs without effective drug interdiction. You cannot
prevent drug use if you don't talk about it. From the President on
down, it's time to seriously look at drugs again. The Nation needs it,
and our kids deserve it: We now need renewed national leadership.
Mr. GILMAN. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. ZELIFF. I yield to the gentleman from New York.
Mr. GILMAN. I want to commend the gentleman for his efforts in the
drug war, something we have been fighting for many years. Too often our
Nation forgets crucial aspects of how drugs have affected our society,
killing our young people, placing many of our people in a nonproductive
situation. We cannot say enough about this problem, we cannot do enough
about the problem. I want to commend the gentleman for his efforts.
Mr. ZELIFF. I thank the gentleman from New York and the highly
respected chairman of the Committee on International Relations. I know
from your vantage point, maybe you can just tell us from your vantage
point, from a worldwide global effort what this is doing to our
national defense and security.
Mr. GILMAN. It has affected every aspect of our society, not only
security which has been hurt by the many drug abusers who are out
there, but also industry itself, loss of productivity, absenteeism, the
amount of accidents that occur. But most important, how it has impacted
upon our young people, the overdose, the deaths, causing many of our
young people to leave school and to go out on the street and become
drug traffickers rather than to be productive members of our society.
It has been estimated that drug abuse in our country costs over $500
billion in lost productivity, absenteeism, and all sorts of problems
that it causes. We cannot say enough to convince our Nation to get
behind our drug war to make certain that our communities are going to
be drug-free and that our schools will be drug-free. I hope my
colleagues will take a look at the proposal to cut funding for the
drug-free school proposal. I think that is an extremely important
measure. Prevention is so important.
Those of us who have been fighting the battle recognize there are
five major battlefields in the drug war to reduce supply and demand
simultaneously, to go to the source countries and eradicate, to
interdict when the product comes out of those countries and heads
toward our shores, and then to beef up our enforcement when it reaches
our shoreline.
Then on the demand side, to provide the kind of education that will
discourage abuse by our own youngsters, to teach them that drug abuse
is not recreational but is deadly, and then in the final analysis to
treat and to rehabilitate the victims of drug abuse. Again I thank the
gentleman for focusing his attention on this very important aspect of
the drug war.
Mr. ZELIFF. I thank the gentleman from New York.
Mr. EHRLICH. If the gentleman would further yield, I first want to
thank the gentleman in a very public way for making me a Vice Chair of
the committee. I am very excited. I also congratulate the gentleman
with respect to your enthusiasm to tackle this issue head-on, because
it occurred to me in the course of the crime debate, and I would like
the gentleman to comment on this if he would. We discussed on this
floor truth-in-sentencing and the importance of building prisons and
mandatory minimum sentences and gun violence and all the very important
crime-related bills that have
[[Page H2705]] passed through this floor, but we were criticized
because we did not address at that time in my view what is really the
threshold issue here, which is the proliferation of drug abuse in this
country over the last 20 years, because I know the gentleman agrees
with me, name the issue, AIDS, child abuse, truth-in-sentencing,
building of prisons, whatever it is, whether it is a fiscal issue or a
social issue, most of the issues we deal with on this floor are in some
way related to the proliferation of drug abuse in this country today.
I would direct a question to the Chair of the subcommittee and ask
you to comment on this observation.
When Mrs. Reagan came out with the ``Just Say No'' Program, she was
criticized, as the gentleman will recall. It just was not cool to just
say no. There had to be something more sophisticated, a more complex
message that we needed to give to the children of this country.
But the fact is, and I think this goes back to the whole idea really
behind the Contract With America and why many of us ran for public
office, getting back to this idea of personal responsibility in our
individual lives and stressing the fact that our kids make millions of
decisions during the course of a day, and the message they need to hear
coming from their parents, from their elders, from the floor of this
House is, ``It's OK to say no, it's cool to say no,'' because they will
pay the price potentially if they make the wrong decision.
I would like the gentleman to comment on the leadership the Reagans,
the former First Lady showed in coming out in such a way that she knew
she would be in for it. She knew that the Hollywood types and the
commentators from Washington would deem her comments almost irrelevant
and she would become the focus of actually being made fun of, which she
was, but she stuck to her guns and she is going to revisit our
subcommittee, I know you are very honored to have her come to our
subcommittee and re-stress, reiterate how important this message is
today for our kids in 1995.
Mr. ZELIFF. First I am very proud to have the gentleman as my Vice
Chair. I think Thursday's meetings are going to be right on point, and
I am hoping that with the people we have assembled there, we can draw
enough attention to get back on track.
I agree, Nancy Reagan did step out at a time when it was not easy to
do that, to take a leadership role, but that is what leadership is all
about. She certainly was supported by the President at that point, and
people from around the country stepping out. This is what we have to do
now. We need to now step back out.
We hope that we can encourage the President to start with his office,
the bully pulpit, and start showing the kind of leadership that needs
to be shown here, that maybe that will then start both sides of the
aisle here, both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, we start then speaking
out as well.
I think that is what it is going to take. It is going to have to be a
national, a top priority, and the priority starts right at the very,
very top, with the President. If he shows the kind of leadership that
he is capable of showing, then we will all be able to do the same in
our individual areas.
But we cannot let this go on. If we accept casual use of drugs, then
we are going to accept things, the former Surgeon General was starting
to talk about legalization, and we are going downhill from there. I
think we have just go to reverse where we have been and start back up
where we were back in the days of Nancy Reagan.
Mr. EHRLICH. I really appreciate the gentleman's comments. This is
certainly not a partisan issue in any respect, but you were focused on
the casual use of drugs, which I think is an element in this whole
debate that has been missing in recent times. I would like the
gentleman to comment on this number.
Columbia University Center on Addiction And Substance Abuse recently
warned, if historical trends continue, the jump in marijuana use among
America's children, defined as ages 12 through 18, from 1992 to 1994,
signals that 820,000 more of these children will try cocaine in their
lifetime. Of that number, about 58,000 kids will become regular cocaine
addicts and users.
It seems to me that the White House misses the fact that no one goes
from being a nondrug user to a gross abuser. There is a middle ground
there. The casual user really needs to be the focal point of our
efforts here on the floor of this House. Here again, that is where the
former First Lady really deserves credit, because she focused her
energies on those casual users, and God knows, if we ignore the casual
users, we have major problems down the road.
Mr. ZELIFF. Absolutely. We have got to get to kids early on and stay
with them all the way through.
Mr. MICA. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. ZELIFF. Yes, sir, I yield to the gentleman from Florida, a very
valued member of our committee as well.
Mr. MICA. First I want to take just a moment and thank you as
chairman of our subcommittee, I have the honor of serving with you.
I know the hour is late, I know that my colleagues are late, the
staff is tired, and we have been working very diligently the past weeks
to bring issues before the Congress and the American people of utmost
importance, but I really cannot think of any subject that is more
important to this Congress or to American society than the question of
drug and substance abuse.
I want to compliment you, too, taking over as chairman of this
subcommittee and immediately dealing with the issue and bringing this
issue to the forefront not only of our subcommittee but of the Congress
and this administration and the American people.
If I might just comment a few minutes. As a Member, a new Member of
Congress during the 103d session, I had over 130 members of both sides
of the aisle, Republican and Democrat, sign a letter asking the former
chairman of the House Committee on Government Operations to hold a
hearing, a full hearing on the administration's drug policy. Do you
know that we never held a true full hearing on the administration's
drug policy? The worse the situation got, the more that this was
ignored. In fact, it was totally ignored. Again over 130 Members, both
sides, Republicans and Democrats, asked for a hearing and never got a
hearing. On the very last day, a hearing was held in one of the
subcommittees and it was a sham of a hearing.
So I salute you on taking charge of this subcommittee, on bringing
this subject forward. Let me say that this is a real, real problem that
this country has, and that is drug and substance abuse and that our
subcommittee and this Congress must address some of these fundamental
issues.
For too long, the other side sent mixed messages. They sent messages
as far as the Congress was concerned in the way that drug abuse would
be tolerated in this country. We had a Surgeon General of this Nation
who did not give the proper emphasis to the problems with casual abuse
and drug use that we have heard mentioned here today. It has not been a
priority of this administration. I again commend you on making it a
priority.
When this Congress can send thousands of American troops into Haiti
and we can help solve the problems in Somalia and around the world and
when just a few miles from here, Washington, DC, we have in the alleys,
in the backyards, in the streets almost every weekend and every night
people, their lives being destroyed, young people being destroyed. You
know, I have been coming to our Nation's capital for almost 15 years
now and every Monday I pick up the paper and it practically brings
tears to my eyes and sadness to my heart to read about the young black
American, Afro-American males that are being wiped out in our Nation's
capital, again just a few blocks from here.
Each year since I have been coming here, it has been between 350 and
450 people whose lives are snuffed out in this fashion.
{time} 2130
And somewhere this has to be a priority. Somewhere there has to be a
time for this Congress and this Nation to wake up and see that the real
problem facing this country, that the biggest social and crime problem
is drugs and drug abuse and drug use.
If you come to Florida in my district and you talk to the sheriffs
and talk to the enforcement people and you ask them how many people in
your prison
[[Page H2706]] or in your jail are here and have been involved in drug
abuse or substance abuse, they will tell you 60 percent, 70 percent of
the people in prison have been victimized or involved in drug use and
abuse.
We have ignored this problem, and we must bring this problem and this
administration and this Congress' approach, a new approach, a sound
approach.
This administration ignored helping our Andean nations with
information, with exchange radar information. I will say that two of
the chairs and former ranking member of the Committee on Foreign
Relations sat in hearings and saw the mess that was created with our
Andean nations, and now we accuse Columbia of not paying attention to
drug abuse and interdiction and assistance and enforcement. Yet this
Nation has not made it a priority. So we have got to get our house and
our policy and our agenda and our priorities in order, and we have got
to make drugs and substance abuse enforcement, interdiction, telling
our young people this is not an acceptable behavior, telling our young
people how it will destroy their lives and make enforcement a real tool
rather than an imaginary or illusory tool as has been done under this
administration.
So I do want to commend again the gentleman in the well, the chairman
for holding these hearings and for coming out late tonight and for
giving us an opportunity to tell the Congress and the American people
that this is high on our priority agenda. We do not have a Contract
With America for the next 100 days, but this is part of the Contract
With America now and for this new majority in Congress, and it will be
for the days remaining in our tenure in this Congress and now the 104th
Congress.
Mr. EHRLICH. If the gentleman will yield, I really appreciate
listening to his remarks. As the subcommittee chairman knows, I was not
here in the 103d Congress. But in reading through the administration's
antidrug strategy, I read a provision that really disturbed me. The
Clinton drug strategy now seems to deemphasize prevention, saying
``Antidrug drug messages have lost their potency.''
My question to the gentleman from Florida and to the chairman of the
subcommittee is was that a central theme of the hearings that did occur
in the 103d Congress? Have we given up?
Mr. MICA. If I may respond to the gentleman, there never was a
central theme. There were hit and miss embarrassments, and the only one
that I recall that there was any change or attempted change in policy
was relating to the Andean policy and the exchange of information.
I remember when the President came to the Summit of the Americas in
Miami and we spent about an hour together, almost every Member of
Congress who joined our delegation stood up and said, ``Mr. President,
what is your policy relating to narcotics control? Mr. President, what
is the situation relating to enforcement?'' Each time we got different
answers from the President and from his advisers, and finally they have
begun to respond, only because there is a new majority in the Congress.
Mr. ZELIFF. If the gentleman will yield for just
a second, the interesting thing is there has been very little
mention about a drug policy at all for the last 2 years. I think this
is the crime of the whole thing, we are just now talking about it. We
are tolerating it, and that is what we hope these hearings will start
to bring out.
Mr. MICA. Under the previous administration, the drug czar, Mr.
Martinez from Florida, and Mr. William Bennett, there were no less than
two dozen subcommittee hearings and at least two full committee
hearings on the policies, and these drug leaders from the
administration were hauled before the Congress and asked to comment on
specifies of the policy. We have not had that opportunity, but we will
have that opportunity. We will find out what the policy is, what the
direction of this administration is going to be, and if necessary I
will work with the gentleman and with both sides of the aisle to craft
a policy that makes some sense so that we bring enforcement, so that we
bring real education forward, and that we list this as a national
priority, that our children and young people are dying on our streets,
that it is the number one cause behind crime in this country, and it
has been swept under the table and now something needs to be done about
it.
So this is your priority and it is my priority, and it will be the
priority of other Members in this 104th Congress.
Mr. ZELIFF. I thank the gentleman for those very wise comments.
I yield to the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Souder], another valued
member of our subcommittee, and I look forward to his testimony on
Thursday.
Mr. SOUDER. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I imaging that there
are a lot of people in a state of shock on hearing about this hearing,
because I want to commend the gentleman because of the way this body
works and the other body, and I was a legislative director for Senator
Coats in 1982 through 1992, and in 1985 to 1993, the top three issues
were drugs, drugs and drugs, and anything that looked like a drug bill
we shoveled money toward that drug bill, and we tried to address the
issue. But much of the way Congress works is once we pass a bill, then
we assume that supposedly that the problem has disappeared. We end
welfare as we know it, and we fix this, and because Congress focused on
it 4 or 5 years ago, the problem was supposed to go away. It does not
matter that statistics show that it has grown up. But now the political
focus is off, people want to ignore it and put it under the table and
focus on something a little more topical and get more attention, even
though the problem is still existing and is increasing.
In the first year in office President Clinton slashed the czar's
office from 146 to 25. He put enforcement efforts on the back burner
and shifted the emphasis from our borders he says to neighborhoods and
streets, yet they have cut back on a lot of those types of efforts.
This administration has spent, as we heard earlier, much too much time
focusing on the problems in Somalia, or in Haiti, or on micromanaging
the rest of the world and they have not paid adequate attention to our
crisis here at home.
In Fort Wayne, IN, in my hometown, instead of having 30 or 40
buildings that are used for crack, we now have 150 to 250 that are
occasionally used for crack. Our gang problem has increased further.
For murders, we see in Fort Wayne that most murders are drug-related,
they are kids battling on the streets over control of the drug trade,
often coming out of Detroit or out of Chicago. It has not gone down at
all.
I think as we look at that we need a clear message from our national
leadership that we are going to do whatever we can. We need to use the
moral authority of the bully pulpit, of the President. We need clear
direction coming out of there. We already heard Joycelyn Elders and her
position which was actually, ``Don't smoke, but if you have to smoke,
don't smoke tobacco.'' It was a really very mixed message, and we have
seen an increase in the T-shirts and in the rock music, and in every
store with rock music that you go into you have that marijuana sign,
the marijuana drug, an acceptance in the culture, and we need to focus
on changing the moral authority and the director of this country. We
are clearly seeing a rise in the use of marijuana, the major drug of
preference in usage, as well as other types of drugs in this country.
The plain truth is that leadership matters. We can put money into
education and D.A.R.E., into the school problems which reaches a few
people. We can try to put the balloons up in the air. We can try the
INS, we can try the faster cigarette boats to try to track people down
in the water. We can look through the banana shipment to see if drugs
are coming in. We can use different aircraft and try all the different
methods for interdiction and we need to, but that alone will not
eliminate it. We need to have local task forces to do it. We need to
have a focus there. We need to have treatment programs, many of which
fail, but we still need to have treatment efforts and make the effort
on all of those fronts.
But a lot of this ultimately is going to come down to we just have to
say no. That is why it is so important to have Mrs. Reagan coming to
give that moral message again, that we have to have the moral authority
to change the commitment in the individual lives and in society to say
that that is wrong. We cannot tolerate this. We
[[Page H2707]] need to pass that message to our children and to our
families to supplement that. Our responsibility as government leaders
is to try to use the force of government, but much of this is in the
hearts of people, and we have to use our bully pulpit, the President,
the Congress, committee hearings like the gentleman is having to put
the toughness back in it.
I think the record of this administration is clear, and if they think
that they have improved it, they need to exhale.
Mr. ZELIFF. I thank all of my colleagues for joining us tonight. We
are having this hearing on Thursday, and it is going to be the most
important single issue that I think our country faces. It is one we
need to focus great attention on from both sides of the aisle and both
ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, and we look forward to these hearings.
____________________