[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 21 (Thursday, March 5, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H885-H890]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1415
                       UNITED STATES DRUG POLICY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. LaHood). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. McCollum) is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. McCOLLUM. Mr. Speaker, one of the most startling statistics you 
are ever going to see, at least that you are going to see in the next 
year or two, and I hope it is not repeated, is the fact that teen drug 
use in the United States has doubled since 1992. Doubled, drug use 
among teenagers.
  That is not acceptable. It is not acceptable for many reasons. 
Society cannot stand having our young people become more and more 
involved with narcotics that dull their senses, habituate them, get 
them involved not only with marijuana, but leading on to harder 
substances, cocaine, heroin, et cetera, that can lead to life-
endangering, if not career-ending types of involvement.
  It is not acceptable in the sense of the crime that is involved with 
drugs and how it permeates society and reaches down to the ghettos, as 
well as up to the higher-income people. It is a very, very bad 
situation in our country today.
  Many who talk about the drug situation like to put a good face on it, 
a happy face. I do not think there is a happy face.
  Yes, we can say that if you compare drug use overall in the United 
States to something 10 or 20 years ago, it is overall down. Or we can 
say it is a little better on the treatment side hither and yon than it 
was before. But the reality is among the people we care the most about, 
among our children, drug use has doubled since 1992, and we have to do 
something about it.
  Now, I am all for having an Office of Drug Policy, and I am all for 
that Office of National Drug Control Policy having a strategy, and 
General Barry McCaffrey is someone who I personally admire, and I 
believe he is very sincere in his efforts to try to work to eradicate 
the drug problem in this Nation. But I cannot agree that the strategy 
which he promulgated with the President a couple of weeks ago is 
adequate.
  I have in my hands the national drug control strategy, 1998, a 10-
year plan. There are some things in here that are very good. I 
particularly commend the drug czar's office for establishing criteria 
that we can measure progress by. It has been missing. We need to do it 
just like businesses measure progress hither and yon in their business.
  We find in this drug plan all kinds of goals and objectives in detail 
about how we fight the drug scourge with prevention and treatment and 
so forth. But in the context of getting to the solution, the 10-year 
plan has some very serious problems to it.
  The reality is that it is too shortsighted, in my judgment. We need 
to come up with a plan that says, yes, we will attack the demand side 
and the supply side. We are going to have a balanced approach. We have 
known that for years. We have talked about it for years. But we really 
have not come to the consensus, either in the Nation or in Congress or 
in our national leadership, on precisely what it is going to take and 
how soon we can get the resources it is going to take to actually stop 
this entire process of drugs coming into our country like they have 
been recently.
  I am disturbed by the fact that in this drug strategy, up front, it 
says we should no longer talk about fighting the effort against 
narcotics as a war. This strategy at the very beginning of it says that 
war is not an appropriate metaphor, that it is misleading. In essence, 
the administration in producing this plan is saying we can never defeat 
the scourge of drugs gripping our Nation and killing our youths. Our 
only hope is to contain it, and the quote from the drug strategy is, to 
check the spread and improve the prognosis.
  By saying this, they are, in my judgment, yielding and waving a white 
flag in the efforts we have. We should be conducting a war on drugs, 
and a war on drugs means a strategy that says, here is what we can do 
to stop it, here is when we are going to do it, here is how we are 
going to do it, here is the timetable to do it, and yes, this is a 10-
year plan.
  What is the ultimate goal of the 10-year plan? It is to reduce the 
availability and use of drugs in the United States by 50 percent in 10 
years. But the teenage drug use in the United States has doubled since 
1992, so if we reduce the use by 50 percent in 10 years, we will have 
only gone back to where we were in 1992. Is that acceptable? I suggest 
no, it is not acceptable.
  In addition, what is meant by the word ``availability''? That is a 
pretty darn broad word. It is defined in here in a way that one might 
conclude it means the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, but 
it could also mean law enforcement and a lot of other things that go on 
to reduce the availability, the opportunity to buy drugs on the 
streets, I presume.
  But nowhere in this drug strategy is there a goal or target that says 
what our objectives should be to reduce the flow of drugs coming into 
the United States at our borders or before they get to our borders. 
That is of paramount importance.
  One of the reasons we have so much trouble with our prevention 
programs and with our law enforcement efforts in fighting narcotics 
today is because drugs are in more plentiful supply and cheaper than 
they have ever been. Both cocaine and heroin, in particular, fall into 
that category.
  Heroin, for example, killed more young people in my hometown of 
Orlando a year or so ago than anywhere else in the United States; more 
than in Los Angeles, with a population many times the size of Orlando.
  In the last two or three weeks, I have seen at least three or four 
articles in my hometown newspaper about arrests connected with heroin, 
a couple of them dealing with teenagers in our high schools there, 
things perhaps unheard of a few years ago being uncommon now.
  Why is that? It is because heroin is now coming into the eastern part 
of the United States from Colombia, and it is purer than ever before, 
it is better quality and it is cheaper, and we are not really doing 
anything significant to stop that flow. The same thing can be said in 
many ways for cocaine and for marijuana and for the other narcotics 
that we are trying to fight.
  That is not to say that Drug Enforcement Administration is not 
working hard. It is not to say the Coast Guard is not working hard. It 
is not to say that our State Department and our Defense Department 
people who are in charge of working in their respective areas are not 
attempting to do their jobs. It is not to say that Customs is not doing 
what it is supposed to be doing.
  But the reality is the sum of this is insufficient, inadequate, and 
there is no leadership saying precisely what it is that we need to do 
and how we are going to do it, to stop the flow of drugs coming in in 
this alarming amount that has the price so low and the quantity so 
plentiful, that so many young people are using it that it is hard to 
get our arms around it.

  All of our experts say we need to reduce the flow of drugs into this 
country by at least 60 percent, if not more, in order to raise the 
price up and make it more difficult for young people to buy it and 
afford it and get it and thereby reduce the pressures at the street 
level.
  That is not the only thing we need to be doing. Again, we need to be 
educating, we need to be on television. Some of the things suggested in 
this strategy are good about that. I think we are going to spend quite 
a few million dollars we have appropriated very soon on

[[Page H886]]

television commercials directed at young people to try to discourage 
them from using drugs.
  We need to be involved in other ways, including ways in the 
workplace, which have been in the past suggested and some employers are 
doing it, but others are not. We need to get more people to have drug-
free workplaces.
  We need to spread the word out into the community to reduce this 
demand and use of drugs by education and every way we possibly can. We 
need to have better treatment programs and so on.
  But when it comes right down to the crux of this, if we continue to 
inundate our Nation with the quantity that is coming in now, it is not 
going to be possible to manage this from the demand side alone.
  It is my judgment as the Chairman of the House Crimes Subcommittee 
and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, who looks at these 
matters regularly, and has for some years, it is my judgment that we 
should set a goal, and I think it is achievable, set a goal to reduce 
the flow of drugs into the United States from other source countries, 
from outside the United States, reduce the flow of drugs by 80 percent 
within the next two or three years. Why don't we set three years and 
say 80 percent within three years. You can say, is that realistic, is 
that achievable, can it be done?
  I want to tell you a little bit about why I think it can be done. I 
went down to Colombia and Peru and Bolivia in December, and I was in 
Mexico and Panama in the early part of this year, and I visited when I 
went in each of those countries with the key players at the State 
Department and with our people involved with the DEA in those countries 
and our defense attache and with the others who are country team 
members who are every day on the front lines in those countries trying 
to assist us in reducing crop production of cocaine and heroine, who 
are attempting to stop the drug lords in Colombia and elsewhere from 
shipping drugs this way and so forth.
  I spent a little time with each one of them in the evenings talking 
about this idea, could it be possible in your country, in Colombia, in 
Peru, in Bolivia, if you were given the resources and nobody had a 
restriction on the amount of money involved, nobody told you you could 
not have this or could not do the other, could you devise a plan that 
within three years would stop the flow of drugs from this Nation out to 
the rest of the world by at least 80 percent? Every one of them said 
yes, we could. Yes, we could.
  I asked them if they had ever been tasked to do that? The answer was 
universally, no.
  Well, most of the drugs, more than 50 percent of the cocaine at 
least, is produced in Peru, about 20 percent in Bolivia, the rest of it 
in Colombia, most of it refined in Colombia. There is very little or no 
cocaine produced and distributed from any other sources than those 
three countries, and almost all of the heroin in the eastern half of 
the United States comes from Colombia.
  So if we could reduce the flow out of each of those countries by 80 
percent over the next three years, we would certainly reduce the flow 
into the United States of those drugs by pretty close to 80 percent, if 
not 80 percent. In fact, in the case of cocaine, it should be, it 
should translate directly into that, or more.
  You can say, how have we missed the boat on this? Well, I do not 
think we have. Let us take country by country examples of how you would 
address that problem.
  First of all in Peru, there has been great progress made. In Peru the 
quantity of coca base which is used to produce cocaine in a refined 
form, is way down. Peru used to produce about 60 percent of the world's 
supply of coca used for cocaine.
  They grow plants, by the way, in the countries where they grow them, 
that are no higher than this rostrum. They produce leaves that look 
like, in my part of the country, camphorberry leaves, little leaves. 
They strip the leaves off the bushes several times a year, and they 
then make them into a sort of a liquid base, and goes on to make the 
basic base shipped out of the country.
  You say ``they.'' Who is they? In Peru and Bolivia and Colombia, the 
people actually doing this are the poor people, the campesinos. They 
grow this stuff on acreage that is less than one-third of an acre in 
American terms, they call them hectares down there, and they are the 
poorest of the poor doing this. They get very low remuneration for 
doing it. They don't get much money at all.
  They produce these leaves and carry them over and create this base by 
going to what they call a poso pit, the slang locally for a location 
where they operate to convert these leaves into the first step of 
making cocaine. All of this is grown in the Amazon regions of those 
three countries, down in the hot jungle area. I do not know how many 
people realize that, but coca plants are grown basically in the jungle, 
some of it a little higher land than others, but all of it in very 
thick jungle.
  The little plots are cleared out and these poor people grow this 
stuff. Then they take these leaves and they go near a stream, and they 
build some 20 foot long, maybe not even that, some 10 foot long trough, 
a couple feet wide, maybe three or four feet wide at most, very 
crudely.
  They put water in there with the leaves they have carried over in big 
plastic garbage bags basically, or lawn bags, leaf bags. They dump them 
in there.
  Then they put some sulfuric acid that they brought in, by foot 
usually, from someplace they have acquired it, usually from the drug 
dealers, the sources who want them to produce this stuff. And they 
stomp on it with their feet, sometimes with boots on, sometimes with 
naked feet, which does not make a lot of sense to me, because sulfuric 
acid is pretty damaging to the feet.
  They do this two or three times over a 24 to 48 hour period. Then 
they strain off the liquid, and, again, we are talking about really 
crude operations in the forest, with no refineries or anything like 
that around. These are temporary shack-type thatch roof things at best 
set up beside these little streams.
  They take this liquid and they put it into a pot, and they mix lime 
in it, and they make a thicker base, sort of a paste type of substance 
with it, and then they move it over to another pot and they heat it and 
cook it and dry it out until they get slabs basically about a foot 
square, and maybe a inch or two thick, and they wrap it in a tight 
cellophane heavy material, and they carry it out, their kids carry it 
out usually, sometimes they do themselves, either out of the jungle by 
foot to a road or a highway, or, once they get there, into a vehicle, 
hiding it in compartments under the seat, the back seat of the vehicle 
or wherever it may be. They might take space out above an axle or 
wherever they can place this, and they smuggle it to some site, where 
it is either going to be flown in the case of Peru into Colombia for 
refinement in a more sophisticated laboratory, or, in the case of 
Bolivia, near the City of Santa Cruz, where most of these laboratories 
are for refinement there in that country's case.
  At any rate, the point is that in Peru we have made a lot of progress 
in reducing the crops that are grown and stopping these folks, these 
poor people who produce these little plots of cocaine, or actually 
produce plots of coca plants and then go produce the coca base, we have 
seen in the past two years that President Fujimori has had a new policy 
in effect, a reduction of 40 percent of the coca crop in Peru.

                              {time}  1430

  That is down from about 125,000 hectares, that is the way they 
measure their land, 125,000 hectares, to about 68,000 hectares during 
the beginning of this year. That is a dramatic reduction in 2 years. 
Why has that happened? What has been done to cause that to happen?
  One very simple thing happened. President Fujimori of Peru decided on 
a policy of shooting down all of the private planes that are flying 
this coca base, once it has gotten to them, out of the country and into 
Columbia for refining in the laboratories. That policy alone has caused 
all of this disruption.
  There are other things going on. There is a crop eradication program 
that the United States supports, and there are a lot of men and women 
in country in the Peruvian businesses and in the world of our foreign 
service who are working very hard every day to go

[[Page H887]]

out and literally destroy crops by hand in Peru, where they take a 
machete and whack the plant down and kill it.
  But the crop eradication alone would not have done this. We have been 
doing that for a long time. It is the policy of getting tough, and 
sending a message to those who are attempting to do this, that you are 
going to lose your life, we are not just going to be kidding around 
about this anymore. If you are going to be transshipping across country 
lines out of Peru in a private commercial plane, which is the way most 
of this goes, you are in real trouble.
  Now we have begun the process, in cooperation with the Peruvian 
Government, of helping them with riverine traffic on all those rivers 
out there, to stop the possibility that some of this stuff is going to 
out by way of river through the Amazon and so forth. It is effective. 
It can work.
  In order to succeed to an even greater extent, all that is really 
required is the continued effort on the same track that it has been on, 
and the determination of the leadership of the Government of Peru and 
some more air support, some air surveillance, some radar in the air, so 
we can keep up with these planes and give more support on the riverine 
program. We need to keep up what we are doing. But it is working in 
Peru.
  In Bolivia, where about 20 percent of the coca crop is grown, the 
government of Bolivia has just changed hands last fall. I think it was 
in August, to be precise. In Bolivia we have a wonderful opportunity 
now, working with this new government which is dedicated to eradicating 
the coca production and the cocaine production in that country. As I 
said earlier, 20 percent is produced there. It is actually refined, in 
Bolivia's case. There are ways of going about attacking the problem 
there very similar to what was done in Peru.
  I believe that with the support of the United States government, an 
effort clearly can be done to make it unsafe for these folks to be 
transitting and trafficking the base narcotic from the field, where it 
is grown and put into this paste as I have described, by the poor 
people, the campesinos, into the city, in the area of Santa Cruz, 
Bolivia, where it is refined. There is only one road that goes that 
way, and it is a long way. It seems to me that is a choke point, and we 
could stop a lot of the traffic along that road.
  It also seems to me that there is only one road into Brazil and one 
main highway into Argentina. There is no reason why we could not choke 
off the traffic leaving Santa Cruz with a more refined product, and 
with greater information and equipment, skills, et cetera, I believe 
that the Government of Bolivia will be able to do the same or better 
than the Government of Peru over the next couple of years in reducing 
the production of both the coca base from the plants, as well as the 
finished cocaine and shipping it out.
  It is not important what I believe. What is important is that in both 
cases, this is what our American, the United States Embassy country 
team dealing with anti-narcotics believes in each of those countries. 
They believe it passionately and deeply.
  In the case of Bolivia, they say we just need a couple of more 
planes, we need a couple of more trucks, we need a little more of this 
or that equipment, it is not terribly expensive; maybe a couple of the 
x-ray machines, like they have on the borders between Mexico and the 
United States.
  What about Columbia, you say? That is the big, bad apple down in 
Latin America. We know that is where most of the cocaine production 
heads north from. That is where most of the laboratories are. The same 
is true there, though it is more complicated.
  In Columbia, the growing regions in the South, they not only grow 
there but they take in the Peruvian crop and refine it in laboratories 
that are located in that same region. This is all an Amazon Basin 
region of Columbia. We have the cooperation, despite some of the 
difficulties we have had in recent years, we have the cooperation of 
the Columbian Government. They are going to have a new election this 
spring. We need to be sure that we continue to get that cooperation, 
but it appears that it is likely that we will.
  The Columbian National Police, headed by General Serrano, has done a 
terrific job in the face of all odds in going out and trying to destroy 
crops, trying to destroy laboratories, trying their darndest to arrest 
the drug lords in Columbia. Some of that has been very successful, 
though little publicized up here in the States as to what has been 
done.
  The reality is that that portion of the countryside where most of 
this activity is going on is largely under the control of rebel groups, 
guerrilla groups, who have been around for many years in Columbia. The 
shorthand name for them, they call them a FARC, FARC, for a Spanish 
name. That is an acronym, FARC. This group of revolutionaries used to 
be affiliated with the Communist movement in years past. Back in the 
days of the Sandinistas when they were active in Nicaragua, they were 
sympathetic in the same causes.
  There have been human rights violations against this group in the 
past by the Columbian military. Our State Department and others say 
that is so. There has been a general resistance to being involved with 
this group, or supporting Columbian efforts to suppress it.
  I want to tell the Members, there is a big problem, because the FARC 
control that region. They are engaged in gaining all of the money and 
resources they have to continue to do their operations by running a 
protection racket for the drug lords, for the drug kingpins in 
Columbia. The drug kingpins pay them money to go and defend and protect 
the fields where the coca is grown, and to protect the cocaine 
laboratories in Columbia.
  The FARC then go buy all kinds of arms, AK-47s and so forth, on the 
world black market for arms, and they do exactly what I said. They go 
about protecting those fields and those laboratories from the efforts 
of the Columbian National Police to resolve the matter. As a result, 
many, many people have been killed who are law enforcement officials of 
the Columbian National Police, trying to go in and destroy the 
laboratories and the crops.
  The results of that is that there are areas of the country they do 
not even go into because they cannot reach it. Some of it is technical, 
because airstrips are not adequately finished in areas close in. Some 
is because we do not have the right type of helicopters in Columbia to 
do the job at the longer ranges necessary.
  A lot, and most of it, frankly, is because the guerillas, the FARC, 
are out there threatening to kill anybody who comes in there, and have 
the power to do that. The Columbia National Police are not the military 
in Columbia.
  What is it that it takes to resolve this matter in Columbia? It takes 
the United States Government being willing to put the resources into 
training and equipping the Columbian military and assisting them in 
destroying the FARC, to end their control of the region where all of 
this drug activity is taking place, and then continue and step up our 
support to the Columbian National Police to go in and destroy all these 
laboratories, and to our State Department effort, which is a crop 
eradication effort; they spray, as opposed to hand destruction of crops 
in Columbia for cocaine, to provide enough planes and enough equipment 
to go in there and do the job all at one time, not mess around and drag 
this out for 10 more years, or whatever, just go in and get the job 
done. It can be done. It may take a few months to get the equipment in 
order, it may take a few months to train the Columbian military 
adequately so they can go out and do their job, but it can be done.

  I hear people talking to me up here in the two bodies I work with, 
the other body and this one, about the fear if we train the Columbian 
military, that, gosh, they have a bad track record. They are going to 
come back and create all kinds of human rights violations.
  I think it is our job to do everything in our power to see to it that 
they do not commit atrocities. I believe that it is the Government of 
Columbia's desire that that not be the case. I am convinced by our 
people on the ground in Columbia that is indeed true, that we have the 
best climate we may have ever had in modern times for succeeding in 
gaining the kind of cooperation we need inside the Columbian military 
and its government to avoid those kinds of atrocities.
  But make no mistake about it, the risks of being involved in having 
some hazard of that sort take place is worth it. That does not mean we 
condone it,

[[Page H888]]

it does not mean we support it, it does not mean we do not condemn it 
or do everything we can to prevent it, but we need to protect first and 
foremost the lives of the children of America. We need to protect the 
lives of our children from the drug presence that is here in this 
country, from the drugs being produced and shipped, and the sale of 
those drugs largely controlled by the Columbian drug lords who are 
running the country in the southern part of Columbia by the use of 
these rebels.
  We need to have those rebels destroyed, and we need to have the crops 
destroyed and the drug lords destroyed. It can be done without the 
United States military going in. It can be done if we will simply equip 
and train the Columbian military and give them the resources that they 
need. I believe that should be done sooner, rather than later.
  In addition to that, though, and even before that occurs, if it does 
occur in the next couple of years, we can make other progress in 
Columbia in a similar fashion as we have made in Peru and Bolivia. 
There is the possibility of a shootdown policy in Columbia. There is a 
mountain range that runs in Columbia around two-thirds or better of the 
northern and western part of the country. You have to cross this 
mountain range to get to the coast with your cocaine that is then going 
to be shipped by boat or however it comes to the United States or to 
Mexico.
  A lot of the people we have, once this stuff gets to sea it is 
shipped in little vessels that are hard to detect. They get out over 
open water in the Pacific going up to Mexico, they get out over open 
water in the Caribbean in the Gulf of Mexico, and it is very hard for 
our Coast Guard or our Navy to detect these little vessels out there. A 
lot of it comes to our country as a result of that, or at least it gets 
to Mexico, where it is filtered in on that side, and certainly gets to 
Puerto Rico and the islands and comes on to the States that way.
  It so happens that you have to get the crop in a refined condition, 
which is done in the laboratories in southern Columbia, across those 
mountains. The way they cross those mountains is not by roads. There 
are not really any good roads going across those mountains. The way you 
cross those mountains is by small private plane, small little 
commercial planes, just like they do in Peru to get the crop to 
Columbia for final refinement.
  If President Fujimori has been successful in Peru, why cannot the 
Government of Columbia be just as successful in Columbia in shooting 
down those planes as they identify them and as they begin to leave that 
country, or at least as they begin to go across the mountains inside 
Columbia to get to the coast in the first place?
  There are a lot of other details that perhaps I would be better off 
not going into for national security reasons, but we have the ability, 
from information and intelligence, to know a lot about what happens in 
Columbia and a lot about the trafficking that is going on there. What 
we do not have is the leadership to put together the plan that says 
this is the way we are going to do it, and then go carry it out.
  I say the leadership. Our country team in Columbia, who is working in 
narcotics, has the plan. What we need is for them to be asked for their 
plan by those higher up in authority in our United States Government, 
in the executive branch. We need for that plan to be acted upon. We 
need for the administration to come forward and say to the United 
States Congress, here is our shopping list, and here is our 3-year 
timetable. Here is what it is going to take in Columbia to do the job. 
This is our 3-year plan to literally destroy the drug trafficking in 
Columbia, to destroy the cocaine production in Columbia. Here is what 
it is.
  We have not seen that plan, but it could come up, and I have a pretty 
good idea of what ought to be in that plan.
  In addition to cocaine, Columbia produces heroin. That is a new 
thing. Columbia did not used to produce it. Most of the heroin coming 
in the United States, as most of the world's heroin, used to come from 
the Golden Triangle over in the Burma area of the world, way over in 
the Far Eastern part of the world. But now, in recent years, we have 
found it is even more pure than that, the gold heroin being produced in 
Columbia. The poppies are grown in Columbia, in the mountains, and the 
refinement is done there.
  Heroin is shipped in much smaller quantities than cocaine. It goes by 
commercial airline, often. People swallow little packets of heroin and 
bring it into the airports in the United States virtually undetectable. 
If one of those packets burst, they are dead, but they are paid a lot 
of money, so they do it. The reality is that it is much more difficult 
to interdict the heroin once it is refined and is on its way than it is 
to stop the large quantities, metric tons, of cocaine.
  We have probably 600 or 700 or more metric tons of cocaine in its 
refined product form coming out of Bolivia and Columbia directed 
towards the United States every year. We do not interdict very much of 
it, but we know it has to come in large quantities when it gets on 
boats. Or if people are bringing it in, we will see somebody be 
interdicted with a very large quantity of it, a very visible, sizeable 
white powder substances.
  Heroin, again, is small in quantity, much more difficult to interdict 
at that level. But we can do something that is a lot easier, in the 
case of heroin, than cocaine, that solves the problem. We can destroy 
the poppy crops more easily than we can destroy the cocaine or the coca 
crops.
  The reason for that is they are grown in little plots in the 
mountains, they are grown as annuals. These are plants that come up, 
and they are pretty flowers, if you have ever seen them grow. There are 
various types. Some are not dangerous, but the ones, of course, that 
grow in Columbia in those mountains, as some in Mexico, are very 
dangerous.
  But we have the ability to eradicate, to spray, to do it by hand or 
otherwise. What is missing in Columbia, frankly, is the size and type 
of helicopter and aircraft that can go up into the mountains at the 
elevations where these crops are grown and protect the eradicators as 
they eradicate those poppy crops.
  They can do that, they can spot them fairly easily. It is very easy 
to detect those crops. There is no reason why, if we provide the 
equipment to Columbia, that this cannot be done and done very quickly, 
more quickly than the coca eradication. So it is not as big a problem 
as some people make it out to be.
  Does that mean we can cease and desist and once and for all it is 
gone, and you will never have to deal with it again? Probably not. I 
would be naive to think that.

                              {time}  1445

  But we can put a plan in place to literally stop it, to destroy those 
crops, and we can have a continuous plan then that is a lot easier to 
do, of keeping it suppressed, than it is to get it done to start with 
in the first place.
  There is no reason why for a minimal sustenance resource amount we 
cannot see the program continue to suppress the growth of poppy and the 
production of heroin in Colombia for many years to come, if we just go 
in now and do the right thing by providing the resources and the 
equipment and follow the game plan.
  Again, our in-country embassy antinarcotics team knows how to do 
this, but it is not being done. Nobody is doing it. No leadership in 
Washington has asked and tasked them to provide that plan to them, 
other than of course some of us in Congress who have been inquiring 
about it.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I think my colleagues may sense my frustration and 
why I am out here today talking with them about it. We in Congress 
should not be the ones to develop all the plans that are done and to 
drive this issue. It should be driven by the President of the United 
States and this administration. It is an executive branch function, 
primarily. The management of all of these diverse programs and 
interests to try to focus on drugs is definitely within the executive 
prerogative.
  But I can tell my colleagues that every day that passes and I see a 
plan like this one, this drug strategy that was promulgated a couple of 
weeks ago, that calls for a relatively timid approach to reduce drug 
use and availability in this country by a mere 50 percent in 10 years, 
every time I see something like this, and this is obviously current, I 
am moved to come forward and say congressional leadership

[[Page H889]]

is necessary. It has got to come from Congress if it is not going to 
come from the White House.
  So that is why I am out here, and I believe that we as Members of the 
U.S. House have an obligation to the American people to do everything 
we can to organize and force a plan and the implementation of that plan 
to reduce the flow of these drugs into the United States by at least an 
80 percent reduction of that flow over the next 2 or 3 years. If we 
follow this path, I am convinced that we can do it.
  There are other things that need to be done. We need to have radar 
planes that are flying the region that the Department of Defense does 
not currently have. We need to have tracking planes, once they have 
picked up on vessels or airplanes that they believe from intelligence 
or otherwise are loaded with narcotics, to be able to chase these 
planes and vessels, ships. We do not have that surveillance now.
  Mr. Speaker, we should have 24-hour, around-the-clock radar covering 
Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and the waters that go through the Pacific, the 
Gulf and the Caribbean along the coastline of that part of South 
America, including Venezuela, where these drugs are leaving and coming 
and going from. There is no reason why we cannot do that either. But we 
do not begin to deal with this in a fraction of the amount of 
surveillance time that would be required to do the job in the 24-hour 
coverage of which I speak.
  There is no reason why we cannot do that if we put our mind to it. 
But one of the reasons there is a problem with all of this is that a 
large measure of our counternarcotics effort comes under the control of 
the Department of Defense. I have no criticism with that. That is where 
it should be. The Southern Command, with General Wilhelm, which is now 
located in Miami, is primarily responsible from a military perspective 
for all our antinarcotics efforts, at least in this hemisphere.
  There is a structure in place, a new architecture that the General is 
working on. I am pleased with what I have seen. He is working there, 
but he is working with one arm tied behind his back. I will tell my 
colleagues why. It is because in the Department of Defense mission 
priorities fighting drugs is way down at the bottom of the list. The 
resources of DOD have been cut back so much for doing the tasks that 
most who are involved in our national security areas believe are needed 
to do the things that are important, that drugs come in last and they 
get very few resources. They do not get the planes. They do not have 
the AWACS or the P3 platforms that they need. And they do not get the 
other equipment that they need and the support that is necessary at 
Southern Command to do this job.
  One thing the President of the United States could do is get with 
Secretary of Defense Cohen and say let us move the list a little bit 
around and rearrange the chairs and make fighting the war on drugs 
meaningful by raising its priority under the mission of DOD to a higher 
level than where it is today. Some may say that is simple. It could be 
done tomorrow morning. And of course it is simple. It could be done 
tomorrow morning, but I do not think that is likely.
  There are four basic missions that the military has. One is the major 
national security obligation of protecting us against all of our 
enemies that might be aggressive towards us. That is not anything 
anybody would wish to reduce to a second rung. That is number one. That 
is what our military, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast 
Guard are all about. We need to keep it there.
  Number two is peacekeeping. That means things like Bosnia. There is a 
lot of debate about whether we should have been in Bosnia, whether we 
should still be there. As long as we are there, all of us are going to 
be supportive of the activities that are going on there. But there is a 
major debate over the degree to which the United States military should 
be used to be a peacekeeper all over the world putting out fires. That 
is the number two mission.
  The number three mission is readiness and exercises, training 
exercises to keep people going, keep the training at the proper level 
for flying and so forth. I do not think that is a bad mission either.
  But the fourth mission, there are only four, is the antinarcotics 
mission to fight drugs, to fight the flow of drugs coming into this 
country from abroad. That is way down there and it has just about 
dropped off. When they are at the last rung, they are way off.
  Mr. Speaker, it seems to me at least that fighting drugs should be 
the number 3 priority for the Department of Defense, ahead of exercises 
and training. I think when we consider the lives being lost of our 
young people, if we want to fight a war on drugs, it ought to be the 
number two priority ahead of peacekeeping. It ought to be that national 
security is number one and then right after that it should be fighting 
and winning the war on drugs.
  It should be a war. It should be put on wartime footing. We should 
have the Department of Defense supplying every plane, every man, every 
piece of equipment and every bit of intelligence that we need to do 
that. The CIA should be devoting whatever resources are required to 
provide information to that drug-fighting machine with regard to what 
the drug lords are doing, who is producing what, where the shipments 
are going and how they are going. We should not spare a nickel in doing 
this job.
  If we simply change the priorities in the DOD, in the Department of 
Defense, what a world of difference that would make to be able to 
properly equip General Wilhelm's troops and what he is trying to do in 
Southern Command. It is very difficult. He is responsible for an awful 
lot.
  The same thing is true of the Coast Guard. They are underfunded and 
undersupported in what they are trying to do. The Coast Guard is in 
charge, with Admiral Kramek, of our transit zones interdiction. That is 
all the stuff at sea and in the air between South America and the 
United States. They do not have near enough to do it.
  We should seal off the island of Puerto Rico from drugs. A lot of 
people know that the drugs come through Puerto Rico in large quantities 
now to the eastern part of the United States. There is no reason we 
cannot seal the island off.
  The problem is not Puerto Ricans transiting drugs or dealing in 
drugs. The problem is drugs coming into Puerto Rico. It is part of the 
United States. Once they are there, there is no customs to come here. 
There is no check of a ship or a plane. Puerto Ricans are American 
citizens. It is just like being in Texas or Florida and shipping drugs 
or any other piece of equipment to wherever else; the same type of 
restrictions, very little or none.

  We have no reason not to and every reason to seal off the island of 
Puerto Rico and all the other areas of the United States from drug 
trafficking. The Coast Guard has that responsibility and we do not 
provide the equipment, the planes, the radar, and the technical support 
that they need to do that, the manpower and the dollars. We need to do 
that.
  We need to provide whatever it takes to do this job. This plan, this 
drug strategy plan has some nice words in it. It has a 10-year goal in 
it. Some of this stuff is good, but it does not begin to do the job. It 
does not set the basic target and it does not provide the road map to 
get it done, and the budget that goes along with this plan that has 
been submitted is paltry compared to what needs to be given.
  Obviously, we need to have the explicit details of here is how we are 
going to do it over the next 3 years to cut the supply by 80 percent. 
And we need to know what equipment is needed and what manpower and what 
follow-on is needed and if we are going to provide more helicopters, 
and we are going to have to do that to the Latin American effort. We 
are going to have to provide more planes, these radar-type planes, and 
more manpower. We are going to have to provide the readiness and the 
maintenance. We are going to have to have a budget stream and it is 
going to have to be logical and somebody is going to have to decide 
what the DOD is going to have it in. Which one is going to have that 
equipment? Is the State Department going to have these planes, and 
Customs that group? The coordination has to come from this 
administration.
  Mr. Speaker, I have not forgotten Mexico and I realize it continues 
to be a very difficult issue for us. I happen to be one who believes 
that Mexican Government leaders at the very top, the President and 
their Attorney General

[[Page H890]]

in particular, are indeed trying to cooperate and do their best job. 
But there are big problems in Mexico's structure. We have known about 
that for some time and we know that many of the states of Mexico, like 
the States of the United States, have corruption in the state 
governments; that the police in those states are often involved with 
narcotics trafficking. We do not know to what degree, but it is a 
fairly high percentage.
  There are going to have to be some structural, systemic reforms in 
Mexico that are going to take a number of years to accomplish. But the 
Mexican Government has recently passed new money-laundering laws and 
made extradition agreements with the United States. We will now see 
some people come out to be tried in the United States who are drug 
lords. The military in Mexico is destroying poppy crops in the mountain 
ranges where they do grow black tar heroin, which is a large part of 
the heroin in the western United States.
  But Mexico does not grow a single bit of cocaine. There is no coca 
plant in Mexico. No refineries of cocaine in Mexico. And the biggest 
single group of drug problems that I hear about are problems related to 
cocaine and heroin, the two of them combined.
  There is no reason why one extra ounce of cocaine should be allowed 
to get to Mexico to be distributed here by their drug lords. That is 
what is happening now. The Mexicans, these drug lords in Mexico are the 
ones who are doing the retailing in the United States, at least the 
western half. The Colombians take their cocaine to Mexico and wholesale 
it to the Mexicans and the Mexicans retail it here.
  Our borders are porous. We need to continue to beef up our Southwest 
border and we are doing a decent job, but not doing nearly enough. It 
is not smart in many ways.
  When we start looking at prioritization of putting our resources, the 
best use of our resources to really stop the flow of drugs into the 
United States is to put it before and below Mexico. Stop the drugs from 
ever getting to Mexico in the first place. The problems of Mexico are 
going to be around for a while. We need to work those problems. We do 
have the cooperation of the President and the Attorney General. 
Progress is being made. But we have to recognize that it is going to 
take a while, and if we are going to stop the flow of 80 percent of the 
drugs coming into this Nation in the next 3 years, which is possible to 
do, the place to do it is to draw that line south of Mexico and to make 
it work and to provide the resources that are necessary.
  Mr. Speaker, let me wrap up by saying that again we need a balanced 
approach in fighting narcotics. We need to have a true war on drugs, 
though. We need to work on the supply side and the demand side. While 
my conversation today has been about the supply side, we need to put 
emphasis as well equally on the demand side to get our young people 
better educated.
  But today teenage drug use in the United States is double what it was 
in 1992. Double what it was. That is absolutely intolerable. It is 
unacceptable and we should be ashamed of it. Not only should we be 
ashamed, but we should be out there using every ounce of strength to 
destroy the pathways of those drugs getting to our young people.
  Unless we reduce the quantity of drugs coming into the United States 
by at least 60 to 80 percent, we cannot drive the price of drugs up 
that are really cheap today in our cities and reduce the quantity to a 
manageable level, so that our local law enforcement can really be 
meaningful in its job and so that our local community leaders can be 
meaningful and get real results in their education and treatment 
efforts.
  We have to reduce the onslaught of this overwhelming amount of 
narcotics coming in here, particularly cocaine and heroin from South 
America. The way to do that is to set that target and set a goal that 
is realistic and achievable.
  I have suggested today that that be a target of 3 years to reduce by 
80 percent the amount of drugs coming into the United States. It is a 
target that every one of our antinarcotics in-country team believes, in 
the three principal countries involved, that is Colombia, Peru and 
Bolivia. And it is something that this administration has yet to 
embrace in this strategy.
  We as a Congress need to embrace that strategy. We need to force the 
resources, if necessary, on this administration to do the job. It can 
be done. It must be done. We need to provide those resources to those 
who can do it for us in the State Department, in the Defense 
Department, in the Justice Department with DEA, and in every other way 
that is necessary in those source countries where this is affecting.
  The leaders in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru at the very top of their 
governments are ready, willing and able now to cooperate. We better 
take advantage of it while we have the opportunity to stop the scourge 
of drugs affecting our young people. Let us go and give them the 
resources they need.
  It is a first step. It is a logical step. It is not a 10-year plan; 
it is a 3-year plan. And I challenge my colleagues to join with me in 
an effort to really have a true, for the first time in our history, 
true war on drugs.

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