[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.
____________________