[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 49 (Tuesday, April 28, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H2415-H2421]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              SCOURGE OF ILLEGAL DRUGS AGAIN UNDER ATTACK

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Oklahoma is once again to 
be commended for his leadership on this issue. There is no doubt that 
the number one fundamental problem in this country is the breakdown of 
character, the breakdown of the value system, the principled 
foundations of this country and the resultant breakdown partly, 
directly, the two things go in tandem, of families as well.
  The number one outgrowth that we are seeing in this country is the 
problem of drug abuse: drugs of all types, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, 
alcohol, tobacco, but in particular what we have been focusing on is 
this explosion among our youth of the narcotics, of marijuana, heroin, 
cocaine, crack, methamphetamines and other artificial stimulants. 
Tonight we are going to spend some time discussing this issue.
  It is a relatively historic night. Tomorrow we are going to have our 
first pieces of legislation, what will be a comprehensive multi-week, 
hopefully multi-month, year and up to three years extended start of a 
battle on drugs. We have done piecemeal legislation over the last few 
years but we have not had the concentrated effort that we will see 
starting as of tomorrow.
  We have a needles bill in front of us tomorrow to ban the use of 
giving free needles to heroin addicts with taxpayer dollars. We have in 
the higher education bill an amendment relating to taking back student 
loans if students abuse drugs while they are on a government subsidized 
loan requiring them to go into treatment programs, and I have a second 
amendment on drug testing. It is the start.
  We are also having announcement of a major initiative and Republican 
effort later this week. The number one person behind this is our 
Speaker.

[[Page H2416]]

 Speaker Newt Gingrich is committed to having an all-fronts war.
  I am going to yield now to my friend the gentleman from Florida who 
has been a leader in this. Many of us have been involved in this, not 
just now but for many years. Congressman Mica and myself both were 
staffers before we became Members of Congress. He was elected in the 
class before I was, but he was also on the hill before I was working 
over as Senate chief of staff. I also worked in the House and Senate 
before I got elected to Congress. Both of us have had experience in 
working with drug legislation before we were elected to Congress.
  This is not a new issue. These things go in tides. Right now we are 
at a high tide level again and we need to up our efforts. He is to be 
commended for his leadership. I now yield to the gentleman from Florida 
to fill us in on some of the battles that he has been watching, some of 
the background, and particularly a lot of what has happened in Orlando 
and Florida which has been at the epicenter of it, kind of backed off, 
and now you have another wave, which is exactly what is happening in 
this country.
  Mr. MICA. I thank the gentleman for yielding. I certainly thank him 
for his leadership on the drug issue and also on so many other issues 
before the Congress.
  We do have the privilege of serving together on the Government Reform 
and Oversight Committee and on the subcommittee that deals with our 
national drug policy, and that is the Subcommittee on National 
Security, International Affairs, and Criminal Justice. The gentleman 
from Indiana has brought tremendous leadership and, again from his 
tremendous experience both as a staffer and a Member of Congress and 
someone who cares about this issue, cares about his constituents and 
also is very compassionate towards what illegal narcotics are doing, 
and drug abuse, to the children of our Nation.
  Tonight I want to take a few minutes, if I may, and review a little 
bit of the history of how we got ourselves into this situation. As the 
gentleman from Indiana said, I was a staffer back in the early 1980s on 
the U.S. Senate side working with Senator Hawkins from Florida. You 
have also heard and understand, I think, that no State probably has 
been more severely impacted historically by illegal narcotics 
trafficking than the State of Florida.
  When Senator Hawkins was elected, the streets of Miami were overrun 
with illegal narcotics trafficking, we had unprecedented amounts of 
illegal drugs coming in and transiting through Florida and into our 
Nation, and for the first time we saw record drug abuse in our State 
and Nation. The question was what should we do and what could we do at 
that time.
  We were fortunate to have the tremendous leadership of a new 
President who brought a vision, who brought integrity, who brought 
honesty, who brought vision to the White House. His job, and Senator 
Hawkins and others who served in the new Senate majority at that time, 
was to get a handle on this situation. In fact they did, even joined by 
the First Lady who initiated a program of saying ``Just Say No.''
  I do remember and recall how the new Republican majority in the 
Senate began an Andean strategy. As a staffer I helped develop the 
certification law that requires that countries that get United States 
foreign assistance or trade assistance or financial assistance are 
certified each year for their eligibility for United States largesse by 
a review of their efforts to eradicate drug trafficking and illegal 
narcotics. That was another product of that era. There was tough 
enforcement.
  What we saw in the 1980s under the Reagan Administration and the Bush 
Administration, I am not sure if this will show up to my colleagues 
watching C-SPAN, but in fact teenage drug use declined dramatically in 
the early 1980s, and not until 1992-1993 did we see that trend reverse. 
In 1992 I was elected to the Congress. History now records George Bush 
being defeated and the Democrats controlling the White House, the 
United States Senate and the House of Representatives.
  One of the first acts that President Clinton took, and I would like 
to review this historically because I think it is important for the 
record of what took place and what the results of those actions are 
today, one of President Clinton's first actions on taking office was in 
fact to gut the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In fact, 
President Clinton gutted the staff of the Drug Czar's office by 80 
percent. The facts are, it was slashed from 146 staff members to 25 
staff members. Also in his first year, President Clinton cut $200 
million in drug interdiction efforts in the Caribbean and another $200 
million from alternate crop production and drug eradication in Mexico 
and the Andean drug-producing countries.
  Back in the 1980s we thought that the most cost-effective means of 
stopping drugs was at its source, where it is grown, where just a few 
pesos or a few dollars is given for the product at its source. It 
seemed to make a tremendous amount of sense. Rather than try to catch 
drugs when they entered our borders or when they entered our streets or 
were disbursed through our communities and our schools and trying to 
cut off drugs at that point, we felt then, we believe now, that 
interdiction, eradication, crop substitution programs at the source 
countries are the most effective means of stopping drug trafficking. 
You stop it right at its source, in its heels.

  These programs were gutted by this administration. These are the 
facts. The facts speak for themselves. We have seen, again, the 
results. In 1993, President Clinton dropped the war on drugs from 3rd 
to 29th in the national security list. The President produces a 
national security priority list. It was his action that dropped the war 
on drugs to 29th as a national priority.
  To date, he has continued to allow the State Department to let 
counternarcotics issues lag far behind other priorities in our 
relations with other countries. Only recently have we heard the 
Secretary of State begin to speak out because the problem has reached 
such tremendous proportion and the cost and effect in our communities 
is so dramatic.
  The number of individuals, and this again is fact, I cite only fact 
here tonight, the number of individuals prosecuted for Federal drug 
violations fell from 25,033 in 1992 to 21,900 in 1994, a 12 percent 
drop in just 2 years. So there was a deemphasis of prosecution at the 
Federal level. Again, the results are very clear of what we see.
  It is interesting to note this, because with the election of Rudy 
Giuliani as Mayor of the City of New York, he introduced a zero crime 
tolerance policy, he introduced a tough prosecution policy, and there 
has been as high a drop recorded as 30 percent in crime, a dramatic 
drop in drug trafficking in that community of New York City. We have 
seen that tough enforcement, tough prosecution works.
  And we see the results at the Federal level of what has happened with 
a decrease in Federal prosecutions, again citing only the facts in this 
case. From 1992 to 1995, again when the other party controlled the 
House, the Senate and the White House, 227 agent positions were 
eliminated from the Drug Enforcement Agency, and Clinton's fiscal year 
1995 budget proposed cutting 621 drug enforcement positions from the 
DEA, the FBI, the INS, the United States Customs Service and the Coast 
Guard.

                              {time}  2200

  In fact, my community, and I represent central Florida, probably one 
of the more affluent, more prosperous areas, one of the vibrant areas 
of our State and Nation, a great community of people who are law 
abiding but who nonetheless have been inundated by a flow of illegal 
narcotics. An investigation of this issue found that, in fact, a 
tremendous quantity of drugs is coming in through Puerto Rico; and some 
people blame the Puerto Rican State Governor and others, the 
Commonwealth, for not really taking a lead on the issue.
  What we found, and our subcommittee went down and held a hearing on a 
Coast Guard cutter on San Juan Bay, was that, in fact, this 
administration had cut the Coast Guard resources by nearly 50 percent. 
The Coast Guard, United States Coast Guard, in fact, since Puerto Rico 
is a Commonwealth and does not have its own armed forces, relies on the 
United States Coast Guard for coastal protection. That, again, that 
protection was cut by this administration by 50 percent, and

[[Page H2417]]

those drugs came in in incredible quantities into Puerto Rico in 
transit for Florida and the United States.
  Those are the results. They are documented. We have seen this, and we 
have seen what this type of policy has provided as a legacy for our 
Nation and our children.
  The President, in fact, has not substantially increased funding for 
accountable youth prevention programs but instead has nearly doubled 
the amount of funding. His policy was to promote a doubling of funding 
for drug treatment programs, and this has been described sort of as 
treating the wounded in a battle and not addressing the fight itself or 
just approaching it from sort of the most demoralized end of the game 
with the least potential for success.
  Then, of course, President Clinton recently certified Mexico, and 
again no nation has been more responsible for the influx and transit of 
hard drugs into our Nation than Mexico, again another slap in the face 
of the American citizenry.
  I have not brought up other instances of incredible misjudgment on 
the part of this administration and this President, but I must when you 
appoint a surgeon general such as Jocelyn Elders, who adopted a program 
that said to our children, just say maybe, maybe it is okay. Then you 
had echoed by the President of the United States, a figure that every 
child looks to in this Nation, and his comments which I have heard over 
and over on various television programs and news broadcasts: If I had 
it to do over again, I would inhale.
  Now what kind of a message does that send to our young people? In 
fact, we know what the message has done. The message has, and this is 
entitled Trends In Youthful Drug Use, Ages 12 to 17. We have seen from 
that reduction I showed you under Reagan and Bush, the just say no to 
just say maybe, a skyrocketing of youthful drug use in this country.
  We are talking about not only marijuana in incredible amounts and a 
more dangerous marijuana than we saw in the streets in the 1960s, we 
are talking about cocaine, we are talking about methamphetamines, we 
are talking about heroin.
  Again, I come from a community, and my community is one of the most 
rock solid in Florida, fairly prosperous, as I said, and economically 
doing well, and I have this headline from our local newspaper, the 
Orlando Sentinel. It says: Long out of sight, heroin is back killing 
teens.
  My community in central Florida, again a peaceful community, was a 
victim of this policy, letting down the guard and gut slashing the 
budget, which they did when they controlled this body, the Senate and 
the White House. The guard around Puerto Rico in heroin came down not 
only through that country and hurting that territory of the United 
States but into our country and into our State and into our 
neighborhood so that our particular situation has been that in the last 
few years central Florida has seen heroin deaths on a par with other 
major metropolitan areas like Detroit, like New York, like Los Angeles.
  So this is the legacy that we have inherited through this policy. It 
is clear. It is documented.
  One of the other things that I wanted to mention tonight was that my 
colleague has mentioned that we took over the Congress in, what was it, 
36, 40 short months ago. We have been able to bring some of our 
Nation's finances into balance, but we are trying to focus as leaders 
in this new majority with the leadership of Speaker Gingrich in 
addressing some of the social problems. And if drug abuse and misuse is 
not a problem, I do not know what is a problem. Two million Americans 
are behind bars.
  We held a hearing, and the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) and 
others came into our State. They heard our local officials. One of my 
local sheriffs said 80 percent of those behind bars in his county jail, 
that went through his jail, were there because of drug abuse or drug 
related crime. This has an unbelievable effect on our communities and 
on our children. And, again, this drug problem is not relegated to the 
poor, to the ghettos, to the across-the-railroad-track neighborhoods. 
This is hitting every neighborhood, every level of society, and we must 
do something about it.
  So our committee, under the leadership of the Speaker, under the 
leadership of Chairman Hastert, have begun a program of restoring the 
funds in these programs that were cut. We have got the military back 
into the war on drugs, and the Speaker and others are committed to make 
certain that they have the resources to conduct a real war on drugs. We 
have restored the cuts in the Coast Guard and other protective 
agencies, Customs and DEA, to make certain that they have the tools and 
the resources and the financial capability to conduct a real war on 
drugs.
  And what we are doing this week is launching, in fact, a concerted 
effort to see that we have the laws in place, that we have the tough 
enforcement in place and that these individuals who are charged in our 
Federal Government with this new policy have every resource to see that 
it, in fact, is accomplished.
  So that is the purpose of our coming together tonight, is to announce 
this policy. We have seen some terrible mistakes in the past when we 
did not have control of the Congress, when we had leadership in the 
White House that, in fact, strayed. And maybe they were well-intended, 
but the results, in fact, are just devastating to our young people and 
our communities and the social cost involved.
  But we are determined again to turn this around, and whatever 
resources it takes we are going to devote full measure effort, 
whatever, again, finances the Congress can muster to make certain that 
we bring this under control so that the people who we represent, those 
who are trying to raise their children in communities, get them through 
schools, those who are retired trying to live in peace in their 
communities, young people.
  I met a young lady the other day in one of the local department 
stores working, going to college, and she told me she could not go to 
school at night, and it was difficult for her to work and earn enough 
money because she was afraid to be out at the bus stop at night because 
of a potential for crime. And, again, 80 percent of the crime in my 
community is drug abuse related, and that is a pretty pitiful 
statement.

  So for those people who we represent, their children and those trying 
to make a living or gain an education or live in peace and retirement, 
we owe them this effort, and we are going to see it through. And indeed 
it will succeed because we have the commitment, this new majority, and 
we hope we have the support of every one of my colleagues who are 
listening.
  I thank the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) for yielding to me, 
and I am pleased also to join him tomorrow as we pass a resolution 
making certain that a needle exchange program which almost came into 
effect was stopped at the last minute through the efforts of the new 
drug czar, General McCaffrey, and others who know this is the wrong 
policy. It sends the wrong message. It is not the way to go. And if we 
are concerned about the minority communities, young black men and women 
who have been killed, we should be applauding that decision not to fund 
this.
  I am speaking tonight at the United States Capitol in Washington, 
D.C., the District of Columbia. No jurisdiction in our Nation has been 
more oppressed by drugs. No segment of our communities in this Nation 
have been more devastated. Since I have been coming to Washington over 
the last 18 years, almost every year between 300 and 400 young black 
males between the age of 14 and 40 have been slaughtered on the streets 
within view of this Capitol building, a travesty which surpasses the 
casualty in many of our international conflicts just here in 
Washington, D.C.
  So, if the Black Caucus, if other Members are concerned about policy 
that will turn this situation around and save some of these young 
people's lives and not destroy the great young men, the young black 
citizens of our nation's capital who have just had their lives snuffed 
out, then they should be here joining with us to see if we can turn 
this situation around.
  We know what has been done, and what was done by this administration 
did not work. We see the results. These are not abstract or 
manufactured statistics. This is what has taken place from a failed 
policy, and we need to turn that around and give these people a chance.

[[Page H2418]]

  So I am pleased again to join with the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Souder) tonight and others as we launch a program to bring a meaningful 
war on drugs, a war against drug abuse and a public awareness to our 
young people and to our citizens that we must realize the consequences 
of illegal narcotics and drugs.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Florida 
once again for his leadership and for his compassion and heart for 
those who have been abused, shot, lives wrecked and ruined by the 
terrible scourge of drugs in this country, and it has been a 
consistent, complete support.
  One of the things I want to do, too, is a supplement to what the 
gentleman from Florida has done, is to lay out a little bit what is 
happening here in the past and where we are headed and what we have 
been doing as we head into this major effort for the Members who are 
sitting in their office doing mail, for the dedicated C-Span junkies, 
to those who just will look through the Record later. Because some may 
say, where did the issue come from? Why all of a sudden is Speaker Newt 
Gingrich talking about drugs? Where did this pop in? Did they do some 
kind of poll? People are going to say, well, we have not seen what is 
all this action.
  I want to establish that there are a number of logical things that 
have led to the development of this big push you are going to see. Too 
often, we have approached the drug issue as we approached the Vietnam 
war, and that is we devote just enough resources to not quite win, and 
so we keep falling further and further behind in a war we can ill 
afford to lose.
  What has happened here is that the grassroots, every one of us, know, 
and the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) detailed what we heard in 
central Florida. We are hearing from prosecutors, we are hearing from 
sheriffs, we are hearing from all sorts of law enforcement officials 
that 70 to 85 percent of all crime in every jurisdiction has some 
relationship to drug and alcohol.

                              {time}  2215

  They are either stealing to fund a habit, they are high on the drugs 
or alcohol, and that leads to 70 to 85 percent of all crime. Child 
abuse, spouse abuse, not just robbery, rape, pillaging, automobile 
wrecks when it is reckless driving; all of these types of things have 
as its source one common problem. The average person knows this, the 
communities know this, but it has been very difficult to tackle this on 
a national level.
  General McCaffrey argues that it is a cancer; many of us argue that 
it is a war. It is both a cancer and a war. That means that we will 
work to eliminate it as much as possible, but quite frankly, as long as 
there is sin, we are likely to have some drug abuse there. It is a 
question of how we are going to control it. It is also a war. People 
are dying on the streets of America, people are dying around this world 
fighting this drug war.
  This is a dinner table issue. One of the criteria that the Speaker 
looks for when we are going to have a major focus is, is this what 
people talk about at their dinner table? Is this what parents are 
concerned about at night when their kids are not there? Is this what 
parents are concerned about in the schools? Is this something that 
actually resonates with the people as opposed to being kind of an 
inside-the-Beltway Washington concern or a concern of a special 
interest that is lobbying because they have lots of funds, or of some 
other reason in the ways we deal with legislation? This is what strikes 
at the hearts and homes of American people, and that is why he is 
leading.
  Mr. Speaker, it did not just come out of the blue. If we have been 
following this carefully, it has been kind of strange. Why did former 
Senator Bob Dole, our Presidential contender, talk about drugs during 
the campaign? It did not light a fire, it was not a hot media issue, 
but he was out there talking about it. So was the Speaker. People 
thought, this is kind of unusual. Why are they talking about drugs? 
Everybody in Washington is talking about the budget, and they are 
talking about taxes and so on. These people were talking about this 
early.
  One of the things is when we took over Congress, the figures that the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) was looking at were highlighted by 
then Congressman Bill Zeliff, who headed our subcommittee, and he got 
the ear of our Presidential candidate, Bob Dole, and our Speaker and 
said, look, there is a huge problem here. We need to start 
concentrating on this.
  This is not something that we came up with last week; this is 
something that our committee, I am not sure whether we have had 30 or 
40 hearings in the Committee on National Security and Justice Oversight 
Committee, which, in addition to having jurisdiction over the State and 
defense and the Justice Department, also has the drug czar legislation 
that moves through it and some very broad jurisdiction, and we have 
been concentrating on this. In addition, the gentleman from New York 
(Mr. Gilman), who is the senior Republican on the former Select 
Committee on Narcotics, has been focusing on the international issue. 
The gentleman from Florida (Mr. McCollum) has been focusing on 
judiciary-related issues in his Subcommittee on Crime. The gentleman 
from Ohio (Mr. Portman) has been a leader in community efforts.
  It is not as though we have been silent. It is that we have not 
gotten a lot of news media coverage. There is a difference. For 
example, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) and I are on the 
Committee on Government Reform and Oversight where we have been doing 
the investigations into the kind of ``gate'' of the week of the 
administration, whether it is Filegate or Whitewatergate or whatever, 
Greg Livingstonegate I guess, whatever the variation is, and people 
say, is that all you guys do? We have done less on that than we have 
done on drugs. But drugs is not quite as sexy to put on the evening 
news as talking about some kind of finance scandal.
  It is not that I am concerned and humiliated about the influence of 
the Federal Government on possible illegal influence of foreign 
contributions and campaign finance, but the fact is we work on a lot of 
other issues, too, but they do not necessarily hit on the front page.
  We have had many oversight hearings; we have been in Indiana, 
Illinois and Michigan; we have been down in Florida multiple times and 
California multiple times and Arizona, up in New England; we have been 
around the country in Plano, Texas, where we had kids die of heroin 
overdoses in the district of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sessions), 
just like they have done in Orlando.
  I have been to South America three times now in the last 3 years, 
where there is an actual war going on. We have been over in Asia and 
the Middle East trying to meet with foreign countries where the heroin, 
cocaine, marijuana and other drugs are coming in. We have had hearings 
on Hollywood and the movies and their impact on the culture. We have 
had hearings on the music industry and the impact on the culture and 
what we can do related to that.
  This is not something we invented yesterday. This is something we 
have been working on almost from the month we took over Congress. 
Everybody was focused on the Contract With America, but, in fact, 
Congressman Zeliff and this subcommittee were starting on the drug 
issue not very many days after we got here, and the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. Mica) and I know that because both of us are on the 
subcommittee, and we were up and running. Furthermore, the gentleman 
from Florida (Mr. Mica) had been objecting for years that the 
Democratic leadership of that subcommittee had not been focusing on it, 
so when we got in control, we started to move on this issue.
  Now, what we heard in these hearings were from young people who 
talked, and I remember one at the Orlando hearing where a young man was 
there with his dad. It was a tough day for them because they were there 
together and going public, and his dad was fairly well-known. But he 
said how he started with marijuana and how he saw that his parents did 
not realize it, and then he started moving to harder drugs, and he 
started stealing, and his dad, as he said, really did not want to 
confront his son, did not really understand all of that, wishes now 
that he had been more involved. His son did not understand why his 
father did not get involved. They saw his grades dropping. It was very 
touching.

[[Page H2419]]

  Every young person we have heard from, whether it is in Texas, 
whether it is in California, whether it is in Florida, say, I started 
with marijuana, and then I moved to cocaine. I robbed to support my 
habit. My grades went down, my life was wrecked, and then I was spared. 
And we looked at this type of thing.
  We heard from one lady in Texas who talked about how her husband 
would get high on cocaine; how she and her daughter were hiding out 
because they knew he was going to kill them if the drug habit did not 
kill him first. She was living in terror, and what are we going to do 
about this? That is what we have heard about it.
  We have heard how the administration's budget cuts have had an 
inverse effect. When they cut the interdiction efforts, when they cut 
the source country efforts, what we saw was supply go up, driving price 
down, and for competitive purposes, the purity and the potency of the 
marijuana and cocaine and heroin we have on our street is far greater. 
It is not like the 1960s and 1970s. The marijuana is more like the hard 
drugs of those eras, and the hard drugs are fatal today.

  We had signals out of the administration, which the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. Mica) has delineated very well, that we have kids' use 
going up. Even though we see in some adult sectors cocaine usage and 
others going down, the terrible news is it is soaring among kids.
  I want to talk briefly about the international problem. The cocaine 
comes from basically three places in the world. We can chase it all 
over America and all over the world, but there is three countries, 
Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, where the stuff comes from. And thanks to 
the policies in Bolivia and Peru, it has mostly now shifted to 
Colombia. Initially the coca leaves were grown in Peru and Bolivia, and 
then Peru and Colombia were doing the transfer in the making cocaine, 
and the Colombia was the cartels. And now most has gone to Colombia, 
and it is a narcoterrorism threatening the very democracy and the 
stability of the nation of Colombia.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. SOUDER. I yield to the gentleman from Florida.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, this is an interesting point the gentleman 
raises about what had developed as an Andean strategy to stop in a very 
cost-effective manner; we only spent about $200 million out of $16 
billion on this whole drug effort, but we spent about $200 million down 
there. It has been pretty much tightened up because of the efforts of 
President Fujimori, who we met with when we went down there, and also 
because of Bolivia's effort, but we learned some interesting things in 
this experience.
  We learned first that, and we had a knock-down, drag-out fight with 
this administration when they destroyed the shoot-down policy. We had a 
policy established under the Reagan administration that, given fair 
warning over these air spaces, in fact, in Peru and Bolivia and 
Colombia, the drug dealers would be shot down, and they, in fact, were 
until a liberal in the Clinton administration moved from the Department 
of Justice, I think, to DOD, and then turned this policy upside down, 
and we saw a lot of these drugs coming back. I will say the other side 
worked with us on this to get the attention of the President, but we 
had to reverse that. That did a great deal of damage.
  Then when we visited the jungles down there, we learned from some of 
our agents that overflights that had been conducted in that region had, 
in fact, been diverted, I believe, to Alaska by the administration to 
look for other problems, I think environmental problems as opposed to 
the drug problem flights. Then we, in fact, learned that our DEA agents 
in the jungles were dipping into their own pockets in some cases to 
keep programs alive, because money had been shifted from drug 
enforcement and from those programs and strategies, and I think I heard 
the figure of $40 million was put into Haiti for that incredibly failed 
program where we wasted almost $3 billion to date. So each of these 
attempts by the administration to destroy the program did not succeed.
  The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) has also outlined how since 
we took over the Congress, and in fact, I served on the subcommittee 
and the committee before, the Democrats held one hearing of any 
substance relating to national drug policy while all of this was being 
done, in spite of my circulating a bipartisan letter of 132 Members 
requesting hearings on our policy. And the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Souder) has said we are not Johnny-come-latelies in that, and in fact, 
we have held over 40 hearings.
  They may not be interesting to the media; they may not want to cover 
them. They may want to spend more time on tobacco and some of the 
outlandish figures that have been brought out as a diversionary tactic 
by this administration while the country is going down the path of ruin 
with illegal narcotics and drug abuse, and 100,000 dying in our 
streets. And the social costs being absolutely astronomical, in 
addition to, of course, medical costs and the families that are 
destroyed.
  But this is what we have learned, this is what we have done, and in 
fact, we have taken these actions, as Mr. Souder has outlined, and now 
we are faced with a dilemma in Colombia. The administration again, with 
another failed policy, the Colombian failed policy. We begged, we 
pleaded, we have sent letters. We passed, I believe, a resolution on 
the floor of this Congress.
  Mr. SOUDER. A law, Mr. Speaker.
  Mr. MICA. To get aid to Colombia, which is now where there is an 
incredible production of heroin. The heroin, when we went down there, 
they told us they are producing 10,000 hectares which will make heroin 
as cheap on the streets of the United States, and it is getting there 
very quickly, and a much stronger, much more potent heroin, because of 
our policy. We failed to provide the equipment.
  The Congress directed the equipment, the funds, that spare parts be 
given down there to fight this war on drugs, and in the meantime this 
administration has denied those requests. Even of late when they have 
decertified Colombia with a waiver, the goods and the materiel and the 
resources to fight that war on drugs still have not reached Colombia, 
and Colombian military are being slaughtered. The national police chief 
Seranno has been here and begged us for assistance, and we still ignore 
it, and we have an incredible amount of drugs, as the gentleman from 
Indiana (Mr. Souder) just described, coming in now, not only 
transiting, but they are now mass producers of heroin. They are even 
into the cocaine business, because this administration has made it 
profitable for them to succeed.
  I can tell my colleagues, there is nothing more effective as far as 
use of taxpayer dollars. Out of $16 billion we are spending this money 
on treatment and programs that do not work. We talk about losing a 
Vietnam War. This would be just like putting all of our resources in a 
war and just treating the wounded, and that is what this 
administration's policy has been, and that is why it has failed.
  We have to have tough enforcement. We have to have tough and 
effective education. We have to have treatment. We have to have 
interdiction, and all of these elements coming together in a 
concentrated effort to make this thing work.

                              {time}  2230

  And that is what we are hopefully going to do. But the gentleman from 
Indiana has, in fact, outlined the failed South American strategy, and 
we could go on more about Mexico.
  Mr. SOUDER. I would like to make some additional comments on 
Colombia. We were just down there again this past week as we went down 
to the Summit for Americas. I had an amendment that passed and was held 
in conference committee that three Blackhawk helicopters were supposed 
to be sent to Colombia. If this administration had followed the law, 
those Blackhawk helicopters would be down there and they would be able 
to get in the areas and eradicate the heroin. They cannot get up there 
with the Hueys. They do not get up to that altitude.
  Furthermore, there is a shooting war where people are dying in 
Colombia, while we stand here fiddling in Washington trying to decide 
what to do, while we have grounded because of mechanical failure every 
Huey helicopter that they have. They have nothing with which to fight. 
They have lost 40

[[Page H2420]]

percent of Colombia, the effective control of the rural countryside.
  For those who do not understand the significance of this, understand 
that we have troops in Haiti. We have troops in Bosnia. The national 
interest is a little unclear, even in the Middle East, where we are 
spending $1.5 billion about every nine months right now, where the 
gentleman from Florida and I just visited last fall and heard 
skepticism from our own armed forces leaders that we need to be at that 
level given the direct threat there.
  And even arguing that the Middle East has multiple reasons of our 
national interest, including our friendship with Israel, our 
friendships with the potentially threatened Arab States and the oil 
supply, let us look at Colombia. If it is supplying the cocaine and 
heroin to this country where people are dying in my hometown of Fort 
Wayne and throughout northeastern Indiana and all over America, the 
drugs alone is enough to have national interest be a priority there. 
But it is more than just that.
  Along the Panamanian border they have lost effective control of that. 
The drug dealers and control has spread into that section of Panama, 
the Darien area. We are about to abandon Panama. I am very concerned 
that not only are we going to pull out militarily, but that our efforts 
to get an antinarcotics center there could be kiboshed.
  That is extremely critical, as we just heard earlier from Congressman 
Mica about the shootdown policy. They need the AWACS. If we send those 
AWACS up to the United States and they have an hour-and-a-half transit 
time to get down there, we are going to dramatically reduce our airtime 
for surveillance, and we are going to have even more drugs at cheaper 
prices on our streets, threatening our kids and families. We need to 
make sure we have at least an antinarcotics center in Panama as we 
leave.
  Because Colombian narcotics drug lords are prepared to move in 
through Panama. On the other side they control about half the 
Venezuelan border where the jungle is. And control, in a guerrilla war 
they do not have to have forts and troops and lines. Particularly in 
the jungle they can move around. We have to have at least four times 
the effective troops and an operative military defending ground or we 
in effect lose control because they get to pick and choose where they 
want to fight.
  We have lost half the Venezuelan border. It is not the Middle East 
that is our number one supplier of oil, it is Venezuela. Seventeen 
percent of our oil comes from Venezuela. In oil by-products, Colombia 
is our number one supplier. Talk about energy threat, the energy threat 
is in Colombia. It is not in the Middle East. The Canal and the trade 
threat is in Panama, and we have all the drugs.
  And what is our response? We will not send them the three helicopters 
that we were requiring them to send by law, and they are saying, well, 
they need 20 helicopters. You know what, three is better than zero. If 
we need to send them three more, we would not be arguing, maybe six, if 
we had sent them the three last year, then we could get them the three 
more this year. Frankly, they need the Blackhawks and more Huey IIs.
  The alternative is American troops. Here we have a country, Colombia, 
where they are willing to fight and die partly because of our 
consumption here in America. Thousands and thousands of police 
officers, and we were just down there in Colombia and we visited a 
hospital, and we visited a number of Colombian national police who have 
been shot down trying to eradicate the cocaine so that it does not hit 
our streets. And what is our reaction? We will not give them the 
weapons with which to do it. Apparently we are not going to do it until 
we have to send troops down there.
  This hat belonged to Colonel Gallego, the head of the DANTE, the 
antinarcotics subforce of the Colombian National Police. General 
Serrano and Colonel Gallego signed this for me. If anybody saw ``Clear 
and Present Danger,'' it was a fictionalized account. The former 
ambassador who went with us on one of the trips, I asked him if it was 
an accurate movie and he said, ``Not completely. I died in the movie.'' 
It is a pretty accurate picture of the fight they are facing in 
Colombia.
  Colonel Gallego is the man who took down Pablo Escobar of the famous 
Medellin Cartel. He is known as the lab buster. He has a $3.5 million 
price on his head. General Serrano has an $8 million price on his head. 
They want him dead.
  These people, there is no blood on this hat, but there are thousands 
of police officers and military forces who have died in Colombia 
fighting our battle. I do not want to have American men and women. I 
want to help the people who are fighting the war so that they at least 
have a fighting chance to win and drive back the narcotics, the FARC 
and others. I do not know that they will, but we ought to at least give 
them the chance. We are the ones with our national security interest 
directly threatened here.
  I want to move on to a couple of other issues here in the last 
remaining minutes. I touched some on foreign policy, but I want to say 
that we are also approaching this comprehensively and domestically in 
treatment. It is clear that unless we can get the hard core addicts, 
and every hard core addict we get off, we have a dramatic reduction in 
the abuse of heroin and cocaine in particular.
  Now we also know that, let us just say, that treatment programs are 
very erratic in their effectiveness. There are different measures to 
use. Obviously there is going to be a high recidivism rate, and 
obviously if people at least abuse it less than before, that is some 
kind of progress. But there are a couple of basic principles here and 
we will be putting these in as we move through the treatment question.
  If we do not do drug testing, how do we know in fact if the treatment 
program worked? One of the basic principles is that we ought to have 
measurements in treatment programs and we ought to have monitoring. It 
is only the most kindhearted and compassionate thing we can do for an 
abuser, and that is hold them accountable for their behavior. Do not 
let them fall back in, particularly after we use taxpayers' dollars to 
try to get them out. Let us monitor and follow through.

  It is absurd to give out free needles to heroin addicts. They argue 
that, well, they will be clean. They will not get AIDS. They will just 
die of drug overdose. They will not die of AIDS and they will not 
spread it. This would be the equivalent of going into the American 
schools and saying these kids are going to smoke anyway, why not give 
them low-tar cigarettes paid for by taxpayer dollars?
  Why would we use taxpayers' dollars to sustain somebody in a habit 
that is going to kill them, destroy them, wreck their families? If they 
are a dad or a mom, it is abandonment of their children, and we are 
going to give them clean needles? It is absurd. We should have gone 
further than banning direct government money. We should have gotten the 
fungible money where it is transferred from one place to another.
  Furthermore, we should be looking into people like George Soras who 
is funding a lot of these programs and also funding the medicinal 
marijuana, the back-door legalization of marijuana. There are 
legitimate cases, but they are few and far between.
  Anybody who watched the special that focused on a lot of these kind 
of drug clubs for the medicinal uses of marijuana in California, it is 
appalling. Sit around and pass the pot. It is just like in the 1960s on 
the college campuses, only this time it is under legitimate government 
approval funded by George Soras and two friends in State after State. 
There are basically three people with one person at their head funding 
this, and we need to look into that question.
  We need to also look at prevention programs. A lot of the drug-free 
school money, while well-intentioned, has been frittered away. We need 
to find particularly effective programs for those most at risk. A lot 
of times it seems that these programs are mostly aimed at kids who are 
not really high risk. We have to figure out those kids who are most at 
risk and we need to try to get them off.
  I remember at one school where I went around the district and talked 
through these issues with high school kids at about 17 high schools in 
my congressional district in northeast Indiana, and one student came up 
and said that he had just gone clean the

[[Page H2421]]

day before because his friend had gotten high and committed suicide. 
And he said, ``I don't want to do that.'' He said, ``I'm scared. I hope 
I can get off.'' And he said, ``I wish my friend was still here.''
  When are we going to try to identify these high-risk kids and try to 
help them, as opposed to sometimes it seems we are more concerned about 
giving out little rulers or having a skit than actually tackling the 
very hard cases of the prevention.
  The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Portman) was a leader in passing 
legislation which we now have, in northeast Indiana almost every county 
now has a community-based group that is trying to pull the different 
organizations together. Sometimes schools feel like there are 23 
different groups hitting them up to try to do anti-drug programs. We 
need community-wide organized efforts and we are trying to stimulate 
some of that through the Portman bill.
  The gentleman from New York (Mr. Solomon) has an amendment that we 
have in the Higher Education Act that says that if students want a 
subsidized student loan, then they have an obligation to stay clean. If 
they do not stay clean for one year, the first time they are suspended 
from their student loan and they have to go into treatment.
  And I want to offer tomorrow an amendment that also says that drug 
testing be included to make sure they are clean for two years, then 
they can get reinstated. The second offense, they are off for two 
years. Definitely, three strikes and they are out. We do not want to 
have high-risk people not have the opportunity to get an education. 
Self-esteem and education are critical to keeping them off of drugs. 
But at the same time, taxpayers should not have to fund behavior that 
is contrary to the law.
  There needs to be a give-and-take with this, and we want to encourage 
people to get clean. The best thing we can do for them, the college 
education is a waste of money if they are on drugs. We have to get them 
clean. If they sold, it is a suspension of two years for first offense 
and indefinitely for second offense. So this will be up tomorrow.
  The gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Wicker) who has been a leader in 
the needles issue, along with the gentleman from Oklahoma (Mr. Coburn) 
will be working with that. We will work aggressively on prevention and 
treatment.
  Let me reiterate, the difference that is seen here is a concentrated 
effort, not a dribbling of a bill here and a bill there. I am willing 
to criticize the Speaker when I have disagreements, and I want to make 
sure I praise him when I think he has taken the commendable leadership 
in this, as has the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) along with 
his cochairs, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. McCollum) and the 
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Portman) with the anti-drug task force. I 
think we are going to see a difference.
  Mr. Speaker, we need this administration to join with us. This needs 
to be a bipartisan effort. This cannot be divided and have a bunch of 
people on the other side posturing with this. This needs to be a joint 
effort, a drumbeat from every source saying this is unacceptable.
  As a goal we ought to say by the Year 2000 we are going to have a 50 
percent reduction, and the President of the United States and others 
should join with us and say we are going to have a 50 percent 
reduction. A 50 percent reduction in two years sounds like a lot, but 
that would only take us to the place where we were when this President 
took office.
  Mr. Speaker, the least he could do is, when he leaves, get it back to 
the level of when he came. Then we can start to get rid of the drug 
abuse that we had which was already there when he got here. We need his 
help so that when he exits, we are at least back to the level that it 
was when he came. He owes that to the American people, and hopefully we 
can work together with that.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding and for his 
comments, and again for his dedication to this subject. I honestly 
cannot think of any other issue before the Congress as far as the 
social impact on our Nation. We have been successful in the last 36 or 
40 months getting our finances in order, but now the number one 
priority must be to tackle the illegal narcotics problem, the crime 
that it does rain upon this country.
  This week we have launched another stage in the battle, a new 
offensive. It is going to take both Democrats and Republicans working 
together to get that passed.
  But we I think also tonight have documented that the policy from this 
point, 1993, when he took office, to 1995, did not work. It was a 
failed policy. The results are dramatic. Since 1992 drug use among 
teens has skyrocketed, the latest statistics indicate by 70 percent. 
Half of the high school seniors in a recent survey think it is easy to 
obtain cocaine and LSD; and now eighth graders, where drug use has 
increased by 150 percent since 1992. These are the latest statistics. 
One in four high school seniors is a current user of illegal drugs.
  This has had a dramatic impact on our young people. If we took out 
the areas of tough enforcement such as Mr. Giuliani in New York, and 
some of the other areas where some tough enforcement and prosecution 
and zero tolerance has taken place, we can see that we still have a 
very dramatic problem with tremendous cost to the taxpayers of this 
Nation, not to mention the insecurity of individuals who fear going 
from their car to the supermarket, from their community, from street to 
street at night, or even in the daylight being accosted by someone who 
is on drugs.

                              {time}  2245

  Or the loss in our community just within the last 24 hours, as I left 
one of the communities, Oviedo, where a young woman was found dead, 21 
years old, who worked in a local bank, either of an overdose of cocaine 
or heroin, just again within the last 24 hours in my community.
  The incident we had in my community and the college reunion 
festivities over the weekend in Daytona Beach, the young man from 
Orlando who attacked the police with a gun was a habitual drug user and 
had a record of cocaine use.
  Almost every incident of crime, of social problem that we see today 
is drug related, so we are committed to launch this campaign this week. 
We have not just spoken in the past 36 months but also acted in putting 
back together the pieces of an effective multifaceted war on drugs. You 
can call it whatever you want, but it is going to be indeed a national 
effort.
  We beg the administration to get the resources to Colombia, to other 
programs that are effective, to treatment programs that work. We are 
not against treatment, but when you have them come before our committee 
and testify, folks testify that these are failed programs, and then you 
learn that sometimes the religious or faith-based programs are the most 
effective, or the private sector, non-Federally or publicly funded 
programs are most effective, you begin to wonder. We have been spending 
more and more in treating these wounded.
  So today we take up arms, and this week I know I will be joined by 
everyone on this side of the aisle, and I know we will have many from 
the other side of the aisle, to make a meaningful effort to turn around 
this situation in our country, and again the dramatic cost to young 
people and citizens of every age, race, and color across our Nation.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) again 
for his leadership in taking time tonight. I know he and I would rather 
be with our families at home, but this is such an important issue. It 
is not to be made light of.
  It will not be on the front page of tomorrow's paper, except it will 
be there in the obituary page and the page of abuse, the page of 
murders and crimes in our community, and the social costs and 
disruption to each of our communities throughout this land. So that is 
part of our agenda. It is part of our program. I thank the gentleman 
for his leadership.

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