[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 133 (Tuesday, September 24, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H10979-H10980]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     THE DRUG ISSUE IN OUR COUNTRY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana [Mr. Souder] is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I first want to make a brief comment on 
Medicare. I get tired, night after night, hearing us being accused of 
cutting Medicare. I know the President alleges that this year, and I 
know many Americans have probably seen the tape or heard that Mrs. 
Clinton last year, when the President proposed a smaller increase than 
we said, explained very carefully that it was an increase and not a 
cut, and President Clinton before we took power carefully explained 
that it was an increase and not a cut, and, quite frankly, two or three 
Clintons is not bad, and I think that the Democratic Party should 
listen to two of the three Clintons who said it was not a cut, rather 
than coming up and giving misinformation to the American people.
  But I came here tonight to talk about the drug issue. A lot of people 
think this just came up at the last minute here in the campaign. I 
serve on the Government Reform Subcommittee on Internal Security and 
Foreign Affairs where we deal with the drug issue regularly, and our 
subcommittee chairman, Bill Zeliff, started right after we took over 
Congress in focusing on this issue and deserves tremendous credit for 
his persistence in keeping us in front of Congress and America and 
working with--when he started working with then-Senator Dole in New 
Hampshire over a year ago--to show him what had happened and what we 
had learned from our hearings. We thought we were going to have one or 
two hearings on the drug issue. We started with Nancy Reagan and Bill 
Bennett and heard some of the devastation and were shocked at the 
cutbacks that this administration did, and as we got in and had 
hearings with then-drug czar Lee Brown and had multiple hearings with 
the current drug czar, General McCaffrey, we have had multiple hearings 
with the Coalition for Partnership for Drug-free America. We met 
multiple times with the director of the DEA, Mr. Constantine. We have 
met with all branches. It became more and more clear that this was not 
a little issue, this was a huge issue.
  Sometimes here in Washington it takes us awhile to realize what the 
people back home know already, and that is kids are getting shot in the 
streets, there are gangs all over not only our major cities, but in 
small towns throughout. In northeast Indiana, in my home area, in 
Bluffton, in Auburn and Huntington, the gangs have spread out into the 
small towns and dealing drugs, and we have drug battles going on. It 
was Congress and Washington that was slow.
  It is not that this is some kind of a political effort at the last 
minute. We are responding to what American people saw.
  A number of us went down to Central and South America and met with 
the leaders of those nations in Bolivia and Peru and Columbia and 
Mexico and Panama, and delivered very strong messages and are trying to 
work with source country eradication and interdiction. We also held 
regional hearings in the Northeast and the Midwest, two in California. 
We have an upcoming one in Arizona, and going down to the border there, 
and over in Florida. We have been all over this Nation. It also is not 
a last minute political issue, it is an issue that the American people 
are screaming for attention, and we have been slow in responding.
  I also want to comment briefly on two hearings that we did this past 
weekend in California. One in particular I want to talk about is one we 
did in Hollywood looking at the movie industry, and also one last week 
on the music industry. I am not going to get heavily into that, but I 
want to make two points.
  One is we are very concerned that the message is being sent out in 
our music and our movies. Let me give two examples.
  After I was challenged by the leader of the recording industry of 
America to produce some names, and I am not a big rock music fan, but 
the staff provided some names, she said in the newspaper that ``Heroin 
Girl'' was an antidrug message. I went out and bought it. The group 
Everclear whose very name basically stands for some sort of white 
lightning or something; there is another song on there called 
``Chemical Smile''. If you--the song ``Heroin Girl'', it is at best 
marginal as an antidrug message. But as we heard

[[Page H10980]]

in Hollywood, the plain fact, that and movies like ``Trainspotting'', 
while to adults may look like they have a subtle antidrug message, that 
when you are looking at music and movies with the glorification of 
death, of black clothing and skulls and so on, even presenting 
something with a slightly negative image like the song ``Heroin Girl'' 
does, slightly is, in fact, advancing the cause of drugs and adding to 
the kind of perverse romance.
  In other words what they said: When you talk about drugs either 
direction on heroin, you advance many young people using heroin.
  I want to say also why this administration I believe wants to forget 
about the past. I am tired of hearing that, well, we should focus on 
what is next, not talk about the last few years. Quite frankly, if I 
had their past, I would want to forget about it too. The plain truth of 
the matter is interdiction funds went down, supply went up, and prices 
went down. The acceptability of drugs in the schools went up in our 
teenagers.
  It is very clear what happened. The President diverted funds from all 
operations around the country from drug interdiction and more drugs 
came into America. He sent messages. We had a witness at the Hollywood 
hearing, a psychologist who is a consultant to the movie industry, who 
said that when adults say to their children, look, everybody did drugs 
when I was a kid, do not do it now, you are sending a double message, 
particularly when the President of the United States laughs it off. 
Kids look at it and say, when I get to be an old fuddy-duddy, I will 
not do it either. Every kid did it, even you did it, Dad, and unless 
you stand up, you are going to be held accountable, and I am glad to 
have President Clinton on board at this point, but we cannot bring back 
the lives that have been lost the last few years because of past 
neglect.

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