[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 50 (Thursday, April 24, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1872-H1878]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1900
                               DRUG ABUSE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Hastert] is 
recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. HASTERT. Mr. Speaker, tonight I want to take some time and talk 
to you and the House about a very serious problem that faces this 
country, not only facing this country but it is facing many nations 
across this planet, and that is drug abuse.
  Many times we see drug abuse in the guise of our children having 
OD's, being in the emergency room, finding problems in schools, drug 
gangs that are popping up across this country, especially in big cities 
and in towns adjoining big cities. We see the drug problem in OD's of 
kids in our neighborhoods, children, but it also is in corporate 
America, it is also in people who do work in blue collar areas.
  We have worked in this country to make sure that people who fly 
airplanes and drive trucks and maneuver trains down the tracks 
certainly are drug free. We have worked hard to make sure that we have 
drug free workplaces in this country. And certainly the Federal 
Government and many, many State governments have worked to make sure 
their workplaces are drug free as well.
  But, Mr. Speaker, I have just returned from the Second International 
Symposium Against Drugs in Switzerland, and what I learned there was 
truly disturbing. At the same time it was heartening to meet with 
doctors and world leaders engaged in the fight against drug abuse, 
drug-related crime, and international drug trafficking.
  America and Europe are both under siege directly from international 
drug traffickers and internally from well-financed drug legalization 
movements. In Switzerland, legalizers give away 100 percent pure 
heroin, and between 300 and 5,000 needles a day, plus heroin cigarettes 
which Swiss legalizers claim are compassionate because these 
cigarettes, Mr. Speaker, do not contain tobacco.
  Proponents of drug legalization are, at best, a dangerous and 
misguided crowd. For many it is an elaborate game, a way to retaliate 
against those who condemn their own drug using behavior. For others 
legalization is a means of achieving other ends, undermining moral 
values and democratic institutions, turning profits on an expanded 
population, creating new industries around the maintenance of 
addiction, and, in a few cases, even yearning to justify a tragic loss 
to drug abuse.
  Whatever the motivation, drug legalization is wrong headed and 
destined to hurt those societies which indulge the instinct to 
experiment with the most vulnerable segments of their population, 
including their children.
  So let us be clear about legalization, Mr. Speaker. The promoters of 
legalization forget the basic facts. They forget, for example, that 
drug use and abuse always and everywhere follows drug availability. 
They forget that there will always be more users trying drugs when 
there are more drugs to try.
  This is clearly the experience of the United States. Between 1992 and 
1995, the administration experimented with reduced drug interdiction. 
The result was more drugs inside our country and more kids trying those 
drugs. In 1994, there were three-quarters of a million more teenagers 
using drugs than in 1992, a reversal of the 1981 to 1992 downward trend 
in drug use.
  By contrast, between 1985 and 1992, when the United States was firmly 
committed to halting the inflow of drugs, casual teen drug use fell 
dramatically. Regular drug users fell by 80

[[Page H1873]]

percent, from 5.8 to 1.3 million. Crack use declined from nearly a 
million in 1990 to just over 300,000 in 1992. And marijuana use 
plummeted from 22 million regular users in 1985 down to 8.5 million 
users in 1992, a 61 percent fall. That is what can happen when a 
society is serious about turning back the tide.
  Legalization promoters also forget that the number of addicts 
invariably rises with the number of casual or experimental users. In 
the United States, as casual teen drugs rose after 1992, so did 
addiction.
  Legalization advocates forget that the political leadership of a 
country that embraces legalization is also sending a message. I was a 
high school teacher for 16 years. I think I know kids. Kids are not 
stupid. They know if adults in their lives are giving consent or are 
forbidding it. They need and want limits set, even if they occasionally 
test those limits. And when there are no limits, they respond 
accordingly.
  If someone is looking the other way and letting them get high or use 
drugs, they know it. If society legalizes dangerous drugs in any 
measure for those who wish to get high or are already addicted, kids 
get the message. Society will have put the stamp of approval on drug 
use. And, as the old saying goes, what is good for the goose is good 
for the gander. Kids know hypocrisy when they see it.
  Finally, legalization promoters forget three other terrible and 
compelling facts: First, a drug overdose, for example, by heroin is not 
a simple or sterile or quick or painless event. It is a horrible, 
choking, suffocating event. The lungs fill with liquid in a lung edema, 
and the person, often a child, slowly chokes to death.
  Second, they forget that there will always be a black market for 
drugs that are more pure than those being made legally available, and 
there will always be those who cannot get the drugs but want them.
  Finally, the most drug-related crime is not between dealers or gangs. 
Most are committed by those on drugs, or so-called pharmacological 
crimes. Up to 70 percent of the United States' State prisons are filled 
with criminals who committed their crime on drugs. Legalization only 
increases this population.
  Let me turn now to the heart of the matter: National security. This 
is a big area I want to discuss.
  The Swiss national security is threatened by legalizers and 
traffickers in drugs, and so is our national security. In America, 
public complacency and indifference by the media are permitting drugs 
to erode public security, personal security, and ultimately, national 
security.
  But we all must recognize the enormity of the threat. This threat to 
our society comes from the international cartels in Colombia and 
Mexico, who export literally hundreds of millions of tons of heroin, 
cocaine, crack, and marijuana annually. But the threat also comes from 
within.
  In the United States, we have been timid about confronting it on both 
fronts. In the United States, we are accustomed to thinking about 
national security and threats to national security in traditional ways. 
When I say, for example, that America faces a national security threat, 
and we do, most people think of bombs and tanks and espionage and 
intercontinental ballistic missiles, maybe theater nuclear weapons. 
They do not think of hypodermic needles filled with 90-percent pure 
Burmese or Colombian heroin. They do not think of crack or LSD or THC 
or methamphetamine.
  When I say the world's leading democracies are in the jaws of an 
insidious national security threat, and they are, most people think of 
spies and uniformed soldiers and body bags and conventional warfare. 
The truth is different. Often most serious threats are those that 
masquerade as solutions or mere distractions.
  In my view, the legalization initiatives passed by California and 
Arizona this last election season are the Trojan horses of the 21st 
century. My message is that this is not a game or a harmless 
distraction and it certainly is not a solution. The drug cartels are 
sophisticated and they welcome the legalization movement.
  This is a war, and the traffickers and legalizers are intentionally 
slipping a Trojan horse within the gates of the United States and 
Switzerland and other countries around the world. On the whole, we in 
the United States have been too complacent, we have underestimated the 
organizations, the power of this $40 billion annual industry. Yes, Mr. 
Speaker and Members of the House, I said billion with a B, $40 billion 
annual industry.
  The power to corrupt, power to kill, the power to destroy the heart 
and soul of our society. We have underestimated the threat for a simple 
reason. Drug traffickers and promoters are not the sort of threat that 
we are used to responding to. They do not wear uniforms or come in 
battalions. Instead, they often come with stealth, in the dark, and 
inject society under the shroud of night.
  But let us not kid ourselves. Let us go to the very heart of this. 
This adversary is well-financed, it is powerful, it is violent. We have 
had hearings in the Committee on Government Operations and Subcommittee 
on National Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice about 
the huge cartels in Colombia and Mexico, their far-reaching effect, 
that are in places as far away as Nigeria and Russia and Japan, the use 
of the Japanese yakuza organization and the Russian Mafia and the 
Nigerian drug runners across the world. Those stories are well-known.
  So there is no limit to what these drug cartels are willing to do. 
They are well-financed, and they are powerful, and they are very, very 
violent. It kills more people in 1 year than died in the entire cold 
war. Last year, in the United States, this underrated adversary killed 
more than 10,000 children. Think about it, 10,000 children.
  If anything else in this country threatened our children, our kids 
that are in schools, kids that walk the streets in numbers of 10,000, 
this Congress and this society would be turned upside down. But drugs 
have done that.
  On a personal note, I come from Illinois, and my brother works in a 
public school in Aurora, IL. Already this school year he has buried one 
of his students, buried him because the student was involved in a gang 
and the gang was involved in drug trafficking.
  In my congressional district, in one of the major cities in Aurora, 
IL, 6 children have already died this year from drugs and drug-related 
violence. Why? Because they are involved in gangs and drive-by 
shootings and drug overdoses. It is something that is there in somebody 
else's neighborhood, not in somebody else's State, but in our own 
backyard.
  On the national level, the numbers are stark. Over the past 3 years, 
we have witnessed a 200 percent increase in drug use by American 
children, the kids between the ages of 8 and 17, our kids. The price of 
dangerous drugs has fallen by several magnitudes, as availability has 
increased. Street purities of cocaine and heroin and marijuana have all 
jumped to record levels, all this because we let down our guard between 
1992 and 1995 and we have been slow to see the national security 
implications.
  This year, the fourth year in a row, a national reporting system by 
the U.S. hospitals called DAWN showed record level emergency room 
admissions for cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines, and THC or marijuana. 
In 1995, overall drug-related emergency room episodes jumped 12 
percent; cocaine-related episodes leaped 21 percent; heroin-related 
episodes skyrocketed 27 percent. THC or marijuana-related emergencies, 
as a result of purities that are up to 25 times greater than in the 
1970's and the lacing of marijuana with PCP, were up 32 percent. 
Methamphetamine emergencies were up 35 percent.
  In short, drugs are destroying young lives in record numbers. So the 
crisis is here. The crisis is in Switzerland. The crisis is over the 
face of this planet. And the crisis is real, as real as World War II, 
as the air battles over Britain when Winston Churchill called for his 
nation to respond. It is as grave as the national security threat to 
the generation which must follow as the threat that animated the French 
Resistance to act against the Nazi government.
  The difference here is that this threat is insidious, it is slow 
growing, it is like a cancer, it grows below seemingly healthy skin. It 
is threatening Switzerland's future, and it is threatening our own 
future in this country. That is why Congress is fighting legalization 
and fighting to fund drug prevention and drug interdiction. We must

[[Page H1874]]

respond. We must see the Trojan horse that is slipping even now between 
our gates, and we must turn it back.

                              {time}  1915

  We must recognize that drugs fund crime and dissolution of all that 
is best about America and Switzerland. They criminalize our banking and 
commercial systems. They finance terrorist groups in Russia and the 
Middle East and Peru and Mexico and Colombia, and they undermine the 
future that we wish to pass on to our children. I worry, too, that 
Swiss banks may not be fully on guard about drug money laundering. Even 
here we must do more.
  In closing, I must say that we have now been to, and our committee 
has traveled to, the drug producing and shipping nations of Burma and 
Colombia and Bolivia and Peru and Panama and Mexico and certainly seen 
what we are up against. I traveled into the jungles where coca and 
poppy are grown and processed, and I think we have a mighty adversary 
to confront in those nations.
  The first step for us is to support the drug war and drug prevention. 
The first step is for Switzerland's people to pass the youth-against-
drugs referendum. But my hope is that we will not be misled or deceived 
and that we will see this national security threat for what it is and 
respond with a dedicated antidrug effort in Switzerland and here in 
America. I especially want to congratulate VPM and Dr. Francesca 
Haller, as well as the AIDS-Information-Switzerland, for fighting 
against heroin legalization with all their hearts, and we are with you.
  This problem, Mr. Speaker, is an insidious problem. It has reached 
down to the very heart of our society. It has reached into other 
societies around the world and into our commercial institutions. There 
are questions about banks and money laundering, because of all the 
efforts of people who grow illegal drugs and move them into countries 
such as Colombia to refine them and from Colombia move them into Mexico 
where drug families move them across the border and across this country 
and into the street corners where kids can buy them. It would never 
happen if we could not take the street bills, the 5- and 10- and 20- 
and 50-dollar bills that kids pay to drug dealers, and that money goes 
back to the drug cartels.
  Money laundering is a problem. In Switzerland, it is even a greater 
problem because Swiss banks carry money and wires from all over the 
world. Later on I am going to borrow from an article written by a 
gentleman named Bob McGinnis, who talks about how Swiss banks are being 
implicated in moving drug money across this universe.
  I yield to my good friend from Fort Wayne, IN [Mr. Souder], who has 
certainly worked with us on drug issues.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to associate myself with the 
chairman's remarks and to congratulate him on his leadership in the 
committee. Last fall when the National Security Committee was winding 
up a 2-year effort, there was some concern whether or not this was just 
a political effort. In fact, we had been working on this from the time 
we came in to control Congress because when we saw the facts of the 
results on the American streets and neighborhoods and families, we 
backed off of our commitment against drug interdiction, we were 
alarmed. We spent 2 years traveling across America, traveling down to 
foreign nations and confronting the leaders with the fact that most of 
those drugs were coming across the Mexican border, being produced in 
the coca leaves of Peru and Bolivia, processed in the labs of Colombia, 
and we confronted them. We confronted the television and the movie 
industry in Hollywood and said and challenged them with what they were 
producing and what impact they were having in our home communities.
  We went around the country in every region of the country looking and 
hearing stories, tragic stories of young children, of families being 
destroyed, of women being intimidated by husbands who had been beating 
them. As one poor lady said in Arizona, in John Shadegg's district, she 
said she hated to say this but she hoped that the drugs killed her 
husband before he killed her because he had been beating her and her 
daughter, she was hiding and moving from shelter to shelter because of 
what had happened with drugs, all of which started with marijuana.
  The myth that marijuana is not dangerous, all these people said, 
well, we started with marijuana, we heard from kids, oh, we thought 
marijuana was good, but then we wanted to get higher. We heard it from 
gangs, from women who were being beaten, from law enforcement 
officials, from school administrators. We heard it across the board. 
There was a clear linkage. There is a dispute as to whether this is a 
war or a cancer. It is in fact both. It is a war in the sense it is 
coming at us.
  People are making money, they are destroying and undermining the 
fabric of our country. It is also a cancer eating away at our soul 
internally, person by person, as we relax our standards and say well, 
we do not want to judge other people's behavior and so on. But that 
behavior has a direct impact on all of our lives.
  We had a case in Fort Wayne just recently where a high school student 
who was high on cocaine and alcohol flipped their vehicle, hit a senior 
citizen, then flipped over the median on the interstate and hit two 
more cars, two people dead, four people injured if I recall correctly. 
And it was a series we have had of multiple accidents with people on 
drugs.
  If I cannot drive on a road, if my wife cannot drive on a road 
without fearing that somebody is high on drugs or alcohol endangering 
our lives, what is freedom? If my son cannot go to school, if my 
daughter cannot go to college, if they are not safe when they go out on 
the roads at night, if they are not safe when they go shopping, if the 
gang wars that we have in our district, the least we have heard is 70 
percent, the highest is 85 percent of all crime of every type is drug 
and alcohol-related. These are tragic statistics. We cannot say we are 
worried about crime but oh, not about marijuana. It is not a question 
of well, alcohol is legal. Quite frankly, if we had the statistics 
today and looked at alcohol, we would not legalize it. It is not a 
justification to legalize marijuana.
  Furthermore, if we are increasingly enforcing anything on zero 
tolerance in the schools, it is illegal for minors to have alcohol as 
well and we should not use that as an excuse to back off what is true. 
That is why it is so tragic about what has happened in Arizona and 
California with this false siren of medicinal use of marijuana. If 
there is a component in marijuana that can relieve pain, there are 
multiple other ways that you can do that without having the dangerous 
effects of marijuana. It was a false bill of goods sold by people with 
a vested interest in destroying our laws against drugs, and we need to 
stand up to that.
  I am also concerned as we watch what happened there and to hear of 
our chairman's efforts in Switzerland to speak out and the things he 
has brought here tonight and will continue to bring out, it is very 
disturbing to see heroin needles being distributed, the massive level 
of experimentation they have been doing. That the United Nations would 
be involved in any way in this calls into question a lot of the 
judgments that many of us have anyway about how the U.N. Health 
Organization works. The fact is that we have been through this. This is 
not new.

  My friend, John Shadegg, has this quote, I cannot remember the 
original person that had the quote, that history may not repeat itself 
but it rhymes, and that is often the problem that we are facing here. 
It may not be exactly the same thing but we can see these repetitive 
patterns. It is as if sometimes when you drive in on the interstate in 
the morning, if you see somebody who has run out of gas in a tunnel, 
you say, ``Boy, I feel sorry for that person,'' because maybe they do 
not know all the information. But when you do it a second time, when 
you start to see the repetitive patterns, you go, do you not ever learn 
from history? Are there not things that are triggers and say, ``We've 
been there, we've done that, we don't need to do that again''?
  You give heroin needles away, heroin abuse goes up. You have these 
different programs that are out there that supposedly are getting 
people off, and instead you are getting people more addicted and you 
are expanding it.
  We have to look to the past history of this and, that is, the things 
that work are a combination of different

[[Page H1875]]

variables. One is, we have to keep the pressure on the interdiction. 
Even if we cannot stop all the drugs coming across the Mexican border, 
which we cannot, and even if we cannot stop all the drugs that are 
coming from Colombia to Mexico because the coasts are too long, we can 
put the pressure on and reverse a problem that has been happening in 
Fort Wayne and all over America and, that is, the price was dropping, 
the purity was increasing, and that was meaning the street price was 
easier for the kids to get, easier for adults to get, more risk to the 
society, and it was more potent drugs. By putting the pressure on, we 
not only force the pricing structure to change in this country and the 
purity structure and the watering down by making it more difficult for 
them to get their prices on the street, but we also put pressure as we 
heard in Peru and other places that they were starting to have the 
breakthroughs after the interdiction pressure went up, after President 
Fujimori instituted his shootdown policy if planes did not respond 
because the campesinos were finding that, hey, the dealers did not want 
to take a profit hit so they were paying them less. And all of a sudden 
alternative crops to coca leaves look more attractive if your pricing 
structure is different. So interdiction has to be a critical component. 
But so does education and prevention. We need to be looking just like 
we look at what interdiction programs are working and not working, we 
need to look at does this work, does this not work? What can we target 
in the middle schools, clearly the place where so many kids are at risk 
and how can we focus in on that? How can we do better prevention 
programs to get addicts off and focus on that? Because a lot of these 
things have such high recidivism rates, it is a question of how they 
are working but it does not mean we should not work at treatment.
  Furthermore, and we all know this, ultimately in a free society there 
is personal responsibility. Ultimately people have to take more and 
more responsibility for their own lives. Families need to be engaged. 
Churches need to be engaged. Individual teachers and others who can be 
an influence on kids where they may not have the family structure or 
have the means or anybody taking them to a church. As this country, we 
need to change this, because it is tearing us at the core like a cancer 
and it is a war coming at us more dangerous than any other war as the 
chairman clearly demonstrated in his statistics. We cannot say, ``Oh, 
I'm bored with this drug problem, I've heard this before, can't you 
talk about something else?'' It is not going to go away. It is going to 
be there. It is a constant battle because evil will be there. The 
struggles that everybody goes through, the temptation to try to cop out 
of your problems by getting high is a human temptation. But this is an 
insidious one. It is not a freedom of yourself to practice something. 
It is a danger that when you smoke pot, when you take heroin, when you 
take cocaine, when you get drunk, you endanger other people. I thank 
the chairman.
  Mr. HASTERT. I thank the gentleman from Indiana. It is interesting, 
you can imagine my shock and chagrin when I went to a place that I had 
visited 25, 30 years ago, Zurich, Switzerland which at that time it was 
a pristine city on a beautiful lake shore. Today that city is not so 
pristine. There are addicts in the train stations, there are addicts 
off in the alleyways. The city at one time just recently gave away 
15,000 free needles for heroin use a day. Today if you declare yourself 
as an addict in Switzerland, you have a pension granted to you of 2,500 
Swiss francs, and it is 1.4 Swiss francs to the dollar. If you have a 
dog, you get another 500 Swiss francs. If you have a wife, you get 
another 2,500 Swiss francs. If you have a child you get another 350 
Swiss francs. So you can have a pension, declare yourself an addict, 
have a pension of about $4,000 a month and live and get free heroin. 
What kind of a message does that send to the rest of Europe? What kind 
of a message does that send to the world? What kind of a message do our 
kids get from that country? We have enough problems. We do not have to 
just point to Switzerland. We have enough problems here. But we cannot 
afford to let countries who have traditionally been our allies slip 
into this type of morass.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida [Mr. Mica] who has 
been one of the stalwarts in the fight against drugs, both in this 
country and trying in interdiction abroad.
  Mr. MICA. I want to thank the gentleman from Illinois, chairman of 
the Subcommittee on National Security, International Affairs, and 
Criminal Justice of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. I 
want to take a moment and particularly thank him for his leadership. I 
remember last week we had a discussion on the floor about the progress 
of this session of Congress and one of my colleagues said, well, what 
have you done about drugs on this side of the aisle, commenting to us, 
and that we had not done enough. I had to remind the gentleman that 
just in the few months of this session under the leadership of the 
chairman, the gentleman from Illinois, we have held more hearings than 
were held in the entire first Congress when I came from 1993 to 1994, 
my first term, that the leadership that Chairman Hastert has provided 
is unprecedented. He has had before his subcommittee that oversees 
national drug policy just in the past few months the drug czar for very 
lengthy, in fact many hours of questioning not only in formal hearings 
but numerous meetings, countless meetings and work and cooperation with 
the drug czar. With this administration, he has had the Director and 
Administrator of DEA before the committee, very lengthy discussions, 
hearings. Another member and leader of this issue is the gentleman from 
Ohio [Mr. Portman], who has had legislation to bring together the 
efforts of local government, community-based organizations that are 
combating illicit drugs and drug abuse and working to promote 
prevention and education in our communities.

                              {time}  1930

  He has had hearings already on his legislation, and his proposal and 
funding of that proposal that is probably the most effective way of 
combating drugs with those successful community-based programs, not to 
mention other work.
  My colleague, the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum], who chairs 
the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary held a 
hearing recently in San Juan Harbor. Our subcommittee, under Chairman 
Zeliff, who chaired the subcommittee last year, held a similar hearing. 
We were trying to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.
  The programs of interdiction, the programs of enforcement, the 
programs of military cooperation, the involvement of our Coast Guard, 
the whole picture was destroyed in 2 years when the other body took 
office, other party took office, the executive office, and then 
controlled both the House and the other body, and we have seen the 
results of it.
  And I have a selfish interest in this. I have children. I come from 
central Florida, a beautiful area, and I held up in the last year this 
headline from the Orlando Sentinel: ``Long Out of Sight, Heroin is Back 
Killing Teens.'' Central Florida, tranquil, prosperous area; we are not 
talking about ghettos or urban settings of Los Angeles, New York, 
Detroit. We are talking about peaceful, central Florida where heroin is 
epidemic, where our children are literally dying in the streets, and 
under the leadership of Chairman Zeliff and others who are here tonight 
came into our community last fall and held an intensive hearing, and 
helping us get back on track.
  Then the problem has not stopped, and the problem continues, and this 
is last week's Orlando Sentinel article: ``Orlando No. 2 in Cocaine 
Deaths.'' This is just last week. One thousand eleven people died, up 7 
percent in Florida, from cocaine; over a thousand potentially useful 
children, fathers, mothers, their lives destroyed because of what is 
going on. And part of this does relate back to this policy of just say 
maybe.
  I am very concerned about what I have heard, what the chairman has 
outlined tonight, this policy that we have seen in Switzerland of just 
say try it.
  Now we have an administration in this country that appointed a 
national health officer, the Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who said 
just say

[[Page H1876]]

maybe, and we see where it has gotten us today with epidemic use of 
heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines, designer drugs with our youth, and 
now we have a good example that the chairman has brought before the 
Congress tonight, a very bad thing that happened in another country 
when the Swiss Government, in fact, said just say try it, and they 
tried it, and the result is a disaster.
  So there are those now that want to legalize drugs that say this is 
the panacea, and we see the experience of this country, and it is not a 
Third World country. It is Switzerland, a very sophisticated country, 
very sophisticated economic system, and we are not talking again about 
just urban problems, but they have tried it, it does not work, and 
their people are demanding a referendum, and the referendum is called 
Youth Without Drugs, and they intend to repeal this government policy.
  So those who would like to say just say maybe, or just say try it, we 
have a great example of a bad reaction to a program that did in fact 
fail.
  Now it is easy to come and to criticize what has been done, and we 
make no bones that we are not pleased with what happened in the first 2 
years of the past administration here. But what have we done? And let 
me tell you when the new majority took this responsibility on, that the 
current Chair, the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Hastert], was appointed 
by the leadership to direct a House-wide effort to coordinate all the 
resources of the House of Representatives and the various committees of 
jurisdiction to again put Humpty-Dumpty back together again to make 
certain that interdiction was restored, to make certain that our 
military and our Coast Guard had the capability to become involved, to 
make certain that the eradication programs and these source countries 
were restored, to make certain that treatment programs were not just 
spending a great deal of money but we were concentrating on putting the 
money into effective treatment programs. And then education, which is 
so important, that other part of this four-legged stool, that that in 
fact also be properly funded and addressed, and the programs that are a 
success that had the support of this Congress.
  So the Speaker of the House of Representatives appointed Mr. Hastert. 
Now we are privileged to have him chair this Oversight and 
Investigation Subcommittee, national security, international affairs, 
criminal justice, that has authority over our drug policy, and each of 
the elements have in fact been restored. He has fought to get the funds 
back so that the military can become involved in this. He has restored 
the cuts. The first thing President Clinton did was cut the drug czar's 
office and staff and capability, and he has worked to restore that 
office. He has worked to bring the Coast Guard back into the action on 
some of the heroin that is coming into this country. He worked to bring 
to the floor the first decertification measure ever heard in the House 
of Representatives or ever passed by the House of Representatives.
  So he has helped to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, and he 
brings to the floor tonight, to the attention, Mr. Speaker, of you and 
our colleagues a great example of a bad experiment, and that was to 
just say try it, to just legalize drugs. Switzerland tried it, it is a 
disaster. We do not need to be listening to those voices.
  So again, Mr. Speaker, I salute the gentleman on what he has done and 
the leadership he has brought to this issue and to our Congress. He has 
done a remarkable job.
  Mr. HASTERT. I thank the gentleman. One of the things that he was 
remiss in saying was that he was a sponsor of a bill that said we need 
to look at what is happening between our country and another country, a 
close neighbor, Mexico. He and a colleague from Florida, [Mr. Shaw], 
sponsored a very tough piece of legislation, and we are not done with 
that yet. So we really appreciate his efforts and his strong antidrug 
stance.
  At this time I yield again to the gentleman from Indiana [Mr. 
Souder].
  Mr. SOUDER. I wanted to again point out that this is not something 
new.
  Interesting historical footnote: My first job here in Washington was 
Republican staff director of the Children Family Committee in 
Washington, and when the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Hastert], who had 
been involved in Illinois with human services issues like this, came 
and we worked together there, we were already focusing on alcohol 
abuse, on crack babies being abandoned in hospitals. The gentleman from 
Florida [Mr. Mica] who was a chief of staff here in Washington worked 
with a lot in drafting the original antidrug legislation through the 
1980's in the U.S. Senate. This has been a longtime commitment, and we 
cannot back off as Americans.

  And what is so frustrating when we hear these stories like in 
Switzerland is do we not learn anything? When you were saying that 
behavior was in effect being rewarded, what one thing we have learned 
over and over in our country, and I say this as somebody who has a 
German background and partly Swiss and who always looked at the Swiss 
as an international model. To hear this type of thing is so disturbing. 
We have seen it with gangs. If you say you are going to get such and 
such, what you get is more kids joining gangs to get the things. If you 
give benefits to things, people come and abuse it more. You do not get 
them off.
  And I hope you will share more on some of those articles, but this is 
very disturbing that a country that has been held up as an example and 
held up in my family and our heritage and in our region and also in the 
whole world, I think this is really important that American companies 
help put the pressure on this, too, because it is a disturbing 
international trend, and I would hope that they can learn from some of 
our experiences here.
  Mr. HASTERT. I would hope so, and I hope that they learn from our 
good experiences. But you are right on target. You know we have about 
36, almost $37 billion of Swiss investment in the United States so we 
are dealing with Swiss companies day in and day out, and we probably 
ought to send a message.
  You know, it is not everybody has been coopted in Switzerland by 
this. I worked with a woman by the name of Dr. Francesca Haller who had 
led this group, and it is called Youth Against Drugs. They have an 
initiative that they are trying to move in the Swiss legislature, the 
Swiss Parliament, even as we speak, and they hope that this referendum 
comes sometime in September or October, that time period, but they have 
140-some thousand people who signed this petition saying: ``You know, 
we don't want drugs in our country. We're going to fight to stop 
drugs.''
  But it is amazing, it is just absolutely amazing that, you know, 
there is three languages that are spoken in Switzerland, and the 
German-speaking newspapers have been for liberalization, and 
liberalization is a code word for legalization of drugs, and there has 
been a lot of suspicion that the people who serve on those boards of 
directors of newspapers are also boards of directors of the Swiss 
banks, Swiss banks that we have always held up as being the epitome of 
solid issues until of course the Nazi gold issue came forward. And now 
we know that Swiss banks harbored millions of dollars of drug money 
that came from Mexico and was in the account of a fellow by the name of 
Salinas that we have heard of before; and there is a real suspicion out 
there that the Swiss banks are pushing the Swiss newspapers, the 
German-speaking newspapers, to legalize drugs so that they can be the 
holders and the movers of illegal drug money. And if that comes and 
happens, it is just not a Swiss problem, it is not only an American 
problem, but it is a huge international problem, and I think that is 
something that we have to be very, very cautious against, we have to 
make sure that that does not happen, and it is just a huge thing that 
the world financial system has a possibility of getting embroiled in.
  And as I said before, the ability to move money from country to 
country is the whole key to drug narco-traffickers being able to move 
their products from South America to the United States, from South 
America to Europe, from Asia and Thailand and Burma and India, you 
know, to Turkey, to Europe. All these things have these huge 
interconnections, and the drug trafficking is only the other side of 
the coin from the whole issue of being able to move money or drug 
laundering.

[[Page H1877]]

  The gentleman from Florida.
  Mr. MICA. If the gentleman will yield, I was quite shocked about this 
Swiss experiment, and I have also been a harsh critic of the lax 
attitude by both our President and this administration on the question 
of even a casual drug use, and that is not only translated into what 
our kids have heard in our country, but I was stunned to find out and 
get a copy of a billboard which is in downtown Zurich, Switzerland.
  I do not know if my colleagues and the Speaker can see it, but this 
billboard in downtown Zurich says in German, and I will translate it; 
it says ``Bill Clinton used one marijuana joint, and look, he's not a 
junkie. What's the big deal?''
  And this is the kind of justification and commentary that was used to 
support this legalization effort in Switzerland in billboards, and 
here's a copy of one in Zurich, and I think that that is a sad 
commentary, and this program again has been such a failure that the 
Swiss are demanding that it be repealed. But when we have the leader of 
our administration sending the wrong signals by appointing a chief 
health officer, by saying that he might inhale, and then this is 
translated into support for a program in another country that is used 
for justification of legalization, we have the big problem.
  So they have tried it, it does not work. Their countrymen are asking 
for this to be, for this program to be repealed, and we see a bad 
example that should not be repeated in this country.
  The other thing, too, is the lax attitude is really creating even 
more problems in this country. There is a report just released by the 
Partnership for a Drug-free America and these statistics are startling.

                              {time}  1945

  There are key findings of 9- to 12-year-olds. They found in this 
Partnership Study that more teenagers are using drugs. In 1996, last 
year, one in four children was offered drugs. That is 24 percent of the 
9- to 12-year-olds in 1996 compared to 19 percent in 1993.
  Trial use of marijuana last year increased among children from 2 to 4 
percent. It is an increase of approximately 230,000 children 
experimenting in 1995 to 460,000 children experimenting in 1996. Eight 
percent of sixth graders had experimented with marijuana and 23 percent 
of seventh graders and 33 percent of eighth graders reported trying 
drugs. Only 29 percent of parents of children age 9 to 12 are talking 
to their kids about drugs, and fewer children are receiving information 
about the dangers of drugs.
  So what we have done is put drugs on the back burner. We have not 
sent the right message. In fact, we have sent the wrong message, not 
only to our children, but now overseas, and we see the results and its 
tragic consequence in our youth population.
  Mr. HASTERT. Mr. Speaker, my colleague was talking about schools. The 
gentleman would be interested to know, my weekend in Switzerland and 
during that period I gave about three workshops and a major speech, and 
some interviews. I talked to one Swiss school teacher who taught in a 
grade school, public grade school. She lost her job for warning her 
students against heroin use after one of her students died from an 
overdose.
  My colleagues can imagine the pressure that school boards are under 
as a result of this liberalization, when a teacher is fired who warns 
her students not to use drugs after one of their classmates died, and 
this is an insidious thing and it is happening right now.
  One of the things that we have to look at, Mr. Speaker, and certainly 
my colleagues, if we do not agree with heroin legalization, and I have 
to say we talked about what happened in California on the legalization 
of marijuana for glaucoma and pain relief. Our friends in Arizona also 
passed legislation. The Arizona Legislature just turned that around, 
much to their credit.
  But we can say something. I would say if we do not agree with heroin 
legalization, if we think that administering to thousands of young 
people this ability for them to get marijuana, using propaganda like 
the gentleman used, certainly is not a great credit to our country or 
to Switzerland.
  I recommend that probably the Speaker and our colleagues, we ought to 
call the Ambassador, Alfred Defago, at the Embassy of Switzerland, 
right here in the United States, right here in Washington, if we 
believe that the Swiss companies, who have had the privilege of doing 
business in the United States, would know that we disapprove of heroin 
legalization. We expect them to speak out, too. They should speak out 
in this country and in Switzerland.
  The laws that these companies have to live under here where we have 
drug protection for workers and people who buy the products that these 
workers make, they do not exist in Switzerland, because the Swiss have 
not signed an agreement with the European Union, and they have not 
signed an agreement for the other European communities such as Holland 
and Sweden, who have had to virtually clean up their act because of 
this cooperation between European nations.
  Switzerland is completely independent, and the newspapers in 
Switzerland called the people who were trying to change the drug policy 
and push this issue of Youth Against Drugs, they called them just 
insidious names such as psycho gangs, because they were psychologists 
and doctors that are trying to change this situation.
  I think Swiss companies who have had the privilege of doing business 
here need to hear it from American citizens who buy their products. 
Some of the Swiss companies that are involved are right here doing 
business in the United States.
  For instance, Asea Brown Boveri in Virginia and Indiana and North 
Carolina; New Jersey, Florida, and Ohio. ABB should be asked to 
publicly oppose heroin legalization if they are going to continue to do 
business in America.
  Mr. Speaker and my colleagues, let me add that a few other Swiss 
companies that do business in America should be asked to stand up and 
oppose heroin legalization in Switzerland. AGIE USA in North Carolina; 
Swiss Alamo Cement Co. in San Antonio, Texas; and ASA Aerospace Company 
in New York; and the ASCOM Holding Company in Connecticut; all of those 
companies are doing business here and they have an influence back home.
  The relationship between the United States and Switzerland is very 
close. We ought to stand up and say, no, in this country. They ought to 
stand up and say, no, in their own home country of Switzerland.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I wanted to reinforce that point as we look 
at the heroin problem and what can become a rogue nation when one 
nation starts to legalize heroin and how it can move. I know you have 
been in Asia and I was in Thailand as well, and in the Golden Triangle 
area much of the heroin goes through. There is a concern, for example, 
in our agencies over there that as most likely normalization occurs 
with Vietnam, that the heroin could move down and move out of there.
  Would it not be ironic with some of our slowdown in working with 
Vietnam, that we are concerned about how tourism might bring drugs in, 
but if we see these types of things happening in countries like 
Switzerland, we have to look at our relationships of how it goes over 
and comes back.
  This is a critical international issue. Nigeria has turned into a 
rogue agency that I hear a lot about, and I appeal to a lot of my 
fellow Hoosiers. As I said, I am not Swiss bashing, I am part Swiss. 
Mostly German, part Swiss. In my district, Bern, for example, where I 
annually go for Swiss days, we have a lot of Anabaptists who are 
predominantly of Swiss and German background.
  Here is something that you can do. Contact these companies. Ciba-
Geigy is a very big company. We need to keep the pressure on some of 
these big companies. None of us can be accused of not keeping the 
pressure on here in America. We have an international stake in this, 
too.
  I commend the gentleman and want to reinforce contacting these 
different companies. In Indiana, ABB is a direct company with 
involvement in Indiana. We just need to keep the pressure on. They are 
not necessarily hostile at this point, but we need to move on it.
  Mr. HASTERT. Mr. Speaker, in Minnesota, our Members from Minnesota 
might consider calling the Brudier Co. and tell them to take a stand in 
favor of Youth Against Drugs in Switzerland. We talked about our 
tourist trade.

[[Page H1878]]

 Swiss hotels that are across this country in Chicago and other big 
cities, people who fly on Swiss Air, evidently in Switzerland, those 
pilots are not required to take drug tests because it is against the 
law in Switzerland to require somebody to take a drug test. I would 
think twice before I wanted to fly in that type of a situation.
  People who go on ski vacations in Switzerland, there are literally 
tens of thousands of Americans that do it. There is no protection 
against the guy that runs the ski lifts and protect people on those 
slopes that somebody in there is not on drugs. Of all of the thousands 
of people who are drug free, it only takes one person who is a heroin 
addict who cannot be tested because of Swiss law and can cause real 
problems in those areas.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, it is inconceivable to me that they do not 
drug test pilots. That is literally flying blind. Sometimes ignorance 
is not bliss. In other words, it is like we do not want to know whether 
they are abusing drugs, and then if you see a society already having 
these trends, I would think it would be more of a reason to drug test, 
not less of a reason.
  Mr. HASTERT. I think the pressure could start here in the United 
States. You talked about Ciba-Geigy. I think we could call the 
president of Ciba-Geigy, Doug Watson, and tell him to stand up against 
the legalization of drugs in Switzerland. Perhaps hundreds of other 
Swiss companies who benefit from trade from the United States, 
Americans Against Heroin Legalization could call the Swiss Bank, Swiss 
Credit, or Credit Swiss, the big bank that has been silent on this 
issue that certainly should be vocal in supporting Youth Against Drugs 
in Switzerland. Credit Swiss should be vocal in Switzerland to stop the 
legalization of heroin.
  In New York, Robert O'Brien is the regional head of Credit Swiss. In 
Los Angeles, the Credit Swiss head is David Worthington. In Florida, 
Max Lutz, who represents senior management at Credit Swiss. Those 
people should know that Members of Congress do not really appreciate 
that.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I would just like to, as we close up, remind 
folks that what this experiment in Switzerland, a beautiful country, 
you think of the Swiss Alps and mountain chalets and peaceful living.
  Let me read from this. In one park, the number of addicts grew to 
15,000 daily that came for free needles. Switzerland, again, a placid 
European tranquil State, Switzerland now has the highest heroin 
addiction rate in Europe and the second highest HIV infection. That is 
with the free needles, with the free heroin. So they have tried it. It 
is a disaster for their people.
  We are joining their people who are now calling for a referendum to 
repeal this. Again, a good example of a program that went bad.
  So I join my colleagues in whatever pressure we need to put on the 
Swiss, United States interests, we will do that. We are not going to 
let what happened there happen here, and this is the evidence as to why 
we should not let that take place.
  Mr. HASTERT. Mr. Speaker, I think that is really an important point. 
I think that is one of the things we need to look at.
  Mr. Speaker, for hundreds of years we looked to the Swiss for 
chocolate and we looked to them for Swiss watches and Swatches and 
things like that. We also respected the integrity of the Swiss banks.
  During the Hitler era, the Jews trusted the Swiss to protect their 
accounts from the Nazis. However, after the war, the Swiss took bank 
deposits of murdered holocaust victims and funneled them to Swiss 
businessmen to cover assets seized by East European Communist regimes.
  According to recent news reports, while the Swiss Bankers Association 
admits to $32 million in diverted deposits, the World Jewish Congress 
believes the figure may be as high as $7 billion. But in 1992, the 
Swiss bank secrecy laws, which had concealed the diversion of these 
funds, were repealed, and this change removed Switzerland from a short 
list of countries whose banks are capable of masking deposits delivered 
from such illicit sources as drug profits.
  Some countries, like the Republic of Seychelles, have banking laws 
that permit large deposits of suspected money. Although there is no 
direct evidence that Switzerland may be joining these ranks, legalized 
drugs could normalize financial transactions with drug kingpins.
  So one of the things we need to be careful of, if Switzerland does 
legalize drugs and legalize heroin, then the profits from those drugs 
can be moved into Swiss banks and that money can be transferred all 
over the world. Thus, the drug money that happens in the United States 
or Mexico or Thailand, moved into the wire system, moved to Swiss 
banks.
  So I think that is something that is very, very treacherous, 
something that we need to be very, very careful about. Our committee 
will be looking into this, will be working on this, and I hope that we 
will have another special order on this issue.
  I would encourage Mr. Speaker and all of the rest of my colleagues to 
be sensitive to this. Talk to these Swiss companies, be involved, and 
let us turn this around, turn it around in Switzerland because 
Switzerland is so important to this country. We can turn it around in 
this country as well.
  We are not without fault, we have our problems, but we cannot let 
other countries slip into this type of a situation as well.
  I certainly appreciate my colleagues from Indiana and Florida for 
joining us this evening on this very, very important issue.

                          ____________________