[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 64 (Thursday, May 1, 2003)]
[House]
[Pages H3627-H3632]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      ILLEGAL NARCOTICS PROBLEM IN THE UNITED STATES AND THE WORLD

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, tonight I would like to focus on the illegal 
narcotics problem in the United States, as well as a little bit around 
the world.
  We have several legislative initiatives that are about to come in 
front of this Congress, including one moving through my subcommittee, 
the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources 
of the Committee on Government Reform, which is the Office of National 
Drug Control Policy reauthorization bill. The ONDC Director, commonly 
known as the Drug Czar of the United States, is John Walters. This bill 
will reauthorize for 5 years the entire oversight of the narcotics 
programs of the United States.
  In addition, in our emergency terrorism bill, we had money for 
Colombia. We will have in a number of appropriations bills in front of 
us money for the Andean region and other international narcotics 
control programs.
  So I thought tonight would be a good time to start with my colleagues 
and staff and others who are watching this discussion, laying out a 
little bit of the big picture on what we are tackling, mostly focusing 
tonight on the international drug problem, some on our domestic and 
some oversight, and then as we move into the markup in the next few 
weeks in subcommittee and full committee on this House floor, we will 
be spending a lot more time discussing the millions, and, in fact, 
billions of dollars that we spend fighting illegal narcotics.
  First, it is very important to understand that while tonight we are 
going to be talking about a lot of international concerns, this is 
directly a concern that hits every Congressional district. In every 
city and town, no matter how small or large, drug and alcohol problems 
in America account for, depending on the judge or prosecutor, 70 to 85 
percent of all crime in America. Not just drug crime, this counts 
robberies, this counts rapes. This even counts child support payment 
problems, because often the people not making their child support 
payments, the people declaring bankruptcy, are having problems with 
drug and alcohol addiction.
  The use of illegal narcotics have gone up and down in our country. We 
will never eliminate them. It is a false goal to say we will eliminate 
the use of illegal drugs in the United States. There will always be, 
every day, new kids exposed in junior high, elementary school and high 
school. Somebody will lose a job. Somebody will have a problem in their 
marriage, and they will look for a way out. Rather than confronting 
their problem directly, they will look for a way out. So every day 
hundreds of thousands of people are exposed for the first time to the 
temptations of illegal narcotics.
  Furthermore, where there is a market, there will be a demand meeting 
that market, and we will never completely stop this. We have some 
people in this body and others who say well, if we cannot eliminate it, 
why are we spending all this money on it?
  I would ask the same question about child abuse. I would ask the same 
question about spouse abuse. I would ask the same question about rape. 
I would ask the same question about breast cancer and about other types 
of disease, heart disease and others.
  We do it because we need to keep tackling it. We need to make as much 
progress as we can. Particularly for those things that are controllable 
by individuals, such as rape, spouse abuse, child abuse, narcotics 
abuse and other things, we need to stay on top of it so the problems do 
not get bigger.
  It may be that that all we can do is hold it even, and sometimes we 
will make progress. There has been a lot of misinformation in the 
United States that we have not made progress on drug abuse. In fact, 
drug abuse in the United States is way down compared to at the peak 
point when former President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan 
said ``just say no.'' We constantly hear ``just say no'' being mocked, 
but ``just say no'' was the centerpiece of an aggressive program in 
interdiction, enforcement, treatment and prevention, that in the 1980s 
had a dramatic reduction.
  After the late sixties, where I went to college and early seventies, 
where you saw an overwhelming majority of kids on the college campuses 
using marijuana, at least, and Ecstasy and LSD and all these 
psychedelic drugs, by Timothy Leary and all the romancing of it in the 
'70s.
  In the '80s we made tremendous progress. In the '90s we were making 
some progress, and it started to level off. From 1992 to 1994 we saw a 
surge in drug use in the United States that would now, in those 2 
years, require us to have a 50 percent reduction to get back to where 
we were when the former President took office.
  Now, that was still a lower point than when the Reagans took over in 
1980 and made 10 years of steady progress. The bottom line is it is 
wrong to say we have not made progress, it is wrong to say that you 
cannot make progress, and there are points in our American history 
where relaxed government policies, of joking about inhaling, cutting 
back drug interdiction, you see it soar, and we have to recover again.
  But the trend line over a long period has actually been down, and you 
would never guess that from all the people who say that there is no 
hope in this battle. There is hope, but we will never completely win.
  Right now, we have a goal annually, according to President Bush, to 
reduce this by 5 percent a year. To do that, we have to stay aggressive 
in all fronts and be vigilant in all parts of the war on narcotics, 
because even that said, we have tens of thousands of people killed 
every year by the abuse of drug and alcohol.
  To give an example of proportion, the World Trade Center disaster, 
which was absolutely terrible, was around 3,000. In illegal narcotics, 
it is somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 a year, depending on how you 
want to count it.
  In my hometown, we see it on a weekly basis practically of a murder, 
or an accident, or some type of drug-related death, either through 
murder or through somebody in the highways. Often they get attributed 
to alcohol. It is usually poly-drug use, marijuana, LSD. Most police 
departments do not test for Ecstasy or LSD after an accident, and often 
the people involved have done that. We have had cases of young kids 
high on multiple different drugs hitting a car. One killed a senior, 
rolled through the interstate, killed another person. The person high 
on drugs actually lived through it.
  We have had a really visible case in my hometown of Fort Wayne, 
Indiana, where the conflict got so great that one of the kids, one of 
the little gang groups, basically took another young person to a field 
in a rural area and burned them, in effect, at the stake. As one of the 
other kids at school threatened to bring that up, they took her up and 
burned her as well. One defended themselves by saying they had a gun at 
their head and they had to light the match.
  This is what people who are whacked out on narcotics will start to do 
to each other. We see this corruption in every community in America, 
big or small, and we have to stay vigilant and aggressive.
  Now, let me lay out a little bit of the challenge we are facing. The 
number one entry level, if you are an underage person, it is a 
combination usually of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana. You start 
hanging around with kids who abuse those drugs. They are all illegal, 
and you get in an illegal cluster, and sooner or later somebody is 
going to expose you to marijuana. The gateway to all other narcotics is 
marijuana.

[[Page H3628]]

  Furthermore, we have a terrible misnomer in the United States that 
marijuana would be forms of what we called historically in Indiana 
``ditch weed.'' Some areas might compare it to hemp, where you are 
looking at THC contents of about 8 percent.
  The new marijuana that is on the streets today is not what your 
``parents smoked,'' if they did. It is THC contents from 15 to 28 
percent. In my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, BC Bud, one of these 
high form things coming in from Canada, marijuana, and other high grade 
marijuana, as well as in New York and Boston, sells for the same as 
cocaine, because its kick and danger to the body, this marijuana, is 
the same as cocaine and heroin.
  It is ridiculous for those who would downplay marijuana. There are 
wide ranges of marijuana. At the least harmful form, it still causes 
harm and long-term damage to the body worst than alcohol or tobacco, if 
you use it regularly. But in the high grades it is more like cocaine 
and heroin. It is not a harmless substance. That is our number one 
problem. Number two is cocaine, number three is heroin.
  We hear most about meth, because it is the newest, and it is out in 
the rural areas in particular. So there are many Members of this body 
involved in the Meth Caucus because it is the newest challenge to those 
communities.
  But the fact is that methamphetamines are not as much of a national 
threat at this point as cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It is just our 
fastest growth category, and in my district, as well as elsewhere, we 
are really going after methamphetamine.
  Ecstasy is another synthetic drug that has been at the rave clubs. It 
kind of goes up and down in fads as do other psychedelic drugs, and it 
will probably come and go, depending on the awareness of people about 
it, but there will be replacements in these dance clubs and other 
places where kids are exposed to the dangers of those.
  Now, for cocaine and heroin in particular, there are two major source 
areas, and for marijuana as well. The two major source areas are the 
Andean nations, which would be Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, edges 
of Venezuela and Brazil, and Mexico. There are other primary source 
countries, but those are the biggest areas, the Andean region and 
Mexico.
  The other areas would include Southeast Asia for heroin, Afghanistan 
where it was the predominant way that al Qaeda was funded, and the so-
called Golden Triangle, a triangle area around Burma, Thailand and 
China, less so there, and most of those narcotics are moving to Europe, 
only about 25 percent to the United States, to our West Coast. But it 
is a direct threat.
  Afghanistan is one we have kind of turned the other way on, and, 
unfortunately, they are replanting the poppy, and because we do not at 
this point directly going to al Qaeda, we have not been aggressive 
enough.
  Quite frankly, we need to be aggressive with the Northern Alliance 
and our allies in the Afghan War, not just on those who fought us 
through the terrorists. It may not anymore be directly funding the 
terrorists, we are still watching that closely, the Afghan heroin, 
clearly other times of narcotics are, but we still have to get control 
of that heroin production in Afghanistan or it is going to flow through 
the entire world.
  We also have Canada that is a major supplier of this high grade 
marijuana, and also almost all of the precursor chemicals coming in 
seem to be coming in through Canada right now.
  Now, in all fairness to Canada, we are their big exporter. Often this 
BC Bud, Quebec Gold, meth precursors are coming into the United States 
in return for cocaine and heroin flowing through the United States. So 
we are also a drug exporter, and we are the biggest to Canada. So that 
border is more or less a swap border. Sometimes they trade marijuana 
for guns.
  The Netherlands has become the world center of transporting meth 
precursors, as well as Ecstasy, and it is a major drug center for 
synthetic drugs. We also grow a lot of marijuana and manufacture meth 
domestically, so we are also a primary source country as well as a 
primary user, although we do not ship, other than to Canada, in most 
cases, drugs out.
  There are many other transit countries. The Bahama islands are a 
major way that the drugs come up through the Andean region or even 
Mexico, but mostly through the Andean region. Some of what comes from 
South America bounces over to Spain, to Madrid, and then bounces back 
into its United States. We see it come also through Vietnam and places 
in Southeast Asia that are transit areas.

                              {time}  1645

  But let me look at now some more particulars. This map is a map of 
Colombia. To orient, the United States is further north, central 
America comes down, Panama connects to Colombia. Panama years ago was 
part of Colombia. It was separated by Teddy Roosevelt so we could build 
a canal there. It is in the northwest corner of South America. It is a 
beautiful country. It is the oldest democracy in South America. It is 
mountainous for most of its region, and the Andes start to move up to 
20,000 feet down in this region.
  Coca grows in the Andean region because you are near the Amazon, the 
center of the equator; the equator runs somewhere about right in here. 
So you have damp areas, warm areas that you can grow year-round, and 
yet you have some mountainous zones where you can get a little bit, not 
completely wet, but still have plenty of water. In addition, you can 
have access to the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean.
  Furthermore, in this area, heroin poppy grows best at about 12,000 
feet, between 8,000 and 12,000 feet, which is why you see it over in 
Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and why you see it in the Andean region, 
because these are the places that have been best in the world to grow 
high-grade coca and heroin poppy.
  Colombia is the oldest democracy, and has produced many products that 
we in the United States use. They are our biggest supplier of flowers. 
Approximately 70 percent of all U.S. flowers that you buy come from 
Colombia. Historically, coffee is what you think of. You think of 
Colombian emeralds. They were our eighth largest supplier or sixth 
largest supplier of oil until the pipeline came under attack by the 
narcotics and terrorist groups in Colombia. Now they are net even, but 
they were one of our primary suppliers of oil. They also export many 
other products to us. Textiles, all sorts of other types of things.
  Their democracy has been steadily undermined by American drug use 
and, to a lesser degree, European drug use. They have had 30,000 police 
officers killed in Colombia. They have had constant terrorist attacks. 
The current President of Colombia who was here yesterday and today and 
we met with him this afternoon, his father was assassinated by the 
narcoterrorists years ago. They have made multiple attempts on his 
life, including when I was at his inauguration, the FARC launched from 
a Howitzer shells at the building where we were, blew off the corner of 
the presidential palace during the inauguration. For those of my 
colleagues who may have read Tom Clancy's book ``Clear and Present 
Danger'' or seen the movie, I asked former Ambassador Busby whether the 
movie was fairly accurate; and he said, mostly, although I did not die 
like in the movie.
  The fact is that they shot and murdered a big percentage of their 
supreme court. They kill mayors, they kidnap, and they are doing it 
because of our drug abuse. This was not because they were using the 
narcotics. It is because we were using the narcotics, providing 
billions of dollars with which to arm the FARC, in particular, as well 
as other groups that are providing protection.
  Now, in Colombia, President Uribe has made fairly dramatic changes 
and gone aggressively after the coca and heroin production. I would 
like a few of these things to be put in the Record, because we had a 
fairly close vote in this House on assistance to Colombia because 
President Uribe is heavily under attack, he is trying to be aggressive, 
and lots of misinformation was distributed here about the 
ineffectiveness of what was happening.
  Now, here are a couple of key statistics. Terrorist attacks have 
increased in Colombia if you flatten the line, but they have in fact 
gone up and down. And basically they go up when you squeeze the coca 
and the heroin. So when we read in our newspapers, as there was 
yesterday and a few weeks

[[Page H3629]]

ago, as we had a few Americans kidnapped a month or so, 2 months ago, 
that when we read that, we need to understand that those incidents are 
increasing when we are successfully pressing on the coca and the 
heroin.
  But, even with that, this government, President Uribe's government in 
Colombia has increased, almost doubled, the efforts to go after the 
illegal self-defense groups and so-called paramilitaries; they have 
gone aggressively after the subversive groups, increasing, in both of 
those cases, almost doubling the efforts of going after these terrorist 
groups. They have been so aggressive that while it seems like in the 
United States that we are reading more about Colombia because we have 
put money down there, the plain truth of the matter is that since 
President Uribe started these attacks, though some of them are now 
getting more publicity because they are in Bogota or they are trying to 
go after Americans to try to get us to be squeamish, just like they 
initially tried to do with the attacks in Iraq, by trying not to win a 
war, but trying to back up the American people so we give up rather 
than going on through, these attacks have actually been dramatically 
reduced under President Uribe.

  Whether it be kidnapping of mayors, they are down; whether it is 
kidnappings of people are down, the number of attacks on bridges are 
down, the number of attacks on schools are down, because they have a 
President who is being more aggressive and successful. But because of 
where they are doing some of them, because our attention is up, it 
seems like it is not working in Colombia when in fact it is working in 
Colombia.
  Let me give an example. One of the business groups from Colombia that 
was in my office when they were there and they had, a few years ago, 
under former President Pastrana when we had a so-called temporary peace 
agreement, they were there and the phone rang and one of them took it 
and at the school where many of their kids were, a pregnant mom and her 
daughter had just been trapped on a bridge and kidnapped; and they were 
each trying to check to see whether it was their family. This happens 
all the time.
  Gabriel Garcia Marques' book, ``Diary of a Kidnapper,'' talks about 
this particular phenomenon that has just gone rampant in Colombia. But 
the fact is that as we have a president there and a government 
committed to going after this, they have actually reduced the number of 
incidents. The question is, will we in the United States Congress have 
the courage to continue this pressure, or can they, through public 
relations and high-profile attacks, convince the American people that 
we are actually losing in Colombia when we are actually winning the 
battle in Colombia?
  Furthermore, we have had the most dramatic reduction in coca that we 
have ever seen in Colombia. I have been down to Colombia seven times or 
nine times, I lose track. I got elected in 1994; I have been there at 
least once a year ever since then and sometimes twice, particularly the 
last few years as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, 
Drug Policy, and Human Resources.
  What we see in Colombia is a case like happened in Bolivia and Peru 
where often we will eradicate one time the coca crop, but we will not 
stay focused, and because they can grow year around, they come back in 
with it. What President Uribe has done is he has basically hit these 
areas three times. Now, you can imagine if you are a farmer, think of 
it in terms like in the Midwest and Indiana and elsewhere, I am from 
Indiana, we have soybeans and corn. And if we hit that three times, 
obviously, the corn growers and the soybean growers would not be happy. 
They are used to being hit maybe once and going back to a very 
profitable crop.
  Just like kids on our street corners can make $400 as a lookout, but 
only, say, $6 at McDonald's, so they would rather be a lookout if there 
is not a punishment. But if you arrest them, if they are afraid they 
are going to get shot, if there is a penalty for being the $400 
lookout, then maybe the $6 at McDonald's is not such a bad deal. You 
can work your way up and maybe someday get $20. You are never going to 
get $400 an hour most likely, but you are also not going to kill people 
with the illegal narcotics.
  Well, if there was not any pressure on the people growing it on a 
steady basis, like they sometimes grew palm heart or pineapples, and 
then you would see underneath it the coca hiding in the fields. Well, 
President Uribe has gone aggressively after it. His own wife and two 
sons at the inauguration afterwards, after they attacked the palace, 
they were panicked. They know that there is a good chance that their 
husband is going to be killed, or that they are going to be killed. 
They talked about coming to the United States and he said, no, we are 
going to stay here. We are going to go after these illegal drugs. The 
problem is the United States' problem, but we are going to go after 
them, because it is wrecking our country too.
  When somebody shows that courage, we need to show the courage in this 
Congress to stand behind them. There are some Members in this body who 
have gone to towns in Colombia and seen the terror. It is unbelievable. 
First one group comes through that is the leftist narcogroup, and they 
kill anybody who is not willing to help them. Then, groups that are 
often contracted initially to try to stop that group will come through 
and kill anybody who takes the other side. Pretty soon the group that 
was supposed to be providing the protection gets into narcotrafficking 
too, then they fight over who gets to have the little village. Several 
of my colleagues have visited those villages even this year, and there 
are several that are still overrun.
  But here are the facts. Since President Uribe has taken over in 
Colombia, they have reestablished control over most of the country. The 
glass is not full; the glass is half full. It is not emptying out, 
however; it is filling up, and we are making progress. Now is not the 
time to turn and run. Now is the time to back up the bold people in 
Colombia and our advisors down there and say, we are going to go after 
the illegal narcotics that are killing 30,000 Americans a year, and the 
biggest pressure point is Colombia. It used to be in the region. In the 
region, Colombia used to be only 30 percent. But as Bolivia went after 
it and as Peru went after it, it moved to Colombia. Now, if we can take 
out Colombia, there is going to be some seepage back.

  Earlier this morning I met with a number of members of the Peruvian 
Parliament, as well as their military navy and army and talked about 
their worry about spillover. If we are successful in Colombia, will the 
coca and heroin production move to Peru? Possibly. Possibly to Ecuador. 
Possibly back to Bolivia where the Cocaleros are fighting really hard 
and destabilizing the government of Bolivia. But it looks like a lot of 
it is moving to Venezuela on the north border, because President Chavez 
has been a weak President. He has been flirting most of the time with 
Castro, does not have the same commitment to help the United States and 
to go after terrorists in that nation. They are the biggest trading 
partner with Colombia. It is right up here on the north border. We have 
a huge stake in this.
  This area right here is the biggest oil provider to the United States 
or was until Chavez could not keep it flowing. If you go to a Citgo 
station in the United States, not that long ago, Venezuela was running 
ads in all of our papers saying we own the Citgo stations. So it was at 
that point about 12 percent of the U.S. market. To give you an idea, 
Alaska may be 3, Kuwait may be 2 or 3. Venezuela, in this area of 
Colombia, has one of the richest oil fields in the world. We cannot let 
that area be controlled by narcotrafficking. Plus straight to the north 
you move towards Florida and the Caribbean Sea as far as the transit 
area into the United States. We have to maintain control in Venezuela 
and Suriname. And then, in the western side of Brazil where the Amazon 
basin is, you have mostly jungle, and it is very difficult.
  So if we squeeze in Colombia, some of it is going to move in that 
direction, and some is going to move in that direction, and some is 
going to move in that direction. So that is why we have an Andean 
strategy. But the primary focus is Colombia because they are people who 
have the labs that process it. And it is easiest and the cocaine comes 
into the United States cheapest and purest if it comes out of Colombia. 
If

[[Page H3630]]

we scatter them, at least we will get the prices up and the purity 
down.
  I next want to move to the Caribbean Sea. As it comes out of the 
Andean region, it can move several ways. About a third moves through 
the Caribbean Sea, about two-thirds through Mexico. And when it comes 
into the Caribbean out of Colombia down here, it moves up; and the 
biggest vulnerability we have are all of these Bahamian islands. There 
are a thousand islands. They can pick which island they want to come in 
on. By the way, everything I say today about narcotics and narcotics 
terrorists are also true about Islamic or any kind of terrorists; IRA, 
anybody who wants to hit us. Because if we cannot find a drug person 
coming in, we also cannot find an al Qaeda person coming in. If we 
cannot find an illegal immigrant coming across the Mexican border, we 
also cannot find an al Qaeda person coming across the Mexican border. 
It is one and the same.
  So when we are talking about illegal narcotics and we are talking 
about terrorism, we are not only talking about the primary way 
terrorists are funded, we are talking about how they get into our 
country. And while we do not talk about specific incidents, let us just 
say we have been intercepting them coming in the south and the Mexican 
border as well as the primary method which would be the Canadian border 
or our airports. But as they come through, you have major points. 
Dominican Republic. They have huge networks of Dominicans in the United 
States where they can hide among. Most Dominicans would not be involved 
in drug trafficking; but where there are big communities, a few people 
can get involved with that. Similar with Jamaican communities, and 
similar with Puerto Rican communities.

                              {time}  1700

  So in certain areas, for example Jamaica is the primary transit to 
England. In this sea of islands, some are very small. Some are Dutch, 
French, Spanish, Portuguese. Most of those countries are part of the 
European Common Market.
  What Libya, for example, has figured out is that if they move people 
into these islands, in a period of years they become citizens of those 
islands. When we look at their visas to try to see if they are part of 
a terrorist-supporting nation, such as Libya, they do not show up as 
Libyan; they show up as European.
  For example, Curacao is Dutch. If they can get citizenship on a Dutch 
island and get European citizenship, we do not flag them in our system 
as Libyan; they are going to look like they are Dutch. It is a 
vulnerability on the south that we are going to have to figure out in 
terrorism as well as in narcotics. But the Caribbean Sea is one of our 
vulnerabilities.
  Another, and the biggest transit point for most of the United States, 
is Mexico. Under President Vincente Fox, there has been a dramatic 
improvement in Mexico. It is still, bottom line, a mess; but a dramatic 
improvement. Their police forces are paid virtually nothing. Compared 
to the couple hundred thousand dollars they can be offered to let a 
semi load of narcotics go through, their salary is nothing. It is a 
fraction of the U.S. salary. Even U.S. salaries can be overwhelmed with 
the dollars that are being offered, so we have had an incredible 
corruption problem along the border.
  The President of Mexico, understanding that this was a tremendous 
pressure, has located additional forces there. He is aggressively 
trying to clean up the forces, but this is a huge challenge.
  Let me talk a little bit in particular about that fact that we have 
had a series of hearings on the north and south border looking at 
homeland security issues. I also now serve on the new Select Committee 
on Homeland Security. We will be holding a hearing in the Buffalo-
Niagara area in conjunction with my Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, 
Drug Policy and Human Resources, which also has oversight over the 
Justice Department and other agencies, and the new Subcommittee on 
Infrastructure and Border Security chaired by my colleague, the 
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp). We will be holding a hearing up on 
the north border.
  We have just held a hearing over here on Tohono O'odham Indian Nation 
lands in southwest Arizona, and then just during the last break we were 
down at El Paso where we had a hearing and spent about 4 days on the 
Texas border.
  Let me describe some of our challenges on this border.
  Starting with California, San Isidro by San Diego is the biggest 
human cross point. More people cross at San Isidro than anywhere else. 
It is easy to hide to some degree just because of the sheer volume of 
people. But because we have a fence there now, we have changed some of 
the dynamic. Years ago, I believe in my second or first term when I was 
down in the area east of San Diego, I saw, at about 2 in the morning, 
approximately somewhere between 800 and 1,200 people massed, ready to 
make a dash for the U.S. border.
  Their penalty if we catch them is that they are detained to see if 
they have any other violations, and then they are sent back. I learned 
they had packages for $1,500 or $2,000 where you can get guaranteed 
that in 7 days you would make it through to the United States or you 
got your money back. That sounds ridiculous, but why would you not 
start to offer those packages? Why would capitalists not start to offer 
that if there is no penalty for constantly crossing, other than if you 
have another crime?
  Now, the fact is that what I saw that night was people playing 
frizbees, eating their picnic lunches. For that package they get a 
place to sleep, two meals, and they are guaranteed to make it in 7 
days. Like I say, that was about 6 years ago.
  Over in Texas, we ran into the same thing. I think it is now $2,000 
guaranteeing the crossing in Texas. It does not always work, by the 
way. We are starting to crack down on those kinds of things. In 
particular, we are going after the people who are doing the packages. 
The fact is that those types of market things will develop.
  Unfortunately, some of the people now, because we have tightened the 
fence here and we do not see that massing, they used to mass to about 
1,200 and make a run at the five Border Patrol agents they would see, 
and most would not even get stopped.
  But as we put the fence up, as we passed more Border Patrol agents, 
we have moved it to the open lands, so at the Tohono O'odham Nation, 
west of Nogales and east of Yuma, in Arizona, in that area, west of 
Nogales and east of Yuma, we have basically sand. We have an Indian 
nation, and we have the Organ Pipe National Monument, where a ranger 
was killed in a shootout, one of the first of the rangers killed, a 
national park ranger. We have a fish and wildlife area, and we have a 
little bit of the Barry Goldwater Air Force range where they do bombing 
runs.
  Now, what happens, because we have done a better job of sealing off 
Nogales, a better job of sealing off California, we are starting to 
make some progress over in the eastern side of Arizona in Douglas. What 
we see are these people who sell these packages and others trying to 
make a run through the desert. As we drove along this border a little 
over a month ago, we could see the people huddled getting ready to make 
their late afternoon run. We could see the fences cut.
  There was one area where it was just hard for me to conceive of this 
happening. Unless Members see it with their own eyes, they may not 
believe it either. This is how bold some of the people on the border 
are. We have a barbed wire fence along the border. At one place, the 
farmer on the other side was having trouble keeping his cattle in, so 
he took the fence from our border, put it across the road that runs 
across and over on his land in Mexico.
  We have not moved the fence back to the U.S. side because in fact it 
is serving a good purpose. At least it is not getting cut this way. 
They go around the Mexican farmer, they go on the road, they have a 
clear way in, but it has detained more people on the Mexican side than 
it did on our side. But think of the boldness to actually steal the 
fence, move it, and claim it as their own property when it is a United 
States Federal Government protection border.

  It is snipped. We can see where they will make the runs in along the 
wash. One of the most popular hiking trails in Arizona is basically 
sealed off right now because so many illegals are moving through, and 
it is so violent and so

[[Page H3631]]

many drugs are moving through that area it is not safe to backpack 
there right now. You can see discarded milk cartons, the larger plastic 
containers. If they are clear, it meant they were water; if they were 
black, it meant they were narcotics for a pick-up. We see trash all 
along the border as they discard it and move.
  Also, the poor illegals who are coming across are often misinformed. 
They have been dumped here on the border or have been told it is just a 
couple hours' walk to Phoenix. It is a couple days' walk to Phoenix 
across desert with no water or food, and we are having tremendous human 
casualties in this area because of the misinformation of the people who 
want to take advantage of the people who are coming across.
  When we were having the hearing in the little town of Sells, Arizona, 
when Members hear about narcotics busts in their hometown, think about 
this. We are having a hearing. We have the room filled with people from 
Phoenix and Tucson. We have, in effect, gathered the Customs and Border 
Patrol, the DEA, the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, the 
local police, the State police in the town of Sells, which is a town of 
5,000 people, or maybe 10,000 at maximum. And I may have doubled their 
population at 5,000. It is a relatively some small town, capital of the 
Tohono O'odham that used to be the Papago. This Tohono O'odham capital 
had been complaining that as we squeezed other areas, drug runners were 
running through and destroying their Native American culture.
  While we were having the hearing, showing the stupidity of drug 
runners, if nothing else, they had one bust of 300 pounds, one bust of 
500 pounds, one bust of 400 pounds; and at 100 they don't even bother 
with them. Later that night, a run of seven SUVs as we were leaving 
were coming across the border. They had two Blackhawks on them and 
another helicopter chasing them. They got most of them. One shot his 
way out. They got, I think, another 500 pounds.
  To put it in perspective, think of 500 pounds, and then take that in 
one day what they managed to catch was close to, I think, 1,400. The 
previous rest of the year had been 1,500. The previous year had been 
approximately 1,500. In other words, it has gone so exponentially to 
that open area.
  We do not really know how much is coming across these borders. 
Furthermore, remember, in addition to funding the killing in narcotics, 
they are also funding primary sources for any terrorist networks. As we 
seize the assets of things like the Holy Land Foundation and other 
fronts, they move to illegal monies, child trafficking and drug 
trafficking being the two primary.
  Secondly, wherever you can move narcotics, you can move weapons of 
mass destruction or anything else. In other words, if we cannot stop 
one, what makes us think we can stop the other? That is why we need to 
be more aggressive. That is why the President created the Department of 
Homeland Security. That is why he put Border Patrol, Customs, and Coast 
Guard agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, which is really 
the Department of Border Security. It does not have FBI, CIA. It is 
predominantly to focus on the border. We have to get control of this 
border.
  The Mexican border with Texas is a huge problem, as well. Long-term, 
we are going to have to have some realistic discussions about 
immigration strategies in the United States, because every State has 
been benefiting from having many of these low-income workers come in 
and take jobs that Americans do not want to take.
  We have duck and chicken processing plants in my district; and there 
is very little English spoken there, and not very many people who speak 
English will apply there. If we go to a gas station or motel almost 
anywhere in the United States, there are not a lot of people willing to 
take those jobs, just like our ancestors as they came in as immigrants 
took those jobs. We have to figure out how we are going to accommodate 
in a reasonable way those who want to come here to work and make a 
living here, most of whom send as much as 50 percent of their income 
back not only to Mexico, but Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and other 
countries; and those who are coming in for illegal purposes to sell 
narcotics or to terrorize our Nation.
  If we cannot make that distinction between those who want to be law-
abiding but are violating the immigration laws and have some kind of 
balance here, what we are going to have is just huge holes in our 
system that will move around, and we will never have enough money to 
seal this big a border.

  Now, this is, to be blunt, nothing compared to the problem on the 
terrorism side, the northern border, where we do not even have sand to 
serve as a deterrent, or the Rio Grande River. From Glacier National 
Park in Montana to Lake of the Woods in Minnesota, we have thousands of 
miles of basically flat, open land.
  The good news is if a terrorist walks across in northwest North 
Dakota we can probably see him from about 500 miles away. The bad news 
is that that is about how far it is to the next policeman. It is a huge 
challenge in these big open spaces of the Northwest as we look how to 
control, and as the narcotraffickers and other terrorists probe to see 
where our vulnerabilities are. We are constantly changing. We have a 
lot of methods they do not see, but we have to be aggressive.
  We have intercepted, on the terrorist side, probably 125-or-so 
attempts at us since 9-11. It is because we have done a better job of 
sealing our borders. With the PATRIOT Act, we have done a better job of 
getting people who are suspects who then talk about other people and 
breaking up the networks.
  Let me give the most famous example on the Canadian border, the 
Millenium Bomber. Had he succeeded at LAX Airport, more people would 
have died than at the World Trade Center. But he was intercepted, but 
it showed us how these networks worked.
  He was in Montreal and back and forth from the United States 
apparently multiple times. We do not know how many. He is the person 
who identified some of the al Qaeda cells later, because after we 
captured him, he decided to sing; and it was not the national anthem. 
He fingered the networks of other places and other people.
  He had rented a car in Montreal, drove across all of Canada over to 
the West to Vancouver, then took a ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, 
then took another ferry in the late afternoon to Port Angeles, a small 
city in northwest Washington State right outside of Olympic Park.
  There Deanna Dean and the other Customs agents detained him. They 
thought he seemed nervous so they asked him a few questions. When they 
sealed his car, he decided to make a run for it. They intercepted him. 
They brought him back.
  They opened his trunk, and they thought they had a meth lab. It had 
lots of white powder substances, a couple of big gallon jugs of some 
kind of materials. They carried it to their local station. It turned 
out it was two huge jugs of nitroglycerine, with maps of LAX Airport. 
He told of his plans, how he was to meet somebody else.
  Now, think of the challenges when somebody is willing to rent a car 
and move clear across the country, take two ferries, come late in the 
afternoon to a town of 14,000, and drive all the way from Seattle to 
Los Angeles to meet up with somebody else to do the attack; but we got 
him. The good news is that we were successful. The bad news is it is 
going to be hard to get all of them.
  What is true for narcotics, what is true for illegal immigration, is 
also true for terrorism. We have to be vigilant on the north border as 
well as the south border.
  Detroit and Buffalo are the two biggest places where we have 
transshipments of goods. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, in my hometown, the GM 
plant, according to a former GM official, there are 100 crossings from 
Canada to the U.S. involved in the making of every pick-up, the largest 
pick-up plant in the United States.
  We cannot squeeze trade; we are too interconnected. We have to figure 
out how to do personal clearance systems, how to make sure they are 
monitored, how to have more VACA systems so we can see inside the 
trucks; so we have more drug dogs, bomb dogs, more methods to detect 
radiation devices. We have to make sure that our borders are secure 
from multiple threats to the United States, and the Canadian border is 
one of those critical things.

[[Page H3632]]

  We have had multiple meetings, and this hearing in Buffalo will 
include several Canada parliamentarians, as did the one in Seattle and 
British Columbia, and the one in Quebec-New York and the Vermont 
border.
  We have huge problems on the north border that are actually growing. 
On the South border it has been open for a long time, and we are 
actually making that a little more secure. I am pleased that the 
Canadians are working with us, as well as, better than in the past, the 
Mexican authorities, although that is still problematic.
  Let me talk a little bit about a few other issues. I have spent most 
of the time on our borders and on the transit countries, but I want to 
conclude here with a few minutes looking at the ONDCP reauthorization, 
the Office of Narcotics Drug Control Policy.

                              {time}  1715

  We have to be aggressive on the domestic side as well as the 
interdiction side. And as we look at this reauthorization, in addition 
to the Colombia money we will see, in addition to the Office of Drug 
Control Policy and the State Department, in addition to the multiple 
problems in the Justice Department, drug czar John Walters oversees a 
broad range of programs. Several are specific inside ONDCP. One is the 
HIDTAs, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. To some degree this 
program has been diluted. While they are meritorious programs, these 
were supposed to provide our primary protection. And unless Members of 
Congress and the American people understand some of what we laid out 
tonight, they will not understand what the purpose of a HIDTA is.
  Every area has a drug problem. Every area drug tracks. If you are in 
the southwest border, they will come across. If you are in Dallas, they 
will come through. If you are in the Midwest they are transiting 
through. Furthermore, if you are in a city like Chicago, you become a 
supplier not only to Chicago but the Midwest. If you are in a city like 
Fort Wayne, you become a supplier not only to Fort Wayne, but the mid-
sized cities around it like Muncie, Anderson, and Warsaw. If you are in 
Muncie you become a supplier to the mall. So every area is a drug 
trafficking area.
  But what was the point of this program? It was for the high intensity 
drug trafficking areas so we could, before it gets to the Midwest, 
seize the stuff at the major ports and major ports of entry. But this 
has become a pork program where everybody wants a HIDTA. Therefore, 
once everybody has it, it is not that it is not doing good work, but we 
are losing the point of the program which was to seize it at the 
highest intense area before it got to those areas.
  We are going to be looking at some of those hard issues and lots of 
Congressmen are going to receive local pressure to say, oh, we have a 
drug problem. We know that. That is why we have community drug 
initiatives. That is why we have all kinds of prevention programs. That 
is why we have drug free workplace bills. That is why we have drug free 
school bills. We have local law enforcement, State police. This was a 
program intended particularly for the southwest border and the major 
drug trafficking areas so that it did not overwhelm us at the local 
level.
  Next, the National Ad Campaign. The National Ad Campaign has served a 
valuable function to make Americans more aware of the problems of drug 
use. We are inundated, with all due respect, by rock music, by much of 
what we see in the movies. I saw an article, I think it was yesterday, 
saying that we thought that the heroin look was out, but they are 
praising this new group that is coming in that has this emaciated death 
look that once again promotes intense drug use in the United States by 
promoting a look and an action that you get from basically destroying 
your body.
  To combat that we have to have an organized effort such as the anti-
terrorism campaign which was very successful in making that link, the 
current anti-marijuana campaign which is one of the least understood 
issues in America, the dangers of this particular hydrochloride impact 
marijuana has on America. We need to make sure that ad campaign is 
functioning and targeted. We also have a very important technology 
transfer program to make sure that local law enforcement gets the 
equipment that they need to be able to battle in these HIDTA areas and 
also at the local area.
  I have many small towns ranging from a couple thousand people up to 
15,000 people that have been particularly pleased with the technology 
transfer program because they would not, in their small budgets, have 
been able to afford the type of equipment that they need to match up 
with these drug trafficking organizations that have billions of dollars 
behind them.
  So I want to conclude tonight by saying that this problem is complex. 
Over the next few weeks, we will be talking about this more and more on 
the floor as these pieces of legislation move. But what I do hope that 
my colleagues will not repeat on this floor is that we have failed 
because we have not. We have made steady progress, if you take a line 
with ups and downs in it for nearly 20 years. We have made steady 
progress in Colombia and the Andean region. But the more we squeeze the 
narco-traffickers, the more we squeeze the drug traffickers, the more 
violence there will be because we are actually hurting business. They 
cannot just write it off as a bad loss which they kind of do now 
because they abandon loads. But the more we squeeze them, they will not 
be able to abandon loads. The more we squeeze them the higher the 
prices are in the streets. The more we squeeze, the more the purity 
goes down, the less harmed our kids and families and people are, the 
more kids will have a dad or mom home that night who is not whacked out 
on drugs, the safer you will be as you drive down the highway.
  This is a very important effort that we were undertaking in Congress. 
Often it gets lost in all the others. But I hope the Members of 
Congress will focus on this because every dime we spend is likely to 
save another life in America.

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