Congressional Record, Volume 150 Issue 2 (Wednesday, January 21, 2004)

[Congressional Record Volume 150, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 21, 2004)]
[House]
[Pages H74-H82]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

AMERICA'S DRUG POLICY

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Bishop of Utah). 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, the subject of this Special Order, and I
hope to be joined by several of my colleagues, is going to be narcotics
policy in the United States and a number of success stories we have
had.
We often talk about the problems and challenges as chairman of the
Subcommittee on Drug Policy, the committee that has oversight over all
drug issues but also authorizing over the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, so-called Drug Czar, Director John Walters. We have
authorizing and oversight on all drug issues.
Before I get directly into the subject of this Special Order, I
wanted to say a few words about last night's wonderful address on this
floor and to this assembly.
If the President had included every single thing of importance and
everything we have in our budget, we would still be sitting here this
morning. So I first want to thank the President for finishing his
speech in 60 minutes.
My colleagues were sharing many concerns that I share as well. That
is why our budgets are this thick. That is why we debate all year long
on appropriations. But the goal of the State of the Union address is to
set a basic vision for where our country is headed; and I thought
President Bush did a remarkable job of outlining the major challenges
that we face.

{time} 1445

We are not a county or a city council. We are not mayors. We are not
governors. First and foremost, this body and the President of the
United States and the United States Senate have to do international
policy. States and local governments cannot do things like the
challenges we faced after 9/11 in trying to root out terrorism in
Afghanistan, root out terrorism in the funding and the harboring of
terrorists in Iraq, to try to break up these networks worldwide, and
the President definitely had his focus on the one thing that only the
President can lead in and that was our national security. He said, very
eloquently, after the first World Trade Center attack and the bombing
occurred there, the people were served with subpoenas, they went
through our court process, but then the terrorist groups came back and
hit us even bigger. We cannot just issue subpoenas. We have to tackle
the problem head-on.

[[Page H75]]

He also said in response to some critics that we are not going to get
a permission slip to protect the American people. We each took an oath
of office to uphold the security of the American people, every Member
of this body and the President of the United States, and in spite of
all the criticism, it would have been easier to make some compromises
last night on some of this stuff but he held firm because he would
prefer to win, but if it is necessary to protect American security, he
will do what is necessary, and if the people do not understand it and
reject him, he can look at himself in the mirror and said I did my best
job, I did my best job to defend the American people, I upheld the
Constitution to do that. He showed his boldness last night in defending
his policies.
By the way, both sides stood up and cheered. On these issues, there
was not a my-way-or-the-highway approach. I saw both sides of the aisle
standing on almost all of his statements on international security, on
Iraq, on Afghanistan. I saw bipartisanship. Not every Member of the
other party stood, but most did and most supported, at least many of
them, the war resolution itself.
Let me mention a couple of other specifics. For example, I support
veterans assistance, too. In my district, I do not have any active
bases. I have lots of guard and reserve units, and I voted for and
support the continued effort if we are going to use guard and reserve
like the military to try to address pay concerns, and we are not going
to have an active voluntary military unless we improve pay and health
service and all sorts of things for the veterans.
I am on the Select Committee on Homeland Security. I strongly believe
we have to do more on the domestic side of homeland security, but
fortunately, by disrupting, as the President pointed out, by disrupting
the terrorist bases, by disrupting the financial assistance that they
have, the places to hide out, they are continuing to try to penetrate
us the same ways because they do not have the training grounds in Iraq.
They do not have the training grounds in Afghanistan. They do not have
the financial networks. They do not have places to hide out right now
so we have been able to intercept them, which buys us time to help
along the Canadian border, along the Mexican border, to try to get
better and faster equipment in our harbors because the cost would be
horrendous to try to defend every child care center in America, to try
to defend every single harbor, to slow us down so that our goods in the
United States go up way in prices as we try to ship them in and out, as
we try to check 100 percent at the border. It just cannot work right
now.
As we move these machines in, for example, many of these machines at
the airport cost $1.5 million each. One cannot walk down to Wal-Mart
and pick them up. It takes a while for the companies to make them, to
implement them at the airports, but because we have disrupted those
bases, because they do not have places to hide out, we have not been
hit on our soil. Because of the brave men and women in our Armed
Forces, they are taking the bullets that were intended for us here.

So we have time to develop our domestic homeland security because of
the initiatives the President has done. And the fact is, I know those
who would like to throw the incumbent party out of office do not like
to admit this, but the economy is recovering, and the economy is
recovering in spite of 9/11. In spite of the weakness that occurred
after 9/11 in the markets exposing the fraud and cheating of companies
like Enron and others who are manipulating the markets, in spite of the
uncertainties of war, the economy is coming back, and it is coming back
more efficient, and the jobs are increasing not at a fast enough rate.
Underneath that we have some problems. That is why we have the job
retraining because we are having reshifting. I hope we address the
Chinese currency question and the unfair trade policies of China that
are ripping the guts out of my District just like they are in other
places and unnecessarily causing adjustments. The President pointed out
we needed an energy bill and we need new health care bills because when
we talk about jobs, when we talk to industry and the people who create
the jobs and the investors, they want the tax cuts. If the Democrats
succeed in raising the taxes, they will kill the recovery because when
they say they do not like the President's tax cuts, what they mean is
they do not want to vote to extend them, and if we do not extend them,
as the President said last night, it is an increase.
So, if they increase the taxes, does anybody really believe there
will be additional investment to keep our economy recovering? Do people
really believe if we increase the taxes on inheritances that small
businesses will not disband and continue to sell out to foreign
corporations because of inheritance taxes? Do people really believe if
we raise capital gains taxes again that people will expand their
companies and add jobs in their companies? Do people really believe
that if we increase their income taxes, and as the President said last
night, everybody who pays taxes got a tax cut. The only people who did
not get a tax cut are the people who do not pay income taxes. They did
not get an income tax cut because they do not pay income, but if you
pay income, you got a tax cut, and by giving more dollars to people,
people were able to invest and now help lead the stock market recovery.
After 9/11 if we had not given the $600 to individuals, I just cannot
imagine where our economy would be, and then the child tax credit, can
my colleagues imagine the pressures on families trying to deal with
health care and housing costs and clothing costs if all of the sudden
the Democrats succeed in taking back the tax credits? We will have a
disaster in the economy. That is why the President talked about taxes
last night and health care last night and some adjustments; and he
talked about Medicare, too, which is important with seniors.
The only area where we did not really have bipartisan support was
when the President addressed social issue. When he talked about
abstinence education, it was really disappointing to see that become a
partisan issue. Since when has abstinence before marriage become a
partisan issue? That was really sad. Since when did the Defense of
Marriage Act, which even President Clinton signed, that said marriage
should be between a man and a woman forever, when did that become a
partisan issue? When did drug testing and drug prevention programs
become partisan?

I am concerned about the divides on the social issue area because, in
fact, we had the bipartisan support for the Medicare bill. It could not
have passed if we had not had literally dozens of Democrats for that
bill. The tax bill would not have passed without Democratic support. We
would not have been able to pass the war resolution without Democratic
support, but on things like faith-based, on abstinence education,
defending marriage in the United States, we do need to have bipartisan
support. We need help from the other side. We cannot just have those
issues be Republican issues, and it was really disturbing last night to
see that division, and when it is viewed as the President interjecting
partisanship, if he raises the subject of abstinence education, my
lands, how is that partisan? If we say I believe marriage should be
between a man and a woman that is partisan?
Those people who criticize faith-based organizations as being
partisan have a problem right now. Where has the consensus and the
moral foundations of America gone? I thought the President laid that
kind of comprehensive vision, not the particulars that will come in the
budget, but the comprehensive vision of a strong America that stands up
against evil in the world, wherever it is coming from, an America that
is founded on letting people keep their own money, of trying to create
job creation, not have Washington drive everything, not having lawsuits
drive our economy but having the people that are investing in it drive
the economy, and a moral, Judeo-Christian-based foundation in America
that treats people decently and accommodates all kinds of religious
diversity as people move into our country but understands that faith
plays a key role in our Nation. That was the vision he laid out.
Now it is our job as Congress to take his budget that he proposes to
us and get into the specifics of how we fund the National Guard and
what we do in

[[Page H76]]

the national parks. I have worked with my colleague from New Jersey on
fish and wildlife issues, on human rights issues. We do that stuff on a
regular basis, but last night we had an amazing presentation on the
basic vision of where we are going in America, and I was excited by
that speech.
One of the things the President also addressed was a few new anti-
narcotics initiatives, but I think a lot of people missed something he
said right at the beginning of his new initiatives on drug testing and
prevention and trying to correct steroid abuse in the United States,
and that is, that we have had a drop in illicit drug usage in the
United States of 11 percent in the last 2 years. It is an extraordinary
thing.
I get a lot of flak as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal
Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources. The drug legalizers groups,
and groups funded by George Soros that masquerade as large citizen
groups but get their money mostly from George Soros and his few allies
who are billionaires to try to legalize drugs in the United States,
hiding behind so-called medicinal marijuana which is not medicinal at
all, and heroin needles, distribution, free heroin clinics and all this
type of stuff, really predominantly a drug legalization movement funded
by George Soros and his allies. Those groups do not like me. They do
not like anything that comes out of our committee, and they are
constantly harassing us.
They opposed and were just really crushed when the ONDCP, the Office
of National Drug Control Policy, and the National Ad Campaign passed
this House by voice vote. They were just crushed because they had this
idea that there was going to be this big uprising and drug policy would
be defeated, but the fact is we have done drug policy in a bipartisan
way. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings), who is the ranking
member of the subcommittee, he and I do our best to work together on
all issues, to draft the bill together. He had multiple amendments. The
gentleman from California (Mr. Waxman) and I often do not see eye to
eye on other things, as the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Tom Davis),
the chairman of the full Committee on Government Reform, and I do see
eye to eye, and we have our differences at times with the gentleman
from California (Mr. Waxman) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr.
Cummings), but we realized on drug policy we needed to stand together
and worked to address the evils. By doing that, we have had a
reduction.

Often, I will come to the House floor and talk about the problems of
Oxycontin and the rise in meth and the struggles in Colombia and Mexico
and Canada and in Afghanistan, but the truth is if all we hear is the
struggles, we miss the part of the success story, that in fact, the
money we have been spending, by raising the struggles, by raising the
problems, the money we have been spending has actually been working.
Those who are libertarians, or I would call liberal-tarians, whether
they be far right or far left anti-government people, want a line and
say government programs never work. No government programs can tinker
at the edges. Job creation predominantly comes from the private sector,
but incentives can help, that in education it should be mostly at the
local government but had we not addressed through IDEA and certain
civil rights legislation many people in American would not have had a
chance, and the Federal Government needed to directly step in. Clearly
in housing, had the Federal Government not stepped in in certain areas,
there would not be some of that social safety net. That is not the
primary. From a concerted perspective, I think it is secondary, but in
some groups, it was very primary and important.
Same thing in narcotics policy. We have most law enforcement is State
and local. Most treatment is State and local or private sector through
insurance. Most of these things are done through the private sector,
but the government plays a critical role, and let me read a few of the
accomplishments this year through the Office of National Drug Control
Policy.
One of the most visible is the national campaign against marijuana
which is probably why there has been such an outcry and an angry
frustration with some of our policies, because the one thing they do
not want to happen was marijuana. So let me address that a minute.
We hear, and as I started to point out, about all the negatives and
then we start to think it is not working, but in fact, we have made
progress. We have these peaks that drug use in the United States went
up in the 1960s, dropped, went up again, dropped under Reagan, went up
again. By the way, we would have to reduce drug use in the United
States 50 percent to get it back to where it was when President Clinton
took office. We can argue with sub-groups in that and some went up
higher than others and some drugs went up higher than others, but we
are making progress now partly because, quite frankly, we had a balloon
when our national policy from 1992 to 1994, our national policy was
hear no evil, see no evil, do no evil.
From that perspective, what happened was is the President started
joking about I did not inhale. They cut the drug czar's office from 120
people down to 23 people. They cut the interdiction money going to
South America by dramatic amounts, and guess what, cocaine and heroin
flooded into our country. Marijuana flooded our streets. The stigma
went off like it did in the 1960s. The grades of marijuana went up in
their potency from 5 to 8 percent THC to 15 to 25, in some places, 40
percent THC, where marijuana is as potent and as dangerous as cocaine
and sells for that amount in the streets. Those changes in 1992 and
1994 were dramatic.
President Clinton, to his credit, after the Republicans took over and
after a little bit of arm twisting, brought in General McCaffrey to
head the drug czar's office, gave him dollars, and since 1995 we have
had pretty steady progress for 8 years. The first couple of years were
more to flatten out the trends, then to get like a 2 percent, and last
year, there was an 8 percent reduction in marijuana. People who say the
national ad campaign does not work are wrong. The fact is, by educating
people, not just hammering off over the heads and saying, look, you are
going to wind up forever destroyed if you use marijuana, no, not
everybody who does winds up destroyed, but you cannot get at cocaine,
heroin, meth, oxycontin and other abuses as a whole unless you get at
marijuana, because marijuana and alcohol abuse, but for the other hard
drugs, marijuana basically is an entry level drug.

{time} 1500

For every 10 marijuana users, one, or maybe two, counting high-grade
marijuana, will move into a harder drug. If you have 100, you will have
10 over here. If you have a thousand, you will have a hundred over
here. If you have 10,000, you will have a thousand over here. The
percents stay roughly the same.
Because once you are introduced, a certain percentage will become
addicted, whether psychological or physical. A certain percentage will
want a higher hit, a bigger and longer impact of the narcotics. And the
next thing you know, you have more addicts.
So to make a really dramatic reduction, Director Walters decided to
go at marijuana. So the national ad campaign showed all kinds and they
studied particularly target youth groups. I hear a lot of people say, I
do not see a lot of those ads, or I do not particularly like those ads.
Well, guess what, 53-year-old white guys like me are not the primary
target. Not saying there are not 53-year-old white guys who are abusing
cocaine, but we are not the prime target. We are trying to get people
at the entry, at the gateway coming in and getting addicted. By the
time you are 53, if you are addicted, you need a treatment program. And
we are working with the treatment programs and trying to do that. What
we need to do is get at the people as they are coming into the system.
I see I have been joined by my colleague, the gentleman from
Pennsylvania (Mr. Peterson), and he has been a leader in the drug-
testing area. If I can, let me make a brief introduction on the drug
testing.
Last night, the President proposed an initiative for $25 million for
drug testing. The gentleman from Pennsylvania has been looking at this
issue for some time. I worked on this when I was a staffer over on the
Senate side with Senator Coates years ago. So let us say this as point
blank as we can. Drug-free prevention programs and treatment programs
will not work without

[[Page H77]]

drug testing. You have to have an accountability. The President last
night said that as part of our prevention treatment programs we are
going to put in some measurement sticks, just like he talked about in
education and just like he talked about in other areas, and one of
those things is drug testing.
Mr. Speaker, I yield now to my friend from Pennsylvania to talk about
a little of that and whatever other issue he wants to talk about.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I want to commend my good
friend from Indiana (Mr. Souder), who is the leader in Congress on this
issue. I want to commend him for these efforts because these are not
issues that are pushed by the power brokers in this country or pushed
by the big PAC givers. These are the issues that are at the heart and
soul of America's kids and who, I feel, have more peer pressure today
to deal with the drug issue than any generation before them.
This used to be a city issue. For years, maybe decades, the cities
have been infected with drugs. But I hear the experts today say there
is not a community in America that does not have a drug problem. Now,
one of the problems we have is a lot of those communities do not
realize the severity of the problem and sometimes kind of just want to
look by it as long as it has not impacted them or their families or
their neighborhoods.
I represent a huge rural district in Pennsylvania, one of the largest
rural districts in the eastern part of the country, and I have hundreds
and hundreds of small towns. I have not talked to a youngster in my
office that does not tell of the severity of the drug issue in their
school and the easy availability, marijuana being available in middle
school. Sometimes kids will actually smoke a marijuana cigarette before
they smoke tobacco because it is easier to buy. They do not have to
have an ID card. Stop and think about that.
Jonathan Walters, the Drug Czar, was with me in my district about a
year ago and is doing a wonderful job. I will never forget the face of
a young lady, 16 years old, who lived in a small town of about 6,000
people. This is an area you would think would not be infested with
drugs. When she was 14 she was using three bags of heroin a day. The
young people in that school were driving into north Philadelphia and
they were buying pure uncut heroin.
The tragedy of that is that usually heroin is the drug for the end-
of-the-line user. When people got hooked on heroin, they had worked
their way all the way up the food chain. Heroin is such a powerfully
addicting drug, it is usually just a matter of time until their life is
over. But here we have 14-year-old and 15-year-old and 16-year-old
teenagers who are into heroin. I have probably 10 or 15 communities in
my district that have known heavy heroin use in kids.
The power of it is that it is uncut pure heroin that is affordable
and available. And the problem with that is it is so addictive that the
drug counselors tell me if you have any kind of an addictive
personality you may never lick the habit. Now, this young lady, I said
to her, what is your wish? Well, she said, my wish in life is that I
had never touched it. I am on my second rehabilitation program, and I
hope I can stay drug-free. I do not want to ever do drugs again.
But the addiction is so powerful, and when you take young people like
that, who are not even mature as an adult yet, and give them uncut
heroin, or uncut cocaine, or the one that has been terribly impacting
my region also, which is methamphetamine, where it is manufactured in
laboratories out in the country, in homes and garages and barns and
buildings, it is about as addicting as heroin and about as powerful.
And I am told many times people who may be first- and second-time users
will fight that addiction the rest of their life.
So those who think testing is an intrusion of privacy, I want to
plead with you that testing is the only way parents know, it is the
only way a family knows, it is the only way schools know what your
child is doing. And if you have it to where schools participate
voluntarily and parents approve of their kids being tested, I would
test all kids that parents would allow the test. Leave it a freedom of
choice of the family, but I would make it a negative check-off where
everybody gets tested.
Now, that is not where most are at today. But I listened to the
debate at the Supreme Court when they expanded from sports activities
to all extracurricular activities, and some schools have gotten
creative and said kids driving their cars to school, because assuming
you drive your car to school, you are more likely to be bringing drugs
in here.
I had an argument with a nationally well-known figure, and if I
mentioned his name you would all know him, but he was arguing on a
national television show against testing, so I said to him, well, if my
memory is correct, 15 or 20 years ago the military had a rampant drug
problem, and random testing fixed it. He stopped, he paused, he said,
yes, I was there. I was a part of that. I had never related it, but you
are right. I change my position at this moment. I would support random
drug testing.
So today I introduce the Empowering Parents and Teachers for a Drug
Free Education Act. The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) joined me
and the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne). That is a band of three.
But I think it is legislation whose time has come.
I cannot tell you how excited I was last night when the President put
sufficient emphasis on this. It is not about privacy. It is about
helping young people who are now being exposed to drugs that are so
powerful that if they use them once or twice they may be addicted the
rest of their lives. So it is preserving their life.
It is not about drug enforcement. It is about when you find a
youngster that has drugs in their system that the parents get involved,
and then the schools get involved to first help them with this problem.
A youngster into drugs without help will soon be too far down the road
that they will literally owe their life to the drug dealers.
When you look at who the drug dealers are, we know today for a fact
that terrorism is often funded by drug dealers. The drug dealers of
America in our small towns are the scourge of this country. They are
the low life who care nothing about the future of our youth, care
nothing about the future of this country. They are just interested in
the mammoth profits they make selling this poison to our young people.
I will never forget the discussion I had last year with my
granddaughter Nicole. We were going shopping after Christmas, returning
some things and spending some of her money she had gotten for
Christmas, and we always get on this subject. And she said, Pop, why
are you so concerned I will get on drugs? I am a good student. I am
doing well in school, she said. I am not going to do drugs, Pop. So I
said, well, who do you think will entice you to do drugs? She said, oh,
some creep at school or somebody that will come. I said, no, Nicole,
that is not who will introduce you to drugs. The person who will
introduce you to drugs is one of your best friends, like Jacquelyn,
whose boyfriend or friend has, maybe at a party where she has had a
couple of beers, even though that is not legal, but her judgment is
impaired and she tries them. When she tries them and has gotten into
that habit, she is going to want her best friend, Nicole, to be with
her.
It is not some creep that introduces our kids to drugs. It is
somebody who is their friend. It is somebody who they have an
established relationship with. I guess the thing that scares me, and
that I wish school superintendents would be more scared of, and I wish
parents would be more fearful of is that their child, without any doubt
is going to have numerous opportunities to do drugs. Even if they are
not an avid drinker, even if they are not into the other things where
they are more likely to, there will be a time. So we must help these
young people.
In the workplace today it is common practice. You sign a form, and in
most cases they say we will be randomly drug testing. That is the way
of the work world. In the military, you will be randomly drug tested.
And I find there is no tool to help get drugs out of our schools. If I
were president of a college, I would have on the application form that
you will be randomly drug tested. And I would promise the parents that
brought them there that my first goal would be to run a drug-free
college. It would be difficult, but it would be my number one goal.
Because those are still those formative years.
The kids tell me that the age at which they are asked to do drugs is

[[Page H78]]

getting younger and younger and younger. And when you get down to 8th
and 9th graders, who are not that mature yet, who are more vulnerable,
and the drugs are more available to them, and they are more potent than
they have ever been, a lot of them are pure and uncut, and at that
those young ages, if they try once, they may never lick the habit.
I thank my colleague for the chance to join him.
Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield to my friend, the
gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher).
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I would like to join my fellow
colleagues today in applauding our President last night for his
position on drug testing, and I would certainly agree with what my
colleagues have just said, because young people today are faced with
this onslaught.
First of all, we have a media around them, entertainment media, et
cetera, that actually breaks down their ability to make the right
decisions for their lives in the long run, and drug testing would not
only go a long way in terms of just identifying a young person whose
parents need to know that they are vulnerable and are perhaps making
some wrong choices in their life, but drug testing also gives these
young people an added incentive to say no.
Without drug testing, if you are talking about your daughter going to
a party or something and having a few beers, there is nothing she can
say to the person proposing using drugs except, well, that is wrong and
we should not do that; my parents have told me that is wrong. And that
is about as neat a thing to say at a party as I guess let us listen to
Bing Crosby music or something like that. But if there is drug testing
in school, young people will know what to say. And what to say is I
cannot take this drug because I may be tested for drugs in my school
tomorrow. And if I get tested for drugs and I am positive, my parents
will know about it.
And as far as I am concerned, any young person who is found to have
drugs through drug testing, and there should be drug testing in our
schools from junior high all the way through, not only should their
parents be notified but the student should be able to then face an
extra hurdle to jump over before graduation. And that hurdle should be
a class that they need to take that will demonstrate to them the evils
and the threat that drugs have for them as an individual. We need to
let this child, who is now a young person, sit through a few films and
some personal stories about how drugs have destroyed the lives of other
young people and make that mandatory if that young person tests
positive for drugs.

{time} 1515

They would have to get a passing grade. And I would suggest that if
someone has tested positive for drugs before they get their degree,
they have got to test so they are not on drugs. In other words, we have
got to provide positive incentives for young people not to get involved
in this type of behavior in the first place. Again, I would applaud our
President for taking a positive approach. I have some disagreement with
some of my other colleagues as to how effective the war on drugs is and
how effective just focusing on enforcement or interdiction is. I do not
think they have been effective at all. That is why we have got to try
this personal approach, personal responsibility, focusing on
identifying those people who are vulnerable, especially focusing and
identifying people who might make us vulnerable. Airline pilots,
doctors, people who our lives are in their hands, they all should be
drug tested, but then especially testing young people to make sure
their parents can know that there is a challenge and giving an
incentive for these young people to say no when they are offered these
drugs.
I would join you both in applauding our President and hope that we
can stimulate people across this country to look at drug testing as a
positive alternative rather than some sort of threat to privacy. The
only way it would be a threat, I would say, to civil liberties is if
drug testing is mandatory and then we believe that we are going to
prosecute young people for using drugs. That would be self-
incrimination in my point of view, but I do not think that is what is
being advocated here. What is being advocated here is drug testing in
order to facilitate some type of outreach program to get someone so
they are not using drugs.
Mr. SOUDER. I wanted to reiterate the gentleman's last point. This is
a prevention and interdiction tool to help reach people before they
become heavy addicts. That is why it is targeted at the schools. There
is a body of law that has to be followed. This program will be thrown
out in any school that does not follow the body of law. In 1989 and
1990 in the omnibus drug bill, my former boss in the Senate, the junior
Senator from Indiana, whose name I guess I cannot say here on the
floor, that we had an amendment based off of a high school in West
Lafayette, Indiana where the baseball team had an outfielder who got
hit on the head with a fly ball. And he was a very good fielder. The
question was, how did he miss a fly ball?
A similar thing happened, I think, to the third baseman. In that
process, they decided to drug-test their baseball team. They found that
one-third were high. So they decided to put in a policy of drug testing
on athletes and then cheerleaders. We took that as an allowable use
then in the drug-free school bill, in the 1989-1990 bill, and put that
in as an allowable use. It was then attempted to be expanded in Texas
and a few other States student-wide. The court initially just upheld
where there was extra risk in athletics and then as our colleague from
Pennsylvania pointed out, it broadened it in a recent court case to go
to the next step. But in the legislation it was very explicit.
We also did this in the drug-free workplace. We did it on truck
drivers' testing. The test has to be either a total classification or
purely random. They cannot say, ``That guy has long hair. I think he's
doing drugs. I'm going to test him. I'm not going to test this.'' In a
company you need to test the management and the owners, not just the
employees. You have to have equitable treatment, including us in
Congress should be testing ourselves, even though technically we are
exempt from this. If we are going to put it on government employees, we
ought to be doing it ourselves in our offices.
The second thing is related to that, the type of tests and how you do
the tests are by law required. If you are going to use a urine test,
there are standards of how you keep that, how you sort it, how you mark
it, that you have a second test so you do not get any false positive
with it. Hair tests and follicle tests are much better and harder to
mix up. There ought to be a logical appeals process with it. In other
words, if you deprive people of their civil liberties in the process of
this, even students in loco parentis, you got a problem. But the fact
is, if you do it right, it is the best prevention and identification
deterrent.
To share one of the stories from my district, I was at a school which
was doing it in athletes. I like drug testing, like both of my
colleagues, and proposed that it ought to be used more widely. The
student body president objected and said this is a violation of my
liberties. A couple of other people objected. And then one student got
up and said that he had been abusing marijuana, got caught, his life
had been going downhill, that that forced him to confront it just like
the gentleman from California referred to and said he talked to his
parents, got his life straightened around and he believed drug testing
would be good.
Then somebody else from the student government objected again and a
couple of the other students spoke up. And when we were done, the
principal and superintendent came over and said, ``We're implementing
school-wide drug testing because every single person who spoke up
against it has never had a drug violation or suspected but every one of
the kids who spoke up for it had either had a problem or we wondered if
they did.'' They were crying out for help, for accountability from
adults in a society that does not care. That is another aspect of it.
If they think they are going to go to jail, they are not going to speak
up, but if they think somebody is going to reach out and love them and
help them, I believe, and I believe our policies in the United States
need to be focused not on legalizing the behavior, but we recognize
that very few actually go to court for one-time marijuana use.

[[Page H79]]

You cannot be our age and have gone through the 60s and the 70s
without knowing lots of people who did marijuana, and I do not
personally know anybody quite frankly who went to prison for just
smoking marijuana. If they went to prison for that, they were probably
involved either in multiple parties or dealing or driving somebody or
something more extensive. As a practical matter, that is what we are
trying to bust. My colleague from California and I have strong
disagreements about Colombia policy and some other things, but on this
type of thing in prevention and the treatment programs, quite frankly,
these treatment programs that take all this money and do not want to
measure whether their clientele are abusing when they come out, hey,
that is a big problem. I thank my colleagues.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. If the gentleman will yield, as I said, I believe
that the interdiction effort and the efforts, punishment, et cetera,
have not succeeded. One of the reasons that it has not succeeded in our
society, what we have is laws on the books that supposedly make
something illegal, yet we have, by our own actions not put a societal
stamp of disapproval. In fact, by not having drug testing and by not
having, as Ronald Reagan used to say, a Just Say No mandate, or a
societal norm that is unaccepting of drug use as personal behavior,
what we have done is we have got laws that are unenforced, so
officially supposedly it is against the law, but at the same time, the
norms of society are accepting drug use. I think that drug testing will
make sure that young people know absolutely fully well that society has
a stamp of disapproval on drug use. Right now it is very nebulous as to
whether or not our society is against people using drugs or not. This
would be a clear message to young people, saying that society is so
much against it, we are even going to test you and if you are using
drugs, we are going to send you through a special program to make sure
that you know how harmful this can be, and so there is no question in
these young people's minds.
The gentleman is right. Young people are looking out for guidance.
Frankly I believe that if you threaten them, and I know we disagree on
this, if you threaten them, sometimes it is almost titillating for kids
to get around those type of rules where the sheriff comes up and we're
going to put you in jail or something. But when you have to say you are
not going to get your driver's license if we find out that you have
been using drugs, you are not going to graduate, there is no getting
around that. That is a real life stamp of disapproval. I think this
would be very effective.
Again the gentleman is right on target for congratulating our
President and applauding him for making this an emphasis in his State
of the Union speech.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. I have had young people and other
people who were opposed but most of the young people who come in my
office support drug testing. They would like to see that down pressure
on their friends who are struggling with the decision-making process.
Several years ago I was discussing this issue with a radio
commentator on a big city talk radio program. He was making fun of me,
according to the people who were listening to the station, prior to me
coming on, that we are going to talk to the Congressman that wants our
kids to fill a cup with urine and just was kind of making light of it.
At the end of that discussion that day after I was off, one of my staff
was listening, he said, you know, I was pretty opposed to this idea,
but after the discussion, if I had a 12- or 14-year-old boy, and I
don't, would I want testing or would I not and he had a long pause and
he said, you know, I think the Congressman convinced me. Just the
matter of having a discussion.
We have other tests. We have the hair test, which I think is one of
the best because it reaches back. If you tested in September, you know
the activity for months before, because the hair holds the drug. You
have saliva tests, you have sweat tests, of course you have the blood
tests, the urine tests. There is lots of testing today. One of the
deterrents to schools doing it is the cost, especially in a small rural
school district with there is not much extra cash to go around. That is
what is so vital about the President's program saying, hey, if you
decide, if the parents in your community talk to your administration
and say we would like our kids tested and you develop a testing
program, we're going to help. That is what this is about. This is not a
mandate. I know in my district, I am going to be selling it. The young
people want me to sell it. We need to encourage parents and community
leaders to encourage school boards to move out and say, let's do
everything we can do to make our school drug free. I have
superintendents who are there. I have lots of superintendents who are
afraid of the issue.
But I have had a couple of superintendents who have said they bring
in dog teams, they bring in a drug enforcement officer, they bring in
people who tell about the lives of people who got addicted to drugs and
how their life was really over. Parents would have the right to veto if
they did not want it. That keeps us out of the ACLU and the courts. In
my view, I think there are a lot of things we can be doing, and what we
are doing it for is the kids.
Joe Paterno is a strong proponent of drug testing. He has been
coaching young men for a long, long time. On my very last time with
him, as I went to leave the room, he said, Pete, you keep pushing that
drug testing. I want to tell you, over my years of coaching, and I have
been drug testing for some time, one year I let up and the next spring
camp I saw some of my boys back from last year who I suspicioned may
have at times been on drugs, and I hadn't tested much that year and I
saw more signs, because as a coach he knew, he could tell by watching
their play in spring camp whether they had been using drugs or not. I
do not know how he told.

He said, I want to tell you, I'll never make that mistake again. I
continue to do more and more and more testing because testing works.
Mr. SOUDER. I thank both gentlemen for talking about drug testing. I
want to put this a little bit in the context, because that was a
critical part of the State of the Union last night to talk about that
in particular, but once again as the President said at the front of
that section, that, in fact, we have had a reduction in drug use in the
United States. That is partly because we have a holistic policy that
the drug testing is a key component of the accountability and the
measurement.
As both of my colleagues have pointed out as well as myself, but
particularly the gentleman from California, it is a stigma part that
one of the things, I have been to Colombia now about 10 times and in
multiple countries, particularly in the Andean region, where because of
our demand, because we cannot control our demand, we are disrupting and
overturning democracies that have been there for hundreds of years.
In Colombia, I think it was actually in Ecuador, in Guayaquil, a
young student came up to me and said, why do you keep picking on the
Andean nations? When I went to school in the United States, I saw no
stigma at all. You could get dope in any college, you could get it from
anybody. Why don't you put some stigma?
That is partly why I offered the amendment that is a very unpopular
amendment but basically says if you get convicted of a drug crime and
you are taking money from the taxpayers of the United States you're
going to lose your loan. We have had arguments about how that has been
interpreted and I do not agree with how it has been interpreted and we
are trying to fix that but the bottom line is if you take somebody
else's money, you should follow the laws of the United States. We
cannot go to Colombia and say stop growing this stuff if we do not do
things here like drug testing and that.
In Colombia, interestingly in this past year, we have had the most
successful year yet, we are still struggling but we have had the most
successful year yet in stabilizing at least large sections of that
country. We have, in addition to having sprayed all but some
concentrated areas of coca, which is why the attacks are getting so
vicious, why we had some Americans shot down, why we have had our
planes taking more hits than they ever have because we are not spraying
the whole country anymore, we are spraying concentrated areas that are
hard to get to and the drug dealers are digging in to fight to keep us
from eradicating, but we have had the best spraying year.

[[Page H80]]

One hundred fifty municipalities now have a government presence in
them instead of just having the right-wing terrorists come through who
originally were trying to protect the towns but were not government
units and the left-wing FARC which provides protection for the drug
growers fighting with each other, terrorizing the individual people.
There is now a government presence since President Uribe took over in
150 municipalities that did not have it. They have had more than 300
projects and 25 departments benefiting displaced persons,
rehabilitating child soldiers, providing legitimate employment
opportunities. It is part of our Andean initiative to make sure that we
do not just spray, we do not just eradicate but what are we doing for
the people who are being disrupted because of our habits, our habits
and western Europe.

{time} 1530

Then the question is if we cannot get it there, we have got to get it
in interdiction. Because of pulling a lot of our Coast Guard units in
and some of the other things in around Homeland Security, we have had
some gaps; but we have been doing reasonably well, particularly on the
south border. For example, a couple of DEA busts along with the stigma
on LSD, when we can tackle it, much like we are trying to do with meth
and OxyContin hopefully too, this is the pattern of emergency room,
when somebody comes in, do they mention that they were high on LSD? As
we can see, it has dropped from 5,000 in 1999 to 891 in 2002.
In my home area in northeast Indiana, we had a similar drop. We had a
jump up in LSD. We battle it hard; we interdict it. The DEA did a major
undercover bust with it. We had publicity on attacking LSD, and when we
put on the stigma combined with enforcement, it will drop.
Meth is a huge challenge, and it is a growing challenge. Even though
all of us see the little labs, I want to make just a brief education
point on meth because most Members here, if we ask them what is the
fastest-growing category, everybody would say meth, but it is actually
still only 8 percent of drug use, and 80 percent of the meth is coming
from superlabs in California and Mexico even though we are seeing all
these arrests in our district, because the labs we have in Indiana and
rural Pennsylvania and others are dangerous and addictive and
threatening the kids in those labs, but they are only cooking for
themselves and maybe two other people, whereas the superlabs will ship
it to thousands of people. California has been the leader in passing
child abuse laws; and other States need to emulate that, that if they
have a lab, because of the terrible deaths of kids getting exploded by
their parents cooking and the dangers of the superlabs, but we need to
focus on meth and crystal meth and ice and all the different variations
like we had on LSD to get this kind of trend and keep the law
enforcement pressure on with the stigma pressure and with an education
and prevention pressure.
One other thing. We are doing an OxyContin hearing in Orlando. They
have had a series of deaths in that city because of overdoses on
OxyContin. It is a difficult issue because they can have legitimate
uses. Just like in meth, it is tough to regulate out of Brussels and
out of Amsterdam and through Canada because ephedrine is not illegal.
It has legal uses too. But the fact is we have to have the courage to
stand up to some drug companies that do not want us to talk about the
dangers of misuse of some legitimate drugs.
The President last night boldly addressed steroids. We heard,
particularly those of us who are baseball fans, some questions being
asked about records that were falling; and out of that process we
learned more and more that in multiple sports that the success stories
were because people were artificially pumping themselves up. As that
pressure spread and as we listen to the stories of athletes in junior
high and high school, the sad stories of these kids who are afraid they
cannot get college scholarships, who are afraid they cannot be pro
athletes, who are afraid they cannot advance unless they cheat, unless
they alter their body, who are even more vulnerable than the baseball,
football, basketball, wrestling, boxing stars who pump themselves up
who have millions of dollars to get physician advice, who still destroy
their bodies, now imagine being a young person who is still growing,
who is filling out, who does not get the medical advice, and is putting
their life at risk, not just damaging their body but putting their life
at risk. And the President had the courage last night, like the
gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne) and others here in this body, to
talk about the abuse in athletics and how we have to tackle that. Just
like the gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Wolf) and the gentleman from
Florida (Mr. Mica) and others have been leaders in trying to raise the
issue of OxyContin here and the meth caucus in this Congress to try to
address the meth questions, we have to work at the stigma.
One other thing in this general category. If we continue to succeed
in the eradication, if we continue to succeed in the interdiction at
the borders, if we continue to succeed in arresting the dealers and
those who are working with that, if we can up our prevention efforts
and if we can put through drug testing and an accountability provision
in, we still have to worry about those who are addicted. And the
President last night had a couple of references. One is, in drug
treatment, he has an expansion of drug treatment. We have been
increasing that rapidly here; and we need to continue to do that
because, quite frankly, if we do not stop the number of people coming
in, we cannot, as Nancy Reagan so eloquently said, win a war just by
treating the wounded. At the same time, we still have to treat the
wounded. And if we can rehabilitate those who are addicted, we have a
major impact on the drug problems in the United States. And the
President proposed a faith-based initiative.
But he did one other thing. I support mandatory sentences for certain
crimes because I do not like how the legal system is letting certain
people off based on how rich they are or what color they are and
getting to make up what sentences they have based on their legal
representation. There ought to be the same accountability. If one is a
dealer, this is what they get. If one is a multiple user, if one is
driving somebody to a drug bust, this ought to be their penalty. Our
crime reductions in the United States, in the streets of the United
States, and 75 to 85 percent of all crime is drug and alcohol related,
are because we locked more people up; but our prisons are jammed. Many
of those people are now coming out of their sentences, and the question
is what are we going to do? They are starting to re-enter our economy.
They are going to be back, and if all they learned was to how to be a
better criminal, if their kids, who now lost their mom or dad because
they were in prison and did not get any help, instead of being able to
pull themselves up out of their situation, are now destroyed, we are in
deep trouble in society.
One of the other initiatives that the President announced last night
was a major initiative to deal with housing kids of prisoners and
initiatives in re-entry courts. There are a number of programs around
the United States ranging from drug courts and looking for
accountability of how to get drug courts that Director John Walters is
trying to do and to get more patterns with it; but it is an innovative
thing with an accountability, with the judge that people are working
through. The drug testing is part of that, trying to include faith-
based groups that put a religious and friend and volunteer
accountability with it. But we also need to look at real problems of
people not wanting to hire people when they are coming out of prison,
people not yet wanting to let them in their apartment complex when they
come out of prison.

The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis), who is on our subcommittee
and is my colleague from Chicago from the other party, I am
cosponsoring his legislation for trying to deal with the housing that
often people who are coming out of prison face. The President
understood that in addition to the Andean initiative, in addition to
boosting the DEA, our critical anti-drug area, in addition to working
with Homeland Security to make our borders secure from narco-terrorism
and providing drug money to terrorists around the country that we have
to do something to help rehabilitate those who have been in prison and
we need to help them both

[[Page H81]]

from a personal standpoint, as they deserve it as a human soul, and
from a practical standpoint for the rest of us as they are coming out
of prison. They have been locked up. Our crime rate has been down. Are
we really prepared for the changes we are going to see if we have not
invested in those people?
I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.
Mr. PETERSON of Pennsylvania. Mr. Speaker, I recently visited a
prison in my district, a Federal prison; and 80 percent of those there
were addicted to a drug. I believe the figure was 60 percent were there
because they were selling drugs. That is a huge figure, $35,000 per
person to incarcerate people. We certainly can afford to invest in drug
treatment and in prevention.
But I wanted to mention the issue of methamphetamine again. The
gentleman talked about the big labs in California. I come from a very
rural area. There is hardly a month that goes by that in our local
community, a small town, the local paper talks of another meth bust,
another lab found.
And I want to tell the Members the story of Suzie. Her name is not
Suzie, but I want to protect the family. I remember vividly when Suzie
moved to our area. She married a person locally who was very
successful, a family. She was pleasant. She was attractive. She was
smart. And as years rolled by, I had heard that Suzie might have a
cocaine problem. I did not know. But I do know this: over a year ago,
or maybe it was 2 years ago now, there was a major meth bust in our
region, and it was proven that she was one of the kingpins. She was the
person who was buying the material, a lot of the material to make
methamphetamines, at the hardware store: lye, paint thinners, a lot of
chemicals that one would not think have anything to do with ingesting
in one's body. In fact, in my region the drug stores have all the
Sudafed-type health medicines behind the pharmacy because they do not
allow them out there because they are being purchased by people who
come in time and time again and get them because that is a main
ingredient to make meth. So it shows us the problem is rampant. It took
4 years to get the kingpin. DEA, the State drug team, the local police
worked 4 years to get the person. And Suzie was the person who helped
them nail him because before they never could get the kingpin. And he
is now in prison, I think, for 40 or 45 years. But residue is he has
taught so many people how to make high-quality meth that we remain a
meth production area. And the police tell me they just do not know how
to get their arms around it because every time they turn around, they
hear another lead, they go check, they find another meth lab. I mean,
they are everywhere.
So that is a story of a destroyed life. The final page on Suzie is I
got to know her pretty well because she was volunteering in the nursing
homes and the personal care homes and my mother was there, and she was
always very nice to my mother and we talked a bit. And I always wanted
to sit down with her and talk with her about how it happened because
she was going out also speaking to school groups. Several months ago on
a Sunday morning, after friends had talked to her on Saturday night and
she was in good spirits, she was found hanging in an old pump house in
the woods, dead. Suzie lost her life because we heard, the kingpin
said, and I do not know if they can ever prove it, but the kingpin said
she will not live long. Suzie did not live long. She was a person in
her late 40s. She was a mature woman. She was attractive. She was
smart. But she got hooked on drugs. And if a person her age can get
hooked, how vulnerable are our eighth, ninth and tenth graders as they
are still growing and working to become adults? And that is why drug
testing is so important. It is about protecting kids, not about
penalizing kids.
Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments, and
this is not a matter of condemning Americans. It is a matter of trying
to develop a fully holistic policy to try to reduce drug and alcohol
abuse. The fact is the President of the United States in his amazing
address last night again acknowledged he overcame his addiction, or at
least overuse of alcohol. One of my favorite commentators, Rush
Limbaugh, had to battle with an addiction with OxyContin. Clearly, it
strikes all types of people. It is not just the stereotypical people.
And we need to reach out to people who are hurting and try to help them
recover. We need to make sure that part of that is eliminating the
temptation as much as possible, trying to keep the prices high enough,
the supply low enough. We need to try to make sure there is an
accountability on the dealers and those who are using it so they know
if they want public money, whether it is if they are going to a public
school, that there is going to be an accountability and somebody
watching them for their own good and that there is also going to be
help there in treatment and follow-up if they need it. Does the
gentleman from California want to make a comment?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I do have some disagreements with the
gentleman as to the best way to attack this problem, but I certainly
agree that we should make sure that young people understand just how
serious the problem is for them and that there would be no greater
method of telling them and putting a stamp of disapproval on it than
making sure they have to have a drug test.
But the gentleman referred to on the chart there some of the decrease
in drug use that we have had over the last 2 years, and I think that a
lot of that can be attributed also to a stamp of disapproval that the
young people understand that our society has given just in the last few
years. In the last administration, I think that it could be accurately
said that people who were out fighting this problem were faced by an
administration that trivialized the use of drugs as to what kind of
threat it was when the President talked about not inhaling and such.
And some of us who have had pretty wild youths in our time looked at
that and said this man is not being serious, and the young people
looked at the President and said this is not being serious, and our
administration's seriousness on this has had a lot to do with the
reduction in the use of drugs.
Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his comments.
Mr. Speaker, last night the President highlighted the success of our
Nation's drug strategy. I applaud the President for the success of his
strategy and for highlighting this issue in the State of the Union
Address. Across the Nation, the latest study found there has been an
11-percent decline in drug use by 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students
over the past 2 years. This finding translates into 400,000 fewer teens
using drugs and is the first real decline nationally in 12 years. Our
own local survey done by the Coalition for a Drug-Free Greater
Cincinnati has shown similar results over the past 3 or 4 years. This
is very encouraging news for parents, teenagers, teachers and everyone
else who cares about the welfare of kids.
As the President mentioned last night, community involvement is
critical to successful drug prevention. Community coalitions are the
heart and soul of drug prevention and community action on this
important topic. Coalitions help all of us to come together--parents,
teachers, coaches, religious leaders, volunteers, law enforcement--to
encourage youth to understand that any drug use is not only
unacceptable but harmful. Having fewer youths use drugs is important
because we know that if young people can abstain from drugs before they
graduate from high school, they are much less likely to have drug
problems later.
The Drug-Free Communities Act is an essential tool that many of our
communities utilize to fight illegal drug abuse. Instead of creating
new Federal bureaucracies, this program sends Federal money directly to
local coalitions working to reduce the demand for drugs through
effective education and prevention. Community coalitions are groups of
citizens--parents, youths, business, media, law enforcement, religious
organizations, civic groups, health care professionals, and others--who
are working on local initiatives to reduce and prevent substance abuse.
These coalitions are engaged in a wide variety of activities and
strategies specifically tailored to the needs of their communities.
We know that coalitions are making a difference. Due go the great
work of the Coalition for Drug-Free Greater Cincinnati, there was a 41-
percent decrease in marijuana use and 23-percent decrease in alcohol
use among 7th graders from 1993 to 2000. In a similar region where a
coalition did not exist, there was a 33-percent increase in marijuana
use and no change in alcohol use. The coalition, which I founded 8
years ago, is a comprehensive, long-term effort to mobilize every
sector of the Greater Cincinnati community to take an active role in
preventing substance abuse. It brings local community organizations

[[Page H82]]

together with business leaders, parents, teens, clergy, law
enforcement, and school officials to implement antidrug initiatives,
and has become a model for dozens of communities nationwide. I know
that there are similar coalitions in more than 5,000 communities
nationwide doing this good work and they need our support.
The positive results highlighted today indicate that prevention tools
like community coalitions work to create safe neighborhoods and a
better future for our young people.

____________________