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