[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 144 (Thursday, October 21, 1999)]
[House]
[Pages H10719-H10722]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  2320
                           ILLEGAL NARCOTICS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tancredo). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) is 
recognized for half the time until midnight as the designee of the 
majority leader.
  Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor late tonight to talk about 
a subject I often talk about, normally on Tuesday nights in a special 
order, but did not get that opportunity this week, so I am here tonight 
to talk about what I consider to be one of the most important social 
problems facing not only the Congress but the American people in almost 
every community and almost every family across our land, and that is 
the problem of illegal narcotics.
  In the House of Representatives, I have the honor and privilege of 
chairing the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human 
Resources of the Committee on Government Reform. And in that 
subcommittee we have done our best to try to bring together every 
possible resource of the Congress and of the American government in an 
effort to combat illegal narcotics.
  The ravages of illegal narcotics and its impact on our population I 
have spoken to many times on the floor of the House. I just mentioned 
last week that we now exceed 15,200 individuals who died last year, in 
1998, from dug-induced deaths. This is up some nearly 8 percent over 
the previous year.
  I have also talked on the floor of the House of Representatives and 
to my colleagues about some of the policies that were passed by the 
Clinton administration in 1993, when they controlled both the House of 
Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, all three bodies, and 
fairly large voting margins in the House of Representatives. So, 
basically, they could do whatever they wanted to do. Unfortunately, as 
is now history, they took a wrong turn in the effort to combat illegal 
narcotics.
  They began by closing down the drug czar's office from some nearly 
120 employees in that office to about two dozen employees in that 
office. They dismissed nearly all of the drug czar's staff. With the 
Republican Congress, and through the efforts of the former chairman of 
the oversight committee of drug policy, the gentleman from Illinois 
(Mr. Hastert), who is now Speaker of the House of Representatives, we 
have restored those cuts. We have manpower now in that office of nearly 
150 individuals under the supervision of our drug czar, General Barry 
McCaffrey.
  Under the Clinton administration, the source country programs to stop 
illegal narcotics at their source were stopped in 1993. They were 
slashed some 50 percent plus. This took the military out of the 
interdiction effort, which closed down much of the interdiction effort 
and having the Coast Guard work to secure some of our borders and our 
maritime areas. Those efforts were dramatically slashed. And, 
additionally, other cuts were made.
  Changes in policy were made that were quite dramatic. The surgeon 
general, chief health officer of the United States, appointed by the 
President, was then Joycelyn Elders, and that individual sent the wrong 
message: Just say maybe. So we had the highest leadership in the land 
and we had the highest health officer developing a different policy, a 
policy that really failed us.
  I have some dramatic charts here tonight that show exactly what 
happened. I had our subcommittee staff put these together to show the 
long-term trend and lifetime prevalence of drug use. We can see during 
the Reagan and Bush administration that the long-term trend in lifetime 
drug use was on a decline. And I have talked about this and sort of 
illustrated it by hand, but we have graphically detailed this from 
1980, when President Reagan took office, on down to where President 
Clinton took office. I do not think there is anything that I have shown 
on the floor that can more dramatically illustrate the direct effects 
of that change in policy. And that policy, as we can see, had illegal 
narcotics going up.
  What is interesting is we see a slight change here, and that is after 
the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and the 
United States Senate and started to put, as I say, Humpty Dumpty back 
together again. Because we basically had no drug war here. If we want 
to call it a drug war, we have actually almost doubled the amount of 
money for treatment.
  Now, just putting money on treatment of those afflicted by illegal 
narcotics, not having the equipment, the resources, the interdiction, 
the source country programs, is like conducting a war and just treating 
the wounded. Someone told me it is sort of like having a MASH unit and 
not giving the soldiers any ammunition or the ability to fight or 
conduct the war. And this is so dramatically revealed in this chart.
  What is interesting, if we look at some other charts of specific 
narcotics, we see sort of a steady up-and-down trend, and a good trend 
down during the Bush administration in the long-term, lifetime 
prevalence in the use of heroin. In the Clinton administration, it 
practically shoots off the chart. And again, when we restarted our war 
on drugs, through the leadership of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. 
Hastert), who chaired the subcommittee with this responsibility before 
me, and in this Republican-controlled Congress, there was a renewed 
emphasis, a change in policy, employing a multifaceted approach which 
again began attacking drugs at their source, again employing 
interdiction, again trying to utilize every resource that we have in 
this effort. And it is a national responsibility to stop illegal 
narcotics at their source. And now here we see graphically displayed 
what has happened with heroin use.

  What is absolutely startling is that some of this usage in this area, 
these dramatic increases, we had an 875 percent increase in teen use of 
heroin in that period of time that we see here with the Clinton 
administration. Eight hundred seventy-five percent. And we are 
experiencing dozens and dozens of deaths in my central Florida 
community from this heroin, because it is not the same heroin that was 
on the streets in the 1980s or the 1970s that had a purity of 6 and 7 
percent. This is 80 and 90 percent pure. These young people take it and 
they die. And there are more and more of them using it.
  But we have managed to begin to turn this around through the efforts, 
again, of a Republican-led Congress. And this shows, again, some 
dramatic change in usage. This is another absolutely startling chart 
that our staff has prepared. We traced the long-term trend in the 
prevalence of cocaine use. In the Reagan administration, we see here 
where we had a problem. And I remember as a staffer working with 
Senator Hawkins, who led some of the effort in the United States Senate 
back in the early 1980s, that they began the downturn. In the Bush 
administration, incredible progress was made. Back in the Clinton 
administration, we see again a rise of cocaine use and drug abuse. And 
this is basically where they closed down the war on drugs.

                              {time}  2330

  Now, what is very interesting is we are at a very important juncture 
here in the House of Representatives. We need 13 appropriations 
measures to fund the Government. And among the 13 appropriations 
measures, one of those is to fund and assist with the finance and 
operations of the District of Columbia.
  Many people do not pay much attention to this. Some of the Members 
pay little attention to this. But I think that the situation with the 
District of Columbia is very important to talk about tonight as it 
relates to changes in drug policy.
  We have to remember that one of the major issues of contention here 
between the Republican Congress and between the Democrat side of the 
aisle is a liberalization of drug policy. That manifests itself in two 
ways.
  First, there is support on the other side of the aisle for a needle 
exchange program in the District. There is also an effort here to allow 
the medical use of marijuana and liberalization of some of the 
marijuana laws here, two policies with a liberal slant.
  Now, let me say something about the liberal policies that have been 
tried. And I have used this chart before. Let me take this chart and 
put it up here.

[[Page H10720]]

 This is the policy of Baltimore which Baltimore adopted some 10 years 
ago. Baltimore has a needle exchange program. That needle exchange 
program has resulted in 1996 in 38,900, according to DEA at that time, 
drug addicts.
  So they started a needle exchange program, they lost population, and 
they gained dramatic increase in drug addiction, particularly heroin 
addiction.
  Now, this is the chart from 1996. I have a Time Magazine article from 
September 6, and it says, and this is not my quote, it is a quote from 
this article, it says one in every 10 citizens is a drug addict. And 
that is more to what the representative from Maryland in that 
particular area has told me.
  However, listen to this: Government officials dispute the last claim. 
Here is a quote, and it is not my quote. ``It is more like one in 
eight,'' says veteran City Councilwoman Rikki Spector, ``and we have 
probably lost count.''
  So a liberal policy that this House of Representatives' Democrat 
representation wants for Washington, that this President wants for 
Washington has been tried in Baltimore. This is the result.
  I also will illustrate what has taken place in New York City with the 
murder decline. In New York City, you have Mayor Rudy Giuliani who has 
adopted a zero tolerance, no-nonsense, get tough and the opposite of a 
liberal policy but a tough policy. From the 2000 mark, they are down to 
the 600 level. In other words, in Baltimore, Baltimore in 1997, and I 
checked the figures, had 312 murders. In 1998, they had 312 murders. No 
decline, static, and with a liberal policy.
  Here is a tough policy, and we see a dramatic decrease. It is almost 
a 70-percent decrease in murders. I think if you look at these murders 
in both of these cities you will find that they are drug and illegal 
narcotics related.
  So the question before the Congress and the question before us 
tonight is really do we adopt a liberal policy?
  Now, we have been there, and we have done that. I came to this 
Congress in 1992 and watched how with the other side controlling the 
House, the Senate, and the White House what they did. They had 40 years 
of control of this body and over policy of the District of Columbia. We 
have had a little more than 4 years. This is what we inherited. We 
inherited almost three-quarters of a billion dollar deficit that they 
were running here.
  Here are some of the statistics about what had happened in 
Washington, and I will read these from The Washington Post and some 
other articles. They are not my quotes or statements. But the facts 
are, although the District of Columbia was 19th in size among American 
cities, its full-time employee population then was 48,000. We have got 
it down to some 33,000 kicking and screaming. It was only exceeded by 
New York and Los Angeles when we inherited that responsibility.
  So we had a liberal policy which gave us one of the highest debts of 
any local government in the Nation, one of the highest number of 
employees. And the question was, was enough revenue coming in.
  D.C. also had revenues per capita of $7,289, which at that time was 
the highest in the Nation. We have managed in a little over 4 years to 
balance the budget in this budget that is being presented, that is 
being vetoed and the D.C. appropriations measure, that is being vetoed 
has been vetoed by the President.
  The debt that the average citizen had was one of the highest figures 
in the United States at $6,354. And that is what we inherited here. The 
other side is always concerned about how policies affect people. The 
Republicans inherited the District of Columbia. This is an article from 
1995 when we inherited it of the impending cutbacks at D.C. General, 
this is the hospital, make it apparently inevitable that Washington's 
own public hospital will close its trauma center. And who would be hurt 
the hardest? This article says that thousands of poor and expensive-to-
treat patients would be those who were hurt. This is what we inherited.

  Now we have gotten this in order, and the question is do we want to 
go back to those liberal policies and high-spending, high-taxing 
policies?
  Here is a great story. Talk about helping children. After 6 months in 
the District bureaucratic trenches, this is a woman who came from Guam 
and was a welfare specialist and this is quoted from 1995 in The 
Washington Post. This lady quit. Saddened and shocked, she said, by a 
foster care system so bad that it actually compounds the problems of 
neglected children and their families.
  She said she came here from Guam, she worked in Guam, and she said 
then to come here and see one of the worst situations, it is 
depressing. This is what the Republican majority inherited, and this is 
what the other side would like to go back to with again their liberal 
policies, their tax policies.
  Here is an article that I saved from 1996. ``Ghost payrolls ought to 
determine dead retirees in District getting pensions.'' Again, a system 
out of control. Again, the question of responsibility and education. 
This is what we inherited in 1995. Currently, we have 20 condemned 
boilers in the schools, 103 of 230 buses are non-operational because of 
the budget crisis. And at that time again they were spending three-
quarters of a billion over their budget.
  And very sadly, I recall and I saved this article. It says, ``With 
past due, St. Elizabeth skimps on children's meals.''
  They want to go back to those wonderful days of yesteryear when they 
controlled the District of Columbia for some 40 years. This is what 
they did for those people that they supposedly care about after taxing 
them nearly to death, running business, running population out.

                              {time}  2340

  This is a quote:
  ``Some mentally ill children at the District's St. Elizabeths 
Hospital have been fed little more than rice, jello and chicken for the 
last month after some suppliers refused to make deliveries because they 
haven't been paid.'' And they had not been paid even with running a 
supplement from the taxpayers across the United States of three-
quarters of a billion dollars running in debt.
  The housing program in the District of Columbia, again to return to 
those wonderful days of yesteryear when they controlled the House of 
Representatives, the Senate and the White House, this is 1995. 
According to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rating 
system, the District subsidized housing program achieved the lowest 
ranking of any urban public housing agency in the Nation. On a scale 
where a score below 60 places an agency in the troubled category, the 
District's rating plunged from 37 in 1991 to 19 in 1993. They ran it 
into the ground and now they want to do it again.
  What is interesting is, I had another chart here that I wanted to 
show, but I will not have time tonight. I will try to get back to it 
next Tuesday when we continue our effort to show why we should not go 
to a liberal policy on narcotics, on spending, on taxation that is 
being proposed by the other side of the aisle.
  Mr. Speaker, do I have any time remaining?
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Tancredo). There being no designee of 
the minority leader, the gentleman may proceed until midnight.
  Mr. MICA. In that case, Mr. Speaker, I would like to continue tonight 
rather than wait until next Tuesday night, again with some information 
that I think is very important.
  I talked about the situation with Baltimore and with Washington and 
the inclination of the other side of the aisle to go now to a liberal 
drug policy with needle exchange. Many people say, well, if you adopt a 
needle exchange, it will help cut down on HIV infections, it will help 
drug users. Let me just quote a program that was tried, a needle 
exchange program report that was given to our subcommittee, and tell a 
little bit about what took place with that particular needle exchange 
program which now I believe the President and the other side of the 
aisle would like to protect with the President's veto of the D.C. 
appropriations measure.
  A 1997, Vancouver study reported that when their needle exchange 
program started in 1988, HIV prevalence in IV drug addicts was only 1 
to 2 percent. It is now 23 percent.
  We see that when they started out with a needle exchange program, at 
the very beginning they only had 1 to 2 percent infection rate. Now it 
jumped to 23 percent. The study found that 40 percent of HIV-positive 
addicts had

[[Page H10721]]

lent their used syringe in the previous 6 months. So the very intent of 
not having needles being exchanged and spreading HIV was actually 
increased by giving out these free needles. Again, this is the results 
of a needle exchange program study in Vancouver in 1998.
  Additionally, the study found that 39 percent of the HIV negative 
addicts had borrowed a used syringe in the previous 6 months.
  A Montreal study showed that HIV addicts who used needle exchange 
programs were more than twice likely to become infected with HIV as HIV 
addicts who did not use the needle exchange program. That is another 
study in Montreal.
  The American Journal of Epidemiology in 1990 reported on a study that 
was entitled ``Syringe Exchange and Risk of Infection With Hepatitis B 
and C Viruses.'' In this study there was no indication of a protective 
effect of syringe exchange against HBV or HCV infection. Indeed, the 
highest incidence of infection occurred among current users in the 
needle exchange program.
  If it was not more conflicting than anything to have the 
administration, the President, veto the D.C. measure and also again the 
liberal side of the aisle here encourage and fight over adoption of a 
more liberal drug policy and a needle exchange policy, even the 
administration's own head of the Office of Drug Policy, General Barry 
McCaffrey, who is respected on both sides of the aisle has said, and 
let me quote from him, ``By handing out needles, we encourage drug use. 
Such a message would be inconsistent with the tenor of our national 
youth-oriented antidrug campaign.'' That is again a quote by General 
McCaffrey.
  So we have a choice of really going back to, as I said, the days of 
yesteryear when we had the housing programs in the District of Columbia 
in default, we had the emergency medical services and the hospitals 
closing down or not able to operate. I have cited before on the House 
floor a story that I read in the Washington Post back again with the 
other side controlling the District budget, with the other side letting 
the funding of the District budget run amuck, with the other side 
letting a liberal policy of spending and taxation prevail in the 
District, I cited this report in the Washington Post where in fact it 
was said by a reporter that at that time you could dial 911 for 
emergency services or you could dial for a pizza to be delivered and 
you would get the pizza sometimes quicker than you could get the 
emergency medical services.

  Again, the other side had 40 years to run this body and also to 
oversee the operations under the Constitution, and it is a specific 
constitutional mandate that the Congress do conduct oversight and is 
responsible for the District of Columbia. The question again before us 
is whether we want to return to the liberal policies and the failed 
policies of the past.
  In addition to some of the areas that I cited that we inherited in 
the District for responsibility were also the prisons. The other side 
spent a fortune on the prisons. We ended up with inheriting a prison 
system that was basically out of control. In fact, it was so bad we 
basically had to close down the Lorton prison. The prisoners had taken 
over the prison.
  Another story that was reported here in the Washington Post was the 
water system. Sometimes you could not drink the water in the District 
and basically the system was broken down and had to be renovated. The 
District office building, which was the seat of government, basically 
looked like a third world country capital headquarters. Air 
conditioners were falling out of the windows. I ask anyone to drive by 
the District office building now and see the refurbishing that is going 
on. It would make you very proud of the District of Columbia. That 
again is something we have been able to do in a little over 4 years, 
and they let go into default in some 40 years of their stewardship.
  So do we want to return to that time of high spending, high taxes, of 
liberal policies? When I came to the District of Columbia some 7 years 
ago, the murder rate and most of the murders here are black-on-black 
murders and young males between the ages of 14 and 40, and we still 
have horrendous deaths here, but even in the District of Columbia 
through oversight of this new Republican majority, I think we have been 
able to bring down some of those deaths, to straighten out the law 
enforcement activities in the District which also were hurt 
tremendously by the liberal policies of spending and taxation that 
almost ruined our Nation's capital.
  So we had a capital that was hemorrhaging, a capital that indeed had 
so many problems, I could probably spend the rest of the night citing 
article after article about the waste and abuse that we inherited here.

                              {time}  2350

  Again we are at a critical juncture in this appropriations process. 
The question is: Do we return again to those spending tendencies, and 
just because they spent more did not mean people got less. You heard 
what happened to the critically ill, you heard what happened to those 
children who were cares and wards of the city and the District of 
Columbia, you heard those who relied on public housing had a defunct 
public housing, the water system, the prison system.
  So this is a real challenge, and it really magnifies what is going on 
with the rest of these appropriations bills, whether it is education 
that we discussed here today. Education system, and again in Washington 
they were spending more per capita and their students were performing 
at lower levels. Spend more; get a lower result, and regulate and 
administer in a very expensive fashion.
  That is similar to some of the conflict that we face in these 
spending and appropriation bills. I call it the RAD approach, Regulate, 
Administer and Dictate, and that is what has happened in Washington, 
and that is what we are trying to fight as we try to pass 13 
appropriations measures.
  The real easy thing for the new majority, although we took a 
tremendous amount of guff for it, and people called us names and said 
that the sliced bread, as we know it, would no longer exist, and 
accused of all kind of things. We did bring our Nation's finances into 
order just as we brought the District of Columbia's finances into 
order, and it was a fairly simple thing. What you do is limit your 
expenditures. We did not have huge increases in these programs. Just 
like I cited the District of Columbia, we did not have huge increases. 
We moderated the increases. We were able to balance the budget.
  Sometimes I think that was the easy part, even though we got a lot of 
grief for it.
  The tough part is now in trying to take these programs like education 
that we have brought power and authority and programs to Washington so 
that a teacher cannot teach, so that there is not authority at the 
local level, so that there is not discipline in the classroom, so that 
the emphasis, again, is on creating regulations from Washington, 
administering from Washington and keeping the power in Washington as 
opposed to out there.
  So now we are engaged, and even today we have been spending 
incredible amounts of money for young people and their education, and 
yet they have not performed well, and particularly those young people 
who are the most disadvantaged in our society and our schools and 
communities. So, programs like title I that are so important, we need 
to revisit; Head Start programs, we need to revisit; not eliminate, not 
destroy, not cut out, but make them work so that every dollar is 
effectively applied and that those young people have the best 
opportunity ever.
  So this is what the debate is about, 13 appropriations measures. The 
President has vetoed the District bill and several other bills. He is 
holding several bills hostage. We have passed several this afternoon. 
We passed an Interior appropriations measure, and we must fund the 
government.
  The hard work, as I said, is taking each of these programs together, 
whether it is Department of Interior, Education, Commerce, defense 
bills and making them work. My responsibility is a small 
responsibility, and that is trying to take the drug war that was closed 
down in 1993 by the Clinton administration, the drug policy which 
destroyed our ability to stop drugs cost effectively at their source or 
interdict them before they got to their borders. Once they get past our 
borders, it becomes almost an impossible task for our law enforcement, 
local communities and families to deal with that.

[[Page H10722]]

  So we have seen an incredible increase in the supply of hard 
narcotics coming in with our guard let down with a doubling, in fact, 
of the money on treatment, and I have no problem with spending two or 
three times what we are spending on treatment as long as it is 
effective. But it must also be part of a multi-faceted program, a 
program of interdiction, eradication at source countries, a strong 
program of enforcement.
  As I cited, the New York experience, zero tolerance does work. The 
liberal policy they tried in Baltimore and some other communities does 
not work. We could take Los Angeles and other communities that have had 
tough crack-down policies, and these figures and statistics from zero 
tolerance and tough enforcement are so dramatic they have affected our 
national crime rate.
  And then of course education, and under the leadership of the 
gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) who chaired this responsibility 
before me we initiated and launched the largest effort, a media 
campaign effort, ever by, I think, any government in probably the 
history of America or any government in getting an anti-narcotics 
message, a billion-dollars campaign over 5 years. We are now a little 
over a year into it. Last week our subcommittee held a hearing on where 
we are, how that money has been spent, is it being spent effectively.

  So that is another part of this puzzle that we need to put back 
together, a part that really was not even there even in the Bush and 
Reagan administration and even through the Clinton administration. That 
money, that billion dollars we put up in taxpayer money, is matched by 
an equal or an amount in excess of that Federal contribution by a 
donation, so we think we are seeing again, and I will be glad to put 
the charts up again, see the beginning of a downturn. But it takes all 
of those efforts, not closing down the War on Drugs, and there was not 
a War on Drugs after 1993 to 1995, and it has taken us several years to 
get that back on track, to put, as I say Humpty Dumpty back together 
again.
  So we have learned some lessons. Liberal policies, they just do not 
work.
  The District is a very, a very, very exact case, and we can cite it 
agency after agency. We look at our federal bureaucracy, and we have 
the same thing, big spending, spend more get less. That is not the 
answer. But we need to make these programs less. If we need to spend 
more, I do not think there are folks here on our side of the aisle that 
would not adequately fund programs, but we want to see results. We do 
not want to return to a destroyed District of Columbia with the high 
spending, with the high taxes, with the agency after agency defunct 
with people who need help and people who need government to work, have 
it actually work against them, as it did here in the District of 
Columbia and now does in some programs which we have not been able to 
change because of opposition, because of name calling and trying to 
hold on to the vestiges of the liberal past policies that do not work.
  So tonight is not a full hour, and we will return next week with more 
information about our efforts to get our drug policy back on track and 
to make some of these programs work, but we certainly will stay here, 
will endure vetoes by the President and slings and arrows from the 
other side, but we are going to make these things work, and we are 
going to make them work effectively and stay on track even though it is 
a difficult path.
  So, with those comments, Mr. Speaker, and almost at the appointed 
hour of recess I am pleased to yield back.

                          ____________________