[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 65 (Tuesday, May 17, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H3414-H3421]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                OVERVIEW OF THE WAR ON ILLEGAL NARCOTICS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, tonight I am going to give an overview of 
the war on illegal narcotics in the United States.
  I chair the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice Drug Policy and Human 
Services in the Government Reform Committee, which when the Republicans 
took over Congress in 1994, was reorganized by then Chairman Bill 
Zeliff followed by the gentleman from Illinois (Chairman Hastert) 
followed by the gentleman from Florida (Chairman Mica), and now myself, 
to be a committee where we could do an overview of all of the different 
parts of the war on illegal drugs.
  The challenge we have in narcotics is that this battle goes across 
many different agencies, and so it gets divided up somewhere in the 
neighborhood of 23 to 25 subcommittees in the House, a similar amount 
in the Senate, and nobody had been looking at it comprehensively.
  So it wound up over in this committee. The authorizing of the Office 
of National Drug Control Policy, commonly known as the Drug Czar's 
office, is not only overseen now by this subcommittee, but actually is 
now authorized as primary authorizer in this subcommittee as well, 
which has led to the national ad campaign being added to that, the 
Community Antidrug Coalition, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking 
Areas, and increasingly some of the other bills are being assigned to 
this committee because we can look at it holistically, and then it also 
gets sometimes joint referrals to other committees as we are working 
through similarly on the homeland security bill, as people have been 
watching through this.
  There is a couple of different points that I am going to cover 
tonight. One is kind of basically how we approach illegal drugs and how 
we are tackling this as a Congress, as a Presidency, and how this has 
evolved.
  Secondly, looking at some of the successes, then focusing some on the 
major challenges we have ranging from the meth challenge to the border 
challenge, which has been getting a lot of news, to Afghanistan, to the 
abuse of legal drugs like steroids. We have been having hearings in our 
full committee in Government Reform.
  Then some specific comments in detail on the President's which we 
have many concerns about, particularly his effort to, in effect, change 
many of the effective local programs, and nationalize them in 
Washington, and potentially gut the drug war of the United States.
  And I am hoping Members of Congress and their staffs are watching 
tonight, because this is a direct-on challenge that could, in fact, 
undermine everything we have been doing.

                              {time}  1930

  It needs a resounding defeat in this appropriations process so we do 
not have to fight this every year. A decisive win this year and a 
turning around and saying we are not abandoning State and local law 
enforcement and nationalizing everything in Washington is extremely 
critical in our drug war.
  Let me first start out with kind of a philosophy because often when 
we come to the floor of Congress, you hear bits and pieces about what 
we are doing in the drug war, but you do not see a holistic picture 
with this.
  So if you look at this as a start, the first role is not to have 
people use illegal narcotics. So we will start with safe and drug-free 
schools, trying to get to our schoolkids. We have community anti-drug 
coalitions to pull together communities in the United States to do 
these efforts.
  We have the national ad campaign, that you see the ads focused on 
marijuana; and then in conjunction with the direct national ad 
campaign, the in-kind contributions that work through a multiplicity of 
organizations, but particularly the Drug-Free America coalition that 
has used the best advertising agencies in the United States to develop 
ads, which those of us who all too well remember, this is your brain, 
this is your brain on drugs, looking at the fried egg.
  But the Partnership for a Drug-Free America has come up with many 
different creative ads that supplement the national ad campaign. It is 
a massive effort to try to battle everything from the jokes on the 
Tonight Show about our use of marijuana, to movies, to MTV, to all that 
type of stuff to make sure that we have a consistent national message 
out there.
  Then we have drug testing, because one of the best ways to do 
prevention is to drug test people. I have a company in my district that 
they were told they had a problem. They drug tested their company and 
find out a third of the people were high on the spot of cocaine, meth, 
and this high-grade marijuana. Now, they immediately fired them, that 
they were in clear violation of a company policy, but one-third of 
their employees. Another similar thing in another county they did, and 
I think it was closer to 25 percent, but it is extraordinary.
  Remember, these are not hair follicle tests. These are urine tests, 
which means it has to be fairly recent. A hair follicle test, you may 
be able to find drug use 30 days previous. Urine test means you are 
basically high on the job, running this equipment and doing this kind 
of stuff. So drug testing, if you know you are going to lose your job 
if you are drug tested, that is one of the best prevention programs; 
but those are some of the highlights of the prevention strategy, the 
national ad campaign, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, the 
community coalition, drug-free schools and drug testing.
  Then you go, okay, if this stuff's too cheap or too pure, basically 
it overwhelms the prevention policy. So what do we do? First, we try to 
get this stuff, get the illegal narcotics at its source.
  So let us take cocaine and heroin in Colombia. First, you try to 
eradicate it. You go there, spray the stuff, hit it multiple times a 
year. If you fail and some gets out, which it always does, then you try 
to interdict it in the source country and get it before it hits the 
shores of the Caribbean or the eastern Pacific. Once it gets in the 
water, now we are dealing rather than in an area maybe the size of 
Texas, we are dealing in an area that is huge, the Caribbean Sea and 
the eastern Pacific. So it is much harder to get it.
  If it gets to our border, in our land border, in Mexico, the Gulf of 
Mexico, Florida, comes up farther into California or up into New York 
City or

[[Page H3415]]

comes down through Canada, then we now have a border control effort; 
but as I will point out later, and as most people are aware, our border 
is not exactly sealed.
  Then if it gets through our border, then we move to the law 
enforcement question. I am from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Now it is starting 
to get closer to home. We failed to get it eradicated. We failed to 
interdict it in Colombia. We failed to get it as it moved into the 
transit zone. We failed to get it at the border. Now it is coming at 
our hometown.
  Now we will have drug task forces. We will have high-intensity drug 
trafficking areas. We will have Burn grant money going to set up drug 
task forces. We will have our local police forces. We will have our 
county and district-wide, in some cases, drug task forces trying to do 
the law enforcement side.
  Then people go to prison, and so we have prison re-entry programs 
trying to say, okay, we have locked these people up for drug crimes, 
how do we treat them in prison, how do we work with them as they are 
coming out of prison. We have drug court programs. That is kind of the 
law enforcement side.
  Then we have the drug treatment. When all else fails, we do drug 
treatment. Quite frankly, as Nancy Reagan, you can never win a war just 
treating the wounded. That is in effect saying everything else has 
failed. Drug treatment is really hard. I and others have very seldom 
ever met a drug addict who has not been through seven treatment 
programs. The programs themselves are expensive. They are hard to 
maintain. Just think of the things you struggle with in life, and 
classic is everybody tries to do a diet starting on New Year's Day, and 
by the third or fourth day, they have already failed some.
  If somebody has a real addiction problem, without a huge head change, 
it is a constant battle and they fall back and they fall back. 
Treatment cannot win the war on drugs, but treatment is a part of the 
effort to try to rehab those people who get mired in it, and we as a 
society need to help them.
  So if you look at that, we are trying to prevent; then we try to 
eradicate and interdict; then we try to enforce the law; then we try a 
drug treatment when all else fails and try to help the poor souls who 
got addicted.
  What are our success stories? The fact is this President made a goal 
to the Office of National Drug Control Policy that said we want a 5 
percent reduction in drug use in the United States every year. There is 
only way to achieve it: it is marijuana.

  Marijuana is the gateway to all other drug use. Yes, alcohol and 
tobacco for young people because it is also illegal. It is often the 
gateway to marijuana, but basically if you want to tackle the meth 
problem in the United States, you tackle the marijuana problem. If you 
want to tackle the cocaine problem in the United States, you tackle the 
marijuana problem. If you want to tackle the heroin problem in the 
United States, you tackle the marijuana problem. If you want to tackle 
Oxycontin abuse, you tackle the marijuana problem.
  When you tackle the marijuana problem and move that number, you move 
all the others. Maybe only one in 10, one in six, I do not know the 
precise number, it varies year to year or two and by age category, will 
ever move to another drug, but the fact is if you lower the number of 
people using marijuana, you lower the number of people using everything 
else more effectively than tackling those drugs in many cases. 
Marijuana is the gateway drug.
  The marijuana we are talking about in the United States is not what 
used to be called in Indiana ``ditch weed.'' It is not the Cheech and 
Chong stuff. It is not 4 to 6 percent THC content, which is bad enough; 
it is problematic. If you do not really want somebody coming down at 
you drunk, well you definitely do not want them coming at you on the 
highway high, but that is high. It is like being drunk.
  But when you get this marijuana that is coming in from Canada, that 
increasingly is being sold on the Internet so people can do hydroponic 
marijuana, you are talking 12, 20 percent, some cases even 30 percent, 
selling as high as cocaine and heroin. Why? Because it wipes you out 
like meth.
  This so-called medicinal marijuana has unfortunately been implying 
that marijuana's medicinal rather than that there are components in 
marijuana that we isolate like marinol that we should try to put in 
pill form and help people who cannot do other things, but marijuana is 
not medicinal. Marijuana is terribly addictive. It is the number one 
reason people are in drug treatment. It is the number one law 
enforcement problem in narcotics and is number one gateway. So you have 
got to tackle marijuana.
  We have made progress. The reason we have had 5 percent reductions 
steadily for 3 years now is because we have tackled marijuana.
  Let me put this in perspective, and this a frightening statistic 
because some people tell me, oh, you know, why can you not just win the 
war on drugs; how come we have to spend more money every year? Why does 
this not go away? Politicians love to say, okay, I voted for this 
appropriations bill, I passed this appropriations bill, it got 
implemented, now the problem is fixed, now let us focus on something 
else.
  I, as a Christian, believe the source problem is sin. You do not get 
rid of sin. There is nothing in the Bible that suggests sin is going to 
disappear. If you want to call it something else that is a struggle 
when you start to get addicted to an illegal substance, fine, call it 
that; but it is basically do not ask me why we cannot get rid of drug 
use in the United States and not ask the same question about rape, 
spouse abuse and child abuse and other things we struggle with. We 
never get rid of them.
  What we do is we try to control them the best we can, to contain it 
the best we can, to reduce the number of people who do it, but every 
day somebody wakes up in the morning and all of the sudden hits their 
kid or rapes somebody or in a crime of passion kills somebody. It does 
not go away. That is why we have police forces. That is why we can 
never back off of the narcotics thing.
  But when we back off, this is what we know: in 1993 and 1994, we had 
a disastrous policy under a previous President who now realizes, and at 
the end of his term changed around totally, but at the beginning of his 
term, it was a disaster. They cut the drug czar's office from 123 
people down to about 23. They cut the interdiction budget. They closed 
down a lot of the radar systems in the transit zone; and what happened 
in that period and then on top of that laughed about, I did not inhale, 
and did not have these aggressive anti-drug drug testing programs and 
things on the national media.
  What happened from 1992 to 1994, drug use in the United States went 
up so much that we have to have a 50 percent reduction from 1995 to get 
back to 1995. So the fact that we are getting 5 percent a year is not 
enough. It means we are 15 percent back to where we were at in 1995, 
but we have a long way to go to even get back to 1995.
  I have got to say this: people laugh at ``just say no'' under Nancy 
Reagan. It worked and it worked because it was not ``just say no.'' 
``The just say no'' was the symbol, just say no. They started the 
national ads, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. They started the 
safe and drug-free schools program. We created and got more aggressive 
in DEA. ``Just say no'' was the signature. But when we went at it, we 
had drops from 1981 to 1988. From 1988 to 1992, we had a little up and 
down, and then the collapse; and we are trying to get back to where we 
were.
  This administration, however, deserves credit. For every single year 
we have had a reduction, and someday maybe we will get back to where 
the previous President was; and quite frankly, in the last 2 years of 
the previous Presidency, former President Clinton did a great job of 
focusing with drug czar Barry McCaffrey. We made progress in those last 
2 years. It was turned around, and they realized their mistake; and 
they changed it around.
  Then, quite frankly, George Bush, our current President, got off to a 
difficult start because he wanted to take the drug czar office down 
from a Cabinet-level position. We battled that, but we have made 
progress for the last 3 years.
  After 9/11, we saw some changes in how the drug budget was allocated, 
but because we were screening more things and so on, we have been 
getting more narcotics. Because of better intelligence, however, we are 
seeing more of

[[Page H3416]]

what we are missing; but in fact, we are seizing more narcotics.

  We have made steady progress in Colombia. Just a few years ago, only 
about a third of the cities in Colombia had anybody who wanted to be a 
mayor. It is not how we have primaries in the United States and we have 
lots of people running for office in the United States. I have run now 
six times. I have had five primaries and six general elections with 
plenty of people wanting to run again the next time. It does not matter 
that I have big margins. They all want to run for Congress.
  They do not have that problem in Colombia because in the United 
States you do not get shot. Your odds are maybe once every 50 years a 
President gets shot at. We do not have too many candidates for Congress 
getting shot and murdered and assassinated. We do not have too many 
mayors, but in Colombia it was like a death warrant to run for office. 
So hardly anybody was doing it because we could not control the ground. 
Because of the Andean Initiative and the Colombia Initiative, in 
particular inside that, we now have in basically every significant town 
in Colombia, 100 percent now, a mayor. That might seem like small 
progress, but it is pretty big progress.
  We still have huge problems in Colombia. They have gone farther out 
into the national parks. They have gone into the Amazon basin, away 
from where it is easier to see them. It is farther for us to get the 
spray equipment there and the Blackhawk helicopters there. The FARC and 
the terrorist groups are able to run and pick their targets where, as 
we are trying to cover in effect and defend a bigger portion of the 
nation in Colombia. The fact is that it is progressing.
  Secondarily, one of the fundamental questions is that it used to be 
about a third was in Colombia, a little more than that was in Bolivia, 
and another chunk of it was in Peru. The question is, was this going 
back to Bolivia and Peru if we made progress in Colombia, something we 
have to watch. But right now it does not appear to be going back. Plus, 
it was the growth of coca and poppy that was occurring in Bolivia and 
Peru, whereas in Colombia they have always been the processing dealer 
network.
  It is close to the United States. As many people may remember, Panama 
used to be part of Colombia. Much of that then hops right up to Mexico 
and comes across the land border. Whereas if you push it farther south, 
and we do see problems in Paraguay and Brazil and northeast coast of 
South America, but the bottom line is, if we can get control of 
Colombia and in a sense make it a more peaceable nation, a nation that 
has thousands of police officers dying because of America's and Western 
European's addiction to cocaine and heroin, their supposed revolution 
is basically a narco-terrorist war funded by United States drug addicts 
and drug use.
  So we have made some progress in Colombia, and that is good news.
  We have made incremental progress in other areas, but now let me 
cover a couple of the challenges.
  One is methamphetamines, and meth is a huge issue for us to deal 
with. I want to put a couple of national perspective things here 
because probably about from people who are watching tonight, Members 
and staff are watching tonight, about 35 States do not really have a 
meth problem. Some of those 35 actually have a little bit, but it is 
hardly on the radar screen.
  Fifteen States, there is no other drug problem on the evening news 
except for meth. In my home State, if you watch the news, you would 
think that meth is 90 percent of the drug use, and it is not; but there 
are some reasons why meth is such a tough issue in the 15 or so States 
where it is there.
  Hawaii was the first State to really have a huge meth problem. Then 
we saw the superlabs in California, and former Congressman Doug Ose had 
then-chairman, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica), and I go out; and 
we did hearings on some of the early superlabs in California where they 
were producing methamphetamines.

                              {time}  1945

  These crazy people, when they get addicted to meth, they go crazy. It 
is much different. It is a little like crack, but it grabs ahold of 
your brain and you go crazy. These people would blow these things up in 
their houses because they would get so addicted they would not know 
what they were doing, and their house would blow up and kids were dying 
in California.
  We had an unbelievable case that led to a law in California. I mean I 
do not know how else to say it, but some of these were idiots; their 
kid was cold, and to warm them up they put them in their stove and 
burned their kid to death because they were so disoriented. They do not 
have any clue what they are doing. This drug takes you over.
  There was an article in People Magazine in the district of the 
gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Boozman) about a majority of the town that 
got addicted to meth. As this happens, one of the problems with meth is 
we do not have a lot of treatment programs that work with a meth 
addict. It is a huge challenge. Furthermore, if they are cooking at 
home, and by cooking at home, making meth at their home, the 
environmental damage and environmental cleanup is incredible. It is 
often not even safe for the police to go in.
  Take Warsaw, Indiana, with Sheriff Rovenstine, who has a drug task 
force group, and they hear of a meth lab out in Kosciusko County, he 
has to send his group of four guys out there. They will often have to 
wait 4 to 6 hours until the Indiana State police can get there with a 
cleanup lab. They cannot really go into the house because they do not 
know how dangerous it is environmentally for them. They do not have all 
the equipment to do so.
  So you have tied up your entire drug task force in a county of 80,000 
people because of one meth lab, and he may only be cooking for himself, 
someone in his family, and maybe one other person. It is not like a big 
drug operation, but it ties up your police force. It is a tremendous 
cleanup problem.
  Now, in Hawaii, they have had actually one or two apartment complexes 
where these people are starting to cook in some of the urban areas. We 
have not seen too much of that in the United States, maybe a little in 
Detroit, a little in New Orleans and starting to come in at the edges 
of some cities, but mostly this is a rural-small town problem so far in 
the United States. But they have had in some of the apartments where 
you have to pay from $300 to $600 before you rent the apartment to make 
sure it is cleaned. Because if somebody has cooked meth in there and 
now you bring children in, you can endanger your children's health 
because someone was cooking meth in the apartment you have now moved 
into. Do we really want to get in this situation around the United 
States?
  So we are having some difficulties in how to address this, because 
here is the fundamental problem with meth. Meth is only 8 percent of 
the drug use in the United States, and it is not moving much. As it 
moves east and marches across the United States, the reaction in the 
communities is so aggressive that you start to get control and a 
flattening out in the State where it was, and then it moves into the 
next State. So as we watch it move from Kansas to Arkansas and into 
Missouri, into southwest Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and watch it 
head into North Carolina right now, it starts to stabilize on the 
western side but expands on the eastern side. It does not mean it is 
solved on the western side.
  And often the media coverage is delayed. So the media coverage may be 
highest now in some of those States when in fact their biggest problem 
was 2 years ago, because the community is so outraged they are starting 
to deal with it. Nevertheless, it does seem to be expanding nationally.
  The insidious thing about this is that of this 8 percent meth, only 
about a third of this meth is actually from the home cookers. The 
biggest percentage, even in the State of Indiana, which is about sixth 
in the number of meth labs, and my district is second next to the 
district of my colleague, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Hostettler), 
which is the southwestern part, even in our districts 67 percent of the 
meth is coming in from super labs, formerly from California but mostly 
from Mexico across the border.
  So what happens is that meth is somewhat a little more urban and it 
comes in and is cheaper and more potent than the home-cooked meth. So 
we have a double problem here that Members of Congress are wrestling

[[Page H3417]]

with. One is what we are hearing from home are the meth labs, because 
we see the dangers of blowing up and burning houses down. They blow up 
their van if they get in a car accident because they are carrying 
anhydrous ammonia in it.
  One person in one small town in my district was one and a half turns 
from having a huge regional anhydrous ammonia tank explode that would 
have obliterated everyone in that town of 700 within minutes. There 
would have been no ability to run, and they would have been deader than 
we would have been in this Capitol building if that plane had had C4 in 
it and hit the Capitol building last week. They would have been all 
obliterated just like that.
  So as we try to tackle the meth problem, however, the fact is that 
while they put the pressure on the police forces, while they put the 
pressure on the cleanup, while they are endangering their children, 
they are not even the majority of the meth problem. So we have to try 
to figure out how to take down these larger organizations. The DEA, in 
a great case with the Department of Homeland Security, interdicted what 
looked like at that point as much as 40 to 50 percent, maybe even as 
high as 60 percent, of the meth precursors that were coming across the 
Mexican border, pseudoephedrine.
  Now, I am not going to really get into debating bills right now on 
how to address the pseudoephedrine question, but I have some concerns 
about the State laws that are passing, and I think at the Federal level 
we need to get at it at the wholesale level rather than shut down every 
little small rural town that has a grocery store or every small town 
that has a pharmacy because they have to put this behind the counter. 
That is too hard. We need to address it at the wholesale level and the 
production level in China, in India, in the Netherlands, in Belgium, 
and we need to set up meth watch programs. If we have to, we will just 
ban pseudoephedrine in the United States, as now something like eight 
States have, and it is increasing every day.

  The fact is, as we heard with the Oklahoma law, by banning 
pseudoephedrine and taking 100 cold medicines, basically, and reducing 
that number and putting it behind the counter, what happens is they 
merely go to States where you do not have that. Since 35 States do not 
have a meth problem, they will not be too anxious to get rid of their 
cold medications and put them behind a counter if they do not have a 
meth problem in their State. Not to mention there has been a little 
discussion here and there on the floor about what to do about Canadian 
pharmaceuticals.
  Obviously, you can get pseudoephedrine the same way you can get 
anything else from Canada and Mexico, on line. And it is a little naive 
to think we are going to be able to control pseudoephedrine by closing 
all these grocery stores down that do not have pharmacies and making 
the pharmacists put it behind the counter and reduce the amount of cold 
medicine. It is not going to work and, quite frankly, Oklahoma is 
gradually learning that. But it does not mean their heart is not in the 
right place and we do not have to figure out a way to address it, 
because meth is an incredible problem. But we will need some national 
solutions, and the bigger wholesale systems can do this better than a 
little country grocery store.
  I want to move off the meth to the border, another subject that has 
been in the news a lot lately. I said earlier that most people are 
increasingly understanding that the border is not quite sealed. That is 
an understatement. Basically, 900,000 to a million people are crossing 
the border a year. Our subcommittee over the last few years has held 
hearings at San Ysidro, which is the San Diego corridor. We have held 
hearings in cells on the Tohono O'odham reservation to the west of 
Nogales. We have held hearings at Nogales. We had a hearing over in the 
Sierra Vista area and on over to the Douglas area at the Arizona 
border, as well as in Phoenix. We have held a hearing in Las Cruces in 
the New Mexico sector. We have held multiple hearings in El Paso. We 
have been down to McAllen and Laredo on the Texas border, as well as 
hearings on the north border.
  I have spent a lot of time on the border. Earlier this year, not that 
many weeks ago, myself and Nick Coleman and David Thomasson and Mark 
Wiede and Tracy Jackson from my staff spent 4 days on the southwest 
border working on a number of these issues.
  It is easy to confuse immigration questions and terrorist questions 
and narcotics questions when you get to the border because they are the 
same people. If you cannot stop an illegal immigrant, you cannot stop a 
drug dealer. And if you cannot stop a drug dealer, you sure cannot stop 
a terrorist. We have all three elements moving through. Now, they are 
not all the same people. I would argue that out of the million people 
coming in, somewhere around 900,000 are coming to a job. And we have to 
figure out how to get them separated.
  Now, I have heard people say, and I support, getting 2,000 Border 
Patrol, and the administration is only talking 400 or something like 
that. But we could not stop it if there were 20,000 Border Patrol. And 
if we have got them all on the land border, they are going to move, 
because we cannot even see right now planes coming in and boats coming 
in the whole Caribbean Basin because we do not have any aerostats up 
and we are blind. They can get across multiple ways. They can come 
around Canada. We cannot put a person from the Border Patrol or the 
military, the Guard, every few feet. So we have to figure out a 
realistic way to separate those who have a job who are coming into the 
United States from those that are illegal.
  Furthermore, let me give some astounding statistics, and I am not 
going to be too particular here, because I do not want to encourage 
people. But let us just say, hypothetically, there are some border 
crossings right now where if you come across into the United States, 
because we have heard a lot the last couple of weeks about the Arizona 
border and how people are moving across the Arizona border and we do 
not have a fence there and that is the big transit point. First off, 
let me say, clearly, for the record, I do not believe most people are 
coming through in between the border crossings. I believe most people 
are coming through the border crossings.
  Secondly, I am not absolutely convinced that they are mostly coming 
through Arizona. I think Texas has a bigger border, and probably more 
are coming through Texas than Arizona. But Arizona has a problem that 
has been growing exponentially. That, nobody disagrees with. And to 
some degree between the border ports of entry California is more 
controlled because of the fence. So Arizona has the newest part of the 
problem and the most dramatic part of the problem right now.
  But let us talk about what is happening at this border. If somebody 
comes across the border and we decide we are going to put them in jail, 
hypothetically, the question is where would you put them? We do not 
have jails for a million people. The net result of this is that the 
Federal Government in some places does not even take a case unless, and 
this is on the record, I am not disclosing this, they do not even take 
a case unless it is 700 pounds of marijuana. Now, think about the bust 
in your district. You are talking one pound, ounces. We have people in 
jail long term over ounces, and they will not take a case over 700 
pounds. Sometimes, at the local level, they do not take 200 pounds.
  Let me put this in colloquial expression, as I said: You do not 
arrest somebody if they are carrying 150 pounds across the border? They 
said, Mr. Souder, our jails are full. We cannot even put local 
criminals in prison because we have so many people running drugs to 
Indiana, running drugs to Illinois, running drugs to Ohio, running 
drugs to Michigan, running drugs to New York through our town. We 
cannot even control the law enforcement problems in our town because of 
your addictions in the Midwest and the East and across the South 
because they are running through our area. Unless you are going to 
build our prisons, we do not have anyplace to put them.

  So now we are not just talking about a guy who is walking up to a job 
in an RV plant in Indiana, we are talking about we are not even locking 
up drug dealers because we do not have anywhere to put them. So now let 
us get back to this person, like this one person who was picketed up in 
Arizona. They stopped him and said, you are coming in illegally. He 
said why did

[[Page H3418]]

you stop me? I have been doing this twice a year for 8 years.
  Not only do we not have control of the border, we do not have hardly 
any control over the border. At one crossing we were told during a 
committee hearing that as long as you do not have another crime, other 
than entering the United States illegally, that you could cross 17 
times before they detained you overnight. Now, 17 times before they 
detain you overnight.
  Now, the latest is at that border crossing and the other major border 
crossings the number of times you can cross before they detain you 
overnight is forever. We do not have anyplace to put people. There is 
no current principle that says you will ever detain. In fact, when we 
were at San Ysidro, a van had a couple of large individuals concealed 
on the top. They were from Brazil. Basically, they had not committed 
other crimes so their penalty was we paid their way back to Brazil. The 
taxpayers got the penalty, not the individuals.
  Now, back in Brazil they may have purchased a package, which is also 
public record, I am not disclosing anything tonight, the packages are 
for sale in Mexico from $8,000 to $12,000 for Central America, from 
$12,000 to $16,000 or $12,000 to $18,000 for Middle Easterners, 30,000, 
basically, that in 7 days you will get into the United States or you 
will get your money back.
  So if these people from Brazil bought a travel package for the United 
States, they get their overnight, they get their food, and they are 
guaranteed they will get in. So if we fly them back to Brazil, they 
will be on a plane back, as part of their money-back guarantee, and 
they will be back in the United States. Of course, if they get caught 
again, the penalty again will be to send them back to Brazil and it 
will take a couple more days for them to get back.
  Another individual we saw there at the border had a fake ID. They 
said, look, her face does not match up. And she was really nonplussed 
because she knew what her penalty was going to be. After we got done 
examining her stuff, after we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars 
checking her out, she knew she was going to go back across and a little 
later that night or some time later she would come back across again.
  Now, the fundamental question is: If most people who are illegal are 
coming across the legal border crossings, then why are they running 
through the desert? I have been asking that question, too: Why are they 
running through the desert? Do they not know there is no penalty for 
crossing at our major crossings, other than having been inconvenienced? 
It can be a problem theoretically, if we ever change our laws, because 
they will be in our system 17 times, but right now there is no real 
penalty.

                              {time}  2000

  Some of it is an inconvenience to the coyotes. The coyotes are the 
people who are like a travel agent. They do the bookings. They give a 
guarantee. Obviously, if they can get you through the first or second 
time into the United States, it is cheaper for them. They do not have 
to pay extra meals or overnight. They want to keep you together and get 
you through the first time. That apparently has become a problem going 
through the main border crossings because if you bring across a group 
of 20 people and two of them get caught, it is inconvenient. You are 
bringing 20, and there are only 18 that get through. Plus, you gave a 
money-back guarantee. So they like to move through the desert areas and 
the areas between the border crossings for their convenience because 
occasionally our disruption is an inconvenience. It is not like they 
are going to go to jail. It is just an inconvenience.
  The other thing is we are systematically, and some of the things this 
Congress needs to look at, the penalty for being a coyote is 2 years. 
Prosecutors are overwhelmed. They cannot take people with 700 pounds of 
marijuana, how can they take a coyote, and for a 2-year penalty, 
probably getting suspended after 6 months, what is the point.
  We ought to have tougher penalties not on the immigrants who are 
crossing, but for the people who are organizing these huge systems, and 
that penalty ought to be more than 2 years. I am not going to talk much 
about the people on the border who are patriots and the Minutemen. They 
are frustrated, people running through the ranches. You are a rancher 
and you see a couple of people coming across. You want them gathered. 
To come and get them means we may be leaving 100 people in another 
location. But it is your ranch, and you are upset. I understand that. 
We need to get better control. But as a practical matter, you may be 
stopping and it very well may be that the Minutemen did more to bring 
drugs into the United States and more of these operations in because 
they diverted our resources over to picking off here and there, and may 
have, this is a classic of are we running a picket fence on the border 
or a backstop way to see how the networks are going. It is not 
dissimilar to other major drug issues.
  Are we taking down an individual user on the street, or are we trying 
to turn him into who is selling him, and who is selling him, and who is 
selling him. And by the way, how did it get across the border? Who did 
you corrupt? What border guards did you buy? They are corrupting people 
in our own embassies and military. Who are you buying?
  If we figure out those things, we do not have to bust the little 
people who usually wind up bearing the brunt of this. We have to get to 
the systems. If you take down the people at the border, we cannot 
figure out, because Customs historically and the border patrol used to 
bang at this before they were both at DHS. Now they bang internally, 
because the picket fence wants to stop everybody.
  Customs want to let some through so we can see where is the van 
behind them; where are they working; who is paying their way and 
getting them to the border. Furthermore, there is probably a good 
chance they are financing this with narcotics. How do we stop the 
deaths in the United States from narcotics use if we are stopping them 
at the border and we cannot figure out the patterns?
  Let me tell you about another pattern. We hear a lot about identity 
theft in the United States. A friend tried to get a credit card and 
found out four other people had her Social Security number. The good 
news is she had four times as much money in her Social Security 
account. They did not steal her Social Security number because they 
wanted to use her credit cards. But she had to go through all kinds of 
things with her birth certificate and everything else to prove that was 
actually her Social Security number.
  Much of the identity theft in the United States is because employers, 
and there has been a lot of discussion on this, employers cannot 
discriminate. If you show them a Social Security number and a card with 
your picture on it, they cannot question a Hispanic or anybody else of 
any other background about how they got it unless there is reasonable 
suspicion that it was doctored. That is because otherwise this can 
become very quickly a very racially biased harassment thing by 
employers against minorities. I understand that.
  So employers' hands are tied. If somebody gives them a document that 
looks legal, they cannot pursue it; and we are unlikely to change that 
law because I believe there would be racial discrimination expanded if 
we changed that.
  So we have to get to the altered documents. In my district, two green 
card manufacturers' places have been taken down. In another county, a 
third green card manufacturing place was taken down. If we have 900,000 
illegals in the United States in the workplace, that means that the 
bulk of those have illegal cards with somebody's Social Security number 
on them.
  Unless we get an immigration strategy that works here, we have the 
motive, whether it is deliberate to steal your credit card and get your 
Social Security number or whether it is just random that they hit your 
Social Security number, we are having identities stolen because we are 
not dealing with the legal immigration questions and the border 
questions.
  At the border as we move through, for example, one of the side things 
that is happening here is it is even hitting our national parks 
because, much like I said in Colombia, if you start to seal off some 
portions and build fences, they are going to go through places where 
you do not have fences. So at Organ Pipe National Monument they

[[Page H3419]]

shot a ranger going through. There are very few trails that are safe to 
hike in Organ Pipe anymore. One of the best hiking trails in the United 
States is closed because it is not safe. You do not know who is packing 
guns or selling dope. You go through the washes, and we have hidden and 
disguised in sagebrush strips because they have started taking their 
SUVs through the washes and the stream beds. We talk about trying to 
preserve nature, they are tearing up the parks with this stuff. We pop 
the tires, and then they abandon the vehicles.
  When I was walking the border with the superintendent with people 
from the Federal Government, people were crouched waiting to come 
across. The strangest case in Organ Pipe, we had a barb wire fence at 
the border crossing, and you can see they just cut the fence. Every 
time we fix the fence, they cut the fence. There is no effective 
control, especially if they just come back the next day.
  But in one section, there is no fence and it is over in land in 
Mexico, and it is intact. I said, What is the deal with that? They 
said, Well, the Mexican farmer there stole the fence and moved it over 
to his property, but we did not move it back because that farmer is 
really protective of his fence, and they all have to go around.
  Mr. Speaker, think about this a second. A Mexican farmer stole the 
American fence and put it around his farm, and he is more protective of 
the fence at his farm than we are of the border. Interesting in a 
strange way. But at least in that area we are controlled, in a bizarre 
way.
  You also can see all sorts of empty milk cartons. If it is white, 
that means it was water. If it is black, that means it was drugs. You 
see drug scatter all over. In some cases it is pocket change. Other 
cases it will come over on old-fashioned mule trains.

  We held a hearing in the Tohono O'odham Reservation. They have been 
screaming that they have been abandoned there. This was several years 
ago, maybe a year and a half. We were there. The previous year, 1,500 
pounds of marijuana went through. In the previous 2 months, 1,500 
pounds went through. The day we had the hearing with all of the Border 
Patrol cars, all of the Department of Homeland Security personnel, more 
Federal officials than they had seen in Tohono O'odham Reservation 
probably for a year and a half, at one place, they just decided they 
were going to start taking down some cases.
  Guys coming out of the hearing would stop people. They picked up 300 
pounds in one, 500 in another, 400 in another. Basically, by the time I 
got done with the hearing, they had picked up 1,700 pounds of marijuana 
running through the town of Sells. And later that afternoon, they 
sicked some Blackhawks on a group of seven SUVs. Basically, the front 
vehicle shot their way through even with all of the Customs and Border 
Patrol people chasing them. But they did get six of them and had 
another huge bust that evening.
  The point being, it is so massive we do not even know how to deal 
with it. Until we work out a strategy to figure out how to get the 
legal people through, there is no way, whether that is work permit with 
citizenship, long term if they learn to speak English, renounce dual 
citizenship, multiple ways. Somehow we have to do this because we 
cannot do it. We are trying desperately to manage this. People can yell 
at the Customs and Border Patrol, and I believe they need to get rid of 
the division between the Border and Customs Patrol and ICE because it 
does not work. You cannot do the investigations. They have to be able 
to move back from the border and figure out how that network of people 
bring people in then go to the city. If we can find that out, we can 
find out who is providing people with green cards when they get into 
the van and who is making those green cards, who is stealing our Social 
Security numbers.
  If we just look at here are the people standing on the border behind 
the big white fence, and here are the people investigating over here, 
and they are not interconnected, this is silly. We need to tackle this 
in the Department of Homeland Security and in the reorganization. Some 
people are concerned about having the deportation changed. Other people 
do not want deportation there. This is a silly division. It is not 
working, and we have to get this addressed.
  As we tackle this and as we move forward and get Department of 
Homeland Security more organized and work with an immigration strategy, 
then we can start to get control of the narcotics strategy. Remember 
this, 24,000 people a year, that is the last figure we have from 2003, 
die of illegal narcotics. Slightly over 3,000 died at the World Trade 
Center. So since 9/11, we have had 24,000 a year die of narcotics. If 
we divert funds from Border Patrol Agents looking for the potential 
terrorists all of the time and forget that thousands, more than 20,000 
people, are dying of narcotics, we have focused wrong. We have to watch 
the terrorists.
  Plus, as we have talked and I have met in Europe and in the United 
States with the Swiss bankers, as we have talked with other countries 
where they historically have been able to hide money, as we shut down 
certain foundations where they have been laundering money, where are 
they going to go? To narcotics, to human trafficking, and to some 
degree to diamonds and other sorts of commodities that they can do 
illegally. But the number one places are narcotics and human 
trafficking.
  We are seeing these different terrorist groups around the world 
interconnect. As we drive them underground, and as we clean up 
legitimate banks, as we clean up legitimate places, they go to the 
harder-to-find places. And the same people, to take Afghanistan, for 
example, what do you think is paying for the weapons that killed our 
soldiers the other week? Do Members think it was, say, minicomputers? 
Was it Afghanistan, the great producer of SUVs? Was it the bread basket 
of Afghanistan producing soybeans? No. They used to produce food stuff 
for the entire world. Now Afghanistan produces heroin for the entire 
world.
  As the exiled King told us twice before he went back, and once over 
there, we were the bread basket of Europe. But we have been told that 
we do not want to eradicate their livelihood because we need to find 
alternative development.
  The question is do we go to the city of Fort Wayne and tell these 
kids on the street corner, you are making $600 as a lookout, and we are 
not going to tell you we are going to throw you in jail until we find 
you a job that pays you $600 an hour? That is ridiculous.
  We say we are going to lock you up and you should get a legitimate 
job that pays minimum wage, and you learn skills and move up. It is the 
same thing we faced in Colombia. There is no amount of palm heart in 
Colombia that is going to make as much as growing cocaine. So unless 
you think your cocaine crop is going to get eradicated, unless you 
think your heroin crop is going to get eradicated, and we do that 
multiple times a year and we are persistent, then you say, hey, what 
about the palm heart and what about the soybeans because I can feed my 
family and live on this, but I cannot make it if it is heroin. I cannot 
make it if I do not grow something; and if you are going to eradicate 
the heroin, I have to grow something legitimate.

                              {time}  2015

  In Afghanistan, there has been a reluctance. Look, it is not a stable 
country. Nobody successfully ever really governed Afghanistan. So it is 
a challenge. We say we have free elections in Afghanistan. When we had 
free elections, the question was, were you free to oppose your local 
drug lord? The answer is in about 20 percent of the country. That is 
better than it was ever before in Afghanistan. At least people lined up 
to vote the way their local drug lord wanted them to vote. But that is 
not our traditional American way of democracy. I do not mean to demean 
it. I believe President Karzai is working at it.
  But let us be real here. We have just seen the largest production of 
heroin out of Afghanistan out of anyplace in the world under our watch. 
We criticize the Taliban. The 3 years of the Taliban together do not 
equal what Afghanistan produced in heroin under our watch. We cannot 
sit here and twiddle our thumbs and pretend like this is not going to 
be a problem. Members of Congress are going to go over on CODELs and 
they are going to show us great progress. They do not have to grow any 
heroin for the next 2 or 3 years. They

[[Page H3420]]

have the biggest load in history. The Taliban said in their last year 
in power that they were going to grow zero amount of heroin poppy. To 
the best of our knowledge, they grew zero amount of heroin poppy. Why? 
They had such a stockpile with a fraction of what they have now, they 
did not have to grow any because if they grew it, there was no market. 
They have got it wholesaled and stockpiled. What is happening is if we 
do not get those stockpiles, we can have all the CODELs go over 
Congress that we want. They will come back here, they will go on Fox, 
they will go on CNN and say, the Afghanis are doing a great job of 
eradicating the poppy. It is irrelevant. The biggest amount, 4 years' 
worth of the world's supply has been grown this year and is being 
processed. We have to figure out where it is, take out the wholesale 
methods because what we are already seeing is, and our administration 
is starting to awaken and starting to go after this and the military is 
starting to grant this, but because we did not eradicate it a few 
months ago, it is now starting to move and it is into the countries 
around it so in our appropriations request, we have moneys in it to try 
to get it as it is moving and we are going to spend more money chasing 
this stuff than if we had tackled it a few months ago while we were 
asleep.
  Now, we can never let this happen again and we need to work with the 
president of Afghanistan but it needs to be clear, you cannot be a 
narco-state. The people that are shooting at us, the people who are 
crossing over into Iran, the people that then move down into Iraq, 
where are they getting their money for their guns? This is not a hard 
thing. They are not growing other things. They are not doing other 
things. Every pistol, every RPG pretty much is funded by narcotics. 
This is going to become more and more the case as we move around, more 
human trafficking which leads us back to both problems on the southwest 
border.
  Let me just go through one other aspect of the budget, because the 
budget has lots of good things in it in drug treatment. They have some 
good things in it with drug courts. They are sustaining the national ad 
campaign. But I have a deep fundamental concern. The ranking Democrat 
on our subcommittee the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) and I 
have done multiple letters to Members of Congress over the past few 
weeks, Dear Colleagues, from police chiefs. This is not a question 
about cutting drug dollars. This is a systematic, philosophical change 
of this administration in how they want to approach narcotics. What 
they have done are the following pieces. As I described at the 
beginning, there is a prevention component, an international component, 
a law enforcement component and a drug treatment. On drug treatment, 
they are fine. In international, they are fine. On the law enforcement 
and prevention, this budget is a disaster.

  Let me give you first the prevention strategy. They have none. Their 
prevention strategy is this. These parts are fine: run national ads, do 
drug testing in the school, and have a flat-funded community coalitions 
and only the national part of the drug-free schools. What they have 
eliminated in the prevention program is the safe and drug-free schools 
program which is the program that drives directly down to the schools. 
They are only saving the national ones where Washington gets to make 
the decision which schools it goes to. The national ad campaign is 
basically flat-funded. The community drug coalitions are flat-funded. 
There is no coordinated vision of a prevention strategy. The biggest 
single component, bigger than the other components combined, is safe 
and drug-free schools and they zero out the local and State part.
  That sets the tone for what is coming next, either flat-funding or 
zeroing out State and local. Then we get to law enforcement. 
Incredibly, there is no other way to say it but incredibly, they 
propose in effect to gut the HIDTA program by transferring it to OCADEF 
and then to eliminate and zero out Byrne grants which funds in many 
cases the drug task forces. They are then proposing, also, to cut back 
the dollars that go for equipment for local drug task forces, CTAC, and 
that when you put this together, along with a whole series of other 
smaller things that they are doing, let me describe briefly what the 
high intensity drug trafficking thing was and the philosophy and why we 
created a drug czar's office, because there are really two components 
to this. We created a drug czar's office in the United States because 
what happens to the FBI, what happens to the Department of Homeland 
Security, what happens to lots of different agencies is they are fair 
weather friends on the drug war. Their primary mission is not 
narcotics. The FBI's primary responsibility is organized crime. The FBI 
deals with multiple issues. Many times that is narcotics. But when 
other things arise, they are diverted. They are not fair weather 
friends in the sense of philosophically. They are fair weather friends 
that if the Attorney General says, boy, we have this problem over here, 
church burnings over here, missing children over here, national 
security interests over here, we have this problem of stolen patents 
over here, the FBI runs to those issues. They are not like the DEA. 
They do not have narcotics as their main enforcement. The Department of 
Homeland Security has so many missions, the Coast Guard alone can have 
their head spinning. They are supposed to protect a Great Lakes nuclear 
power plant, but if a sailboat tips over, they are supposed to run out 
there and also catch any fishermen. So they have a homeland security 
thing, a search and rescue which is still mostly what they do, and a 
fisheries component. And, by the way, catch any narcotics that are on 
the water. So they are running around. Narcotics is one of their 
missions but not their primary mission. The question was, we needed an 
office in the United States, a Cabinet level, that says drugs are my 
mission.
  Inside the Department of Homeland Security we created a 
counternarcotics office because we need somebody in that agency who 
stands there with some staff, that is his staff, not detailees like is 
currently the case and unfortunately still the case with our bill 
today, who can sit at the table and say, hey, guys, don't forget about 
narcotics. Remember, homeland security is related to narcotics. With 
Mr. Bonner and others, we have the former head of the DEA, but we are 
not going to have that all the time at the office of Customs and Border 
Patrol. We have to have a systematic way that narcotics are built into 
the Department of Homeland Security and that we have a drug czar, a 
director of ONDCP, who focuses on the drug issue.
  The HIDTA program was set up as a 50-50 vote. What we said is, let's 
send $2 million, $3 million to the city of Chicago. Then maybe the City 
of Chicago will have their local law enforcement people come in and we 
will get a unified center to pool our resources. So, for example, we 
stop these embarrassments like one where the distinguished junior 
Senator from New York, when she was the First Lady, was going shopping 
and they were about to do a drug deal where she was going in and 
potentially have a shootout, only the Secret Service was not integrated 
until we had HIDTA with how to share the information. Or many of us 
have heard stories about the FBI arresting the DEA because they did not 
deconflict, or national law enforcement arresting local law enforcement 
people after doing a 6-month case with thousands of dollars, finding 
out that the person that were selling and the person that were buying 
were both working for the government. So we run deconfliction centers. 
We have attracted local law enforcement in to coordinate. Because we 
said, look, if you come in here, we are a 50-50 partnership. We are 
going to set up these in the highest risk areas of the United States, 
along the southwest border, in the big cities. In New York City, we 
have consolidated homeland security and narcotics and we have a 
tremendous HIDTA that is regional across into New Jersey and 
Connecticut and New York and this budget would bust it up. It would 
just end it.

  The police chief from Phoenix could not have said it more clearly at 
our hearing. He said, my mayor told me in city council that I have to 
cut my budget in the city of Phoenix for police. I have three people 
over at the high intensity drug trafficking area, the HIDTA. I realize 
they are doing the arresting. They are critical to our anti-narcotics 
efforts and our crime efforts. I asked him what they want in the city 
of Phoenix. He said, go after murder,

[[Page H3421]]

drugs and gangs. He said, they are all three the same thing. They are 
drugs. Eighty-five percent of the murders, all the gangs, they are all 
narcotics. So we kept the three people in the HIDTA and I cut other 
people. But let me tell you, you transfer this to OCADEF or another 
agency from HIDTA, they are gone. We had a cooperation agreement with 
the United States. The Justice Department says about OCADEF, which is a 
wonderful agency and has a function, but it is Washington-run. It does 
not have a 50-50. I asked them about that. They would not guarantee 
that. They do not have a plan. They do not know why. They do not have 
any evidence that the HIDTAs are not working. In fact, we have a 5 
percent reduction in drug use around the United States. All these 
things are working reasonably well. They cannot list one single HIDTA 
that they want to get rid of. What they want is control of the funds 
and HIDTA does not give them control of the funds because the HIDTAs 
have, in Chicago I think it is $30 million invested from State and 
local and $3 million from the Federal. That is a wonderful deal, if we 
could leverage $3 million and get $30 million and we are seeing this in 
market after market.
  So what does the administration propose to do it? Gut it. Then the 
Byrne grants are there. That is a complete zero out. My drug task force 
in my district does not exist without a Byrne grant. That is what keeps 
it there. That is what has kept it there for the last 10 years. Every 
year they have to spend a limited amount of coming in here saying, 
please deal with the Byrne grants because we keep proposing it. Every 
year we put the Byrne grants down. This is the year to say, Look, we're 
not going to change this program. Stop proposing it. We're not going to 
change. But this year because they are doing Byrne grants 
simultaneously with the HIDTA changes, simultaneously with 
nationalizing the drug-free schools programs, simultaneously reducing 
the money going to State and local law enforcement for equipment, what 
you see is a national strategy that I never thought I would see out of 
my party, which is Washington knows best because you guys at the local 
level just don't cooperate right.
  And then they are eliminating the meth hotspots program. This is a 
program that is not authorized, that is not developed. So how did it 
get to be $35 million last year? I was told, well, these are earmarks 
and we don't like earmarks. Welcome to the real world. Congress does 
earmarks. I have been suggesting to them for several years, maybe, if 
it is a growing program and $35 million is now coming through in 
earmarks, you ought to come up with a meth strategy, because maybe 
Congress is going to pass it again. My prediction is that meth hot 
spots will still be there because the number one thing of anybody who 
has a district with meth is, I have got to go after this meth and I am 
going to go into the appropriations bill and I am going to earmark it 
because if the drug czar does not deal with it, if the Attorney General 
does not deal with it, if DHS does not deal with it, then I have to 
deal with it because nobody else has a strategy to deal with meth in my 
district. So the idea that they are going to zero out meth hot spots is 
a tad too cute for the budget. We are not going to eliminate the meth 
hot spots program. We have to figure out how to run a better antimeth 
program. We have to figure out if there are problems and making the 
HIDTAs more integrated with the national strategy and work with it. But 
democratic government and empowerment suggests that if you have got in 
the United States right now, every single police chief, every single 
anti-narcotics officer, we have checked, the head of the National 
Narcotics Officers Association has said, he does not know one person 
who is for the President's budget with this and he does not even know 
one narcotics officer in America who was asked.
  At our hearing on this, the head of the National Narcotics Officers 
Association said this. The head of the Speaker's home HIDTA in Chicago 
said he had not been asked. A sheriff who heads the meth HIDTA in 
Missouri, who was recommended to us by our Republican whip, said he had 
not been asked. The head of the Baltimore-Washington HIDTA for this 
area said he was never asked. The vice chairman of the southwest border 
HIDTA, the police chief in Phoenix, said he had never been asked. If 
you do not talk to the southwest border, if you do not talk to the 
leadership's home HIDTAs, if you do not talk to a single narcotics 
officer in the United States, how do you have the gall to send us a 
budget to nationalize this?
  It is really important that fellow Members of Congress send a clear 
message. We believe in State and local law enforcement cooperation with 
the Federal Government and that our antidrug efforts are working. We 
need a resounding vote for the success of this program and continue to 
improve it.

                          ____________________