[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.

                          ____________________