[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 152 (Wednesday, November 16, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H10368-H10377]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       COMBATING METHAMPHETAMINES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 4, 2005, the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) is recognized for 
60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate the opportunity always to 
come to this floor of Congress and have an opportunity to address the 
Chair and also the people in this Chamber here on Capitol Hill in 
Washington, D.C. and all across America.
  A lot of important issues come in front of us here in this Congress, 
and one of the hardest things that we have to deal with is the 
priorities always change day to day. We keep this big stack of issues, 
and we continually pull one issue off that has drifted down below the 
stack aways and put it back up on top, pulling those issues out, 
putting them on top, trying to get them moved so that we can get them 
off the table, send them to the Senate, and take up the next most 
important issue. It is a constant process here of hundreds, in fact 
thousands, of issues being reprioritized.
  But what we do also is keep sitting at the top those most important 
issues, those that are critical, those that are urgent. Sometimes we 
have that difficulty of taking up the issues that are urgent at the 
expense of those that are important, Mr. Speaker. But we have an issue 
before this Congress that I believe will come to this floor for a vote 
sometime this week or at the latest we could come back and take it up 
early in the first week in December, and that is the issue of 
methamphetamines.
  I represent a district in roughly the western third of Iowa, and we 
have found ourselves in a situation where we have perhaps as much 
experience, and I will say sad and bad experience, with 
methamphetamines as any place in the country.
  Some of the reasons for that are that the precursors for 
methamphetamine, and that means the components that are required in 
order to produce it in a meth lab, are and have been readily available 
in Iowa, and particularly in the Corn Belt. One of those components is 
hydrous ammonia, and because it is available essentially everywhere in 
the Corn Belt, it has been relatively easy for a meth cook to go in and 
to steal a tank of hydrous ammonia, take that back to their meth lab 
and use that to produce methamphetamines.
  We did not think we really needed to have a security policy and post 
guards around the hydrous ammonia tanks because, after all, when you 
crack one of those nozzles, you get a lesson that you will never 
forget. Yet, these meth cooks are so intent on producing 
methamphetamines that that kind of a danger has not been a deterrent to 
them, and they have some experience with hydrous ammonia also, being 
from the region, and so they are more comfortable using it and handling 
it.
  But, Mr. Speaker, there is a precursor to methamphetamines that is 
significantly different in that regard and still has been, up until 
now, readily available on the shelves of most of the stores in America, 
and that is a component that we are comfortable with that we know 
called ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and then there is a PPA, another 
precursor that is used in some of this. But I brought some of this 
along tonight so that I can speak about it, Mr. Speaker. So when we 
have a cold and we have congestion, we will go down to the store and we 
will purchase pseudoephedrines of some kind.
  Here is one example here, and I have another example here. Most 
people are familiar with that. The active ingredient is 
pseudoephedrine, and that pseudoephedrine is what the meth cooks are 
after.
  Now, I would point out that about 10 years ago, we recognized this 
and began to address it legislatively. One of the things we did in Iowa 
was realize that the people who were making methamphetamine then, and 
it was fairly early in our experience with methamphetamines, they would 
go to the drugstore or the grocery store and buy themselves a big pill 
bottle; and that big pill bottle might have pills in there, mostly it 
was pills that were 30 milligrams each. They would buy several bottles 
of those dry pills, those starch-based pills, bring the bottles back to 
the labs, take the caps off of the big bottles, dump them all into 
their overall vat, and produce their methamphetamines out of those. No 
restrictions, easily available, go buy it off the shelf. Nobody asked 
any questions. After all, it was entirely legal; and up until the time 
they figured out how to use this, there was no negative to people 
having pseudoephedrine or ephedrine products in their own medicine 
cabinet, so there was no restriction.

  Once we figured out that that is what they were doing, they were 
using the pseudoephedrine product in order to produce methamphetamine, 
in Iowa we decided we are going to fix this. We know how to outsmart 
these people. Since they buy these big bottles and there are 100 or 
more in a bottle, sometimes 500 in a bottle, we will just limit the 
size of the container, the numbers of pills that can be sold in a 
container.
  So in Iowa we said, you cannot have 100 or more of these pills that 
contain pseudoephedrine, ephedrine, or the PPAs. Well, we thought that 
would solve the problem. I did not get that involved in the language; I 
supported it; others worked on it. It seemed to me like it was a step 
in the right direction. Perhaps it was. It was a step in the right 
direction for just a little while.
  Congress understood that there was a problem too, and they concluded 
here in about 1995 that, you know, it is just too easy to go into the 
store and buy a bottle of pills that have pseudoephedrine in them and, 
like we thought in Iowa, take them back to the meth lab, take the cap 
off, dump it in their batch and cook an ounce of meth. So Congress did 
not address it the way we did in the Iowa legislature.
  Iowa said less than 100 per container, and Congress said, well, no, 
no meth cook is going to go to all that work if we just require that 
these pills go in blister packs. So if you have noticed, for the last 
10 years when you go to buy your pseudoephedrine, you will find that it 
is in blister packs. So you have to take it out and tear one open. I 
have one in my pocket because of the condition I have been in, Mr. 
Speaker. There is a pair, that is 30 milligrams per pill, 60 milligrams 
in there, and you have to tear a little corner off, tear the tin foil 
off the bottom, push those out of there. It is kind of hard, but you 
can get them out if you are sick and take your pseudoephedrine in that 
kind of way, because Congress said, we will put these in these blister 
packs so that it is too hard for the meth cooks to open up

[[Page H10369]]

hundreds of these, and then they will not be making methamphetamines in 
America any longer. So that was Congress, in blister packs. Iowa was 
less than 100 per container.
  So you put those two things together and that means you get these 
kinds of packages here. This is one that I picked up at the pharmacy in 
Iowa a little over a week ago. This is 96 pills. These are dry pills, 
they are in a blister pack, and they are 30 milligrams each, and that 
is 96 pills in there because Iowa law said you cannot have 100 or more. 
Well, that did not take them very long to figure out that they could 
comply with Iowa law, set these on the shelf, the retailers and the 
pharmacists had no problem, they complied with Iowa law, they did not 
complain very much, if at all. And the meth cooks looked at that and 
said, well, there we go, 96 pills per container. I will grab a stack of 
those containers, take them back to my lab and make myself a little 
tool where I can lay these blister packs down, drill some holes in a 
board, use another one for a press, pop all these pills through and 
they rattle down into the vat below, and they can quickly remove from 
the blister packs thousands of these pills and turn them into an ounce 
of methamphetamines.
  So between Iowa's method of less than 100 per pack, now we have 96; 
between Congress's method of they will all be in blister packs, which 
these are, Mr. Speaker, and all of them that we can purchase today are, 
it did not slow the meth cooks down very much, if at all. It made it a 
little bit inconvenient, but it did not really raise the cost of their 
transaction.
  So here we are, we are back on the floor of this Congress today, 
tomorrow, perhaps the next day; and part of that time we will spend 
debating how we are going to control methamphetamines in this country.
  I will tell you that this is a bipartisan effort. We have the Meth 
Caucus that is really headed up by the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. 
Souder). He is one of the four formal leaders there and I would say the 
most active and the most effective of them. They all deserve credit.
  We put together legislation that I was part of back in the early part 
of this session called the Meth Lab Eradication Act, but the Combat 
Meth bill is part of this. It is a foundation for a bill that has been 
brought by Chairman Sensenbrenner of the Judiciary Committee. They have 
added to it, made some changes, and taken input from some other areas.
  So here we are functioning in the fashion that was envisioned by our 
Founders when they established this Congress and our Constitution, and 
we are listening from all over the country. But we come to this: we 
have toughened penalties, we have done a number of things that are all 
logical and rational, and I support all of those changes that are in 
there in the overall meth legislation. Yet, when we come to the piece 
that is designed to remove the meth precursors from the shelves so that 
the meth cooks cannot get at it, we have not done enough.
  So the proposal that is before this Congress that seeks to remove 
these kinds of products from the hands of the people that are out there 
producing methamphetamines, sometimes cooking it, sometimes using other 
methods, it all takes pseudoephedrine of some kind or a precursor, 
ephedrine, pseudoephedrine or PPA.

                              {time}  1900

  The legislation that is here, I am going to argue, does not do 
enough. First I want to describe, what does Iowa do? Iowa has this long 
history of methamphetamines; Iowa has struggled with this for a long 
time. Iowa is in the corn belt and has anhydrous ammonia readily 
available almost everywhere.
  Iowa, like every place in the country, has had Sudafed and those 
precursors readily available, almost everywhere, convenience stores, 
grocery stores and pharmacies. They have struggled with this, gotten it 
wrong in the past; the package in 1996 did not do much good, just like 
Congress has struggled with this; a blister pack does not do much good.
  So what we have done for more than a year, we have done the research, 
examined this, we have interviewed retailers, convenience store owners, 
pharmacists, pharmaceutical companies, meth lab cooks, meth addicts, 
the law enforcement people, the drug czar in Iowa, put our heads 
together, churned this legislation through.
  A retired highway patrolman, who has been 10 years or more in the 
Iowa House of Representatives, Trooper Clel Baudler did a lot of work 
to put together the language in Iowa so that we could provide the 
medication for the legitimate use, that it absolutely has a legitimate 
use, so that a mother could have a sick child, run to the convenience 
store, the grocery store, pick up enough medication to just supply the 
need.
  We had enough medication on the shelf that we are supplying an 
inventory for a meth cook. With all this work that was done by a team 
in Iowa, they passed this legislation through. After a long period of 
work, it was passed March 22 of this year. The Governor signed it into 
law.
  Again, this is bipartisan legislation. Since that period of time, I 
want to point out the success in addressing the meth labs in Iowa.
  I would say here, the taller, the brighter color, is the numbers of 
meth labs per month that were busted by our drug enforcement teams and 
our law enforcement officers all across Iowa. 2004, we are up there: 
142 for January; 122 for February; 299 meth labs busted in Iowa in 
March of 2004; then it went down to 213 in April; and in May, the 
number dropped down to 16.
  You can see there is a little seasonal cycle to this, where in the 
summertime, the meth lab numbers, at least those that are busted, go 
down, even in 2004, 92 in July; 79, August; 68 in September. By the 
time October came around, of 2004, the number of meth labs busted 
jumped back up to 114. November of 2004, 130; December, 110. So you can 
kind of see the pattern that there is a little seasonal cycle here. Yet 
we have hundreds and hundreds of meth labs that we had to go in and 
take down and clean up and pay the clean-up costs, the environmental 
costs, the risks and the risks to children that we have there.
  So this history goes back a number of years prior to 2004, and they 
looked at this history and determined that we want to do something 
about this. We want to end, we want to eradicate meth labs in Iowa; we 
want to eradicate meth labs in the United States of America.
  So the legislation came forward, having had input from most everyone 
involved.
  Mr. Speaker, the legislation was put together in Iowa, having taken 
input from all these other areas and weighed everything. They sat down, 
talked to the retailers, the pharmacists, the pharmaceutical companies, 
the consumers and came up with this proposal. The proposal was this: 
Let us reduce the amount of precursors, the Sudafed, we will call it, 
the pseudoephedrine, that can be available on the shelf easily at the 
grocery store, convenience store, at a normal outlet.
  Let us set an amount there that is going to raise the transaction 
costs for the meth cook so that he cannot stop in at enough places and 
buy enough precursor to come home and produce himself, I will say, an 
ounce of meth. We have to make it so it is no longer practical to do 
that.
  What we did was we passed a law in Iowa that says, you can buy a 
daily limit of 360 milligrams of pseudoephedrine, 360 milligrams. Here 
is an example of it. They just began packaging it in 360-milligram 
packages. That is 12 gel caps, another distinction. When you use the 
gel, it takes almost twice as much gel to produce the same amount of 
meth as it does the powder or the starch-based pills.
  So the inconvenience of a gel, I don't know if you can really measure 
that. You take a gel cap or you take a pill. It is kind of 
inconsequential as to what you prefer. I can tell you the meth-based 
cooks prefer the starch-based pills far more than they do the liquid 
gel caps we have here. So we say, anywhere in retail, you can buy in a 
day anywhere from 360 milligrams of gel only.
  So, for example, if a meth cook wanted to go out and produce an ounce 
of methamphetamine, you can go to 380 retail stops and those 380 retail 
stops, buy a package of this everywhere. When you get done, you can 
come back with 380 packages of this, that times 12

[[Page H10370]]

would be the number of pills that he would have to have in order to 
cook, produce an ounce of meth, 380 stops.
  Well, that made it a little difficult for the meth cooks to be able 
to run around and make 380 stops and produce enough meth that paid for 
them to be able to do that. The results are clear. They are here in my 
chart.
  Mr. Speaker, this is in blue; this is 2005 compared to the green from 
2004. This is under the old law that said under 100 pills, and no other 
real restrictions on that: January, 81 meth labs busted; February, 27, 
actually, more than 2004; in March, down to 185, less than 2004, but 
still a high, high number of meth labs; April, 146, still a high 
number. You can see enforcement is making a difference.
  But we get to this point where the bill was enacted on, actually, the 
first day of June, past year, March 22, the message went out that said 
these precursors are going to come off the shelf in large quantities, 
meanwhile, while we let mom go in and get 360 milligrams in a package. 
When that happened, the inventory began to be reduced on the shelves in 
Iowa.
  By the time we got to the day of the bill's enactment when it had to 
be off the shelf, except in compliance with these smaller packages, 
then we saw the meth labs go up from 116, from the year before, down to 
42, Mr. Speaker, a significant difference the first day that bill was 
enacted into law. The following month, it went down from 42 to 29; 
July, 25 meth labs; August, only 12; September, only 12; October, only 
10.
  That is the end of my statistics, but my statistics work out to be 
this: An 80 percent reduction in the number of meth labs in Iowa. An 80 
percent reduction. That means 1,011 fewer meth labs in this 5-month 
period of time that we have experienced now under the new Iowa law.
  You think, boy, what would not be worth it to achieve those kinds of 
results? How much meth came out of the hands of the addicts? What 
difference did that make in the lives and the lifestyles of the people 
that are the addicts and the people that have to live around them? We 
can compare this number, 1,011 fewer meth labs, 80 percent reduction in 
meth labs, down to around 10 a month or before we were doing 114 that 
same month. Who knows what it is going to be like for November, 
December.
  By the time we come around here to January, February or March, I 
think we see this number way down here or maybe perhaps even in the 
peak month, it was 229 labs that were busted in 2004, 185 in 2005. I 
think we see a number down here to around 10 or fewer. But we still 
have a problem.
  Mr. Speaker, we have a problem, because these meth precursors, this 
pseudoephedrine that is available, is available on the shelves of some 
of our surrounding States. That allows the meth cooks to drive across 
the river, across the border, go to the store, buy a big sack of it and 
bring it back home and then sit there and cook up meth for a while.
  I think that these remaining labs that we have here, these 25, 12, 10 
and 10 per month that we are busting now, and those that we are not 
uncovering because we do not have 100 percent enforcement in Iowa. I 
wish we did, but we do not. I think they are being supplied by the 
surrounding States that do not have a law that produces this kind of 
result. Mr. Speaker, this has been recognized. Illinois has adopted a 
law that is very, very close to that of Iowa.
  Oregon has a law that simply requires a prescription in order to 
purchase anything that has pseudoephedrine in it. Oklahoma has a pretty 
good law. There are some States out there that made some changes in 
this language. But what I want to do is have a law that gets this job 
done. I do not want to come back to Congress 1 year, 2 years, or heaven 
forbid, 10 years from now and put the fix in place of the things like 
we did in 1995 when we said, surely a meth cook will not go to all this 
work to pop a pseudoephedrine out of a blister pack, or if you put it 
in a package under 100, that is too much trouble to screw the cap off a 
bottle of 96 or 99. These people are resourceful. We have to raise 
their transaction costs.
  Mr. Speaker, my point is this, if you go to a retail stop and you are 
a meth cook, and you want to do an ounce of meth, you do 380 stops to 
get these, times 380 gets you enough to open up all of these caplets 
and turn it into an ounce of meth.
  But under the proposal that is before us today, and this Congress, it 
allows for 3.6 grams a day rather than 360 milligrams, Mr. Speaker. I 
would point out the difference. The difference is 10 to 1. I have it 
just stacked up here, this is, if it does not explode in my hands, this 
represents 3.6 grams of methamphetamines, a typical purchase-size 
package that you would have.
  Under the Federal law that may pass here tomorrow or the next day, 
one could go to a store and purchase this anywhere in a retail outlet, 
grocery store, a convenience, Wal-Mart, wherever it might be, and walk 
away with this much in one's hands. That is a daily purchase rate.
  Now, that is not enough to really bother to fire up the old meth 
cooker, but it is enough to get one-nineteenth of an ounce, and it 
would allow an individual then to make 18 other stops around the retail 
establishments. Yes, they have to sign the book. I am glad they do. 
They have to show their identification. I am glad they do.
  These people are breaking the law regularly. They are not going to be 
concerned about lying when they sign their name or the fact that we are 
not able to index other retail establishments so that those 19 are not 
going to be checking the other 18 records. Neither is law enforcement 
going to be able to have the resources to do that.
  We will just go back on that. If we catch somebody with a truckload 
of this, then we will say, where did you buy it? We will find out they 
violated our new law. What we want to do is we want to raise the 
transaction costs. This meth cook can go 19 stops, get this much 
legally at every stop, come back home, make an ounce of methamphetamine 
out of that. By the way, he can buy the starch-based powder as opposed 
to the requirement for the gel that I have spoken about.
  Nineteen stops, an ounce of meth. He can probably do that in a couple 
of hours, come back home and cook a batch of meth. An ounce of meth is 
enough to last an average addict 90 days.
  The other 89 days he can continue to go out and do the same thing and 
continue to sell the meth. That is the result we are going to have. Or 
you can have three people join together. They will go around, have six 
stops, come back with 18 times this amount, make 1 ounce of meth and 
then that is good enough for each of those three addicts for a month. 
There will be an ounce of that meth. Yes, it will be a month.
  It is about a 90-day supply for one, 30-day supply for each of the 
other three. Then he will have 29 days to go out there and do this for 
a profit.
  Mr. Speaker, I do not want this Congress to be short. I do not want a 
solution that seems to be a solution that retailers and pharmaceutical 
companies agree to, but not one that is going to inconvenience and 
raise the transaction costs adequately for the meth cooks. I want to 
get this done. I want to get it done right. I want to honor the work 
done by the meth caucus here, all the serious work of people who put up 
vote after vote after vote. I will recognize it through the 
appropriations process.
  When there was amendment after amendment that came to this floor that 
struck a blow against methamphetamines, I saw people on both sides of 
this aisle stand up and put up that vote regularly and consistently. 
There is a real conviction in this Congress to get this right. 
Sometimes we have a little trouble being able to get down into the 
depths of the details in order to get it right.
  One of the individuals who has provided that kind of background, that 
kind of knowledge, who has been one of the leaders here when we 
introduce one of our friends and colleagues, but this time I am going 
to say that I am introducing the leader of this meth effort in the 
United States Congress, the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) who is 
the chairman of the meth caucus.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Iowa (Mr. King) 
for being such a passionate and aggressive and steadfast leader and 
part of the meth caucus, not only back home, but out here in 
Washington, that has been able to help us make a lot of progress.
  What I wanted to do, and take some time here, is lay out a little bit 
of the

[[Page H10371]]

history of how we got to where we are. I felt probably the simplest way 
to do that would be that I chair the Narcotics Subcommittee over in 
Government Reform where Speaker Hastert chaired and the gentleman from 
Florida (Mr. Mica).
  The former Congressman Ose had come to the committee when the 
gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) was chair and talked about the super 
lab problem in California and that it led to the death of a young 
child. It eventually led to the child endangerment laws in California 
that have been patterned elsewhere.

                              {time}  1915

  Then when I became chairman starting in 2001, we focused a lot on the 
southwest border. But we held our first hearing on 7/12/2001 with the 
DEA, with Ron Brooks, who is the national chairman of the National 
Narcotics Association, with a sheriff from Indiana, a police chief from 
California, and a sheriff in Washington State, and then a public 
affairs director, Susan Rook, who used to be with CNN.
  Then it was 7/18/2003 when we really started to focus in on metham
phetamines. After we had looked at the borders and tackled that for a 
2-year cycle, we came back on meth. The gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. 
Boozman) and the gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Case) had both been hard 
hit and testified, as well as DEA and ONDCP. And then Captain Kelly, 
the commander of the narcotics division in Sacramento who had been 
instrumental in the early superlab efforts in California as well as the 
chief of police in Vancouver, Washington, and the sheriff in Clark 
County, Washington.
  Then we went into the field hearing in my own district, along with 
the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Chocola), where we had ONDCP come out 
and DEA as we usually do at field hearings. We heard from Curtis Hill, 
the prosecutor in Elkhart County, his chief investigator Bill Wargo, 
the Starke County detective, Corporal Tony Ciriello from Kosciusko 
County, and multiple other prosecutors and people in local law 
enforcement.
  Then we moved up to Detroit. At Detroit on 4/20/2004 our hearing was 
``Northern Ice: Stopping Methamphetamine Precursor Chemical Smuggling 
Across the U.S.-Canada Border.'' We had the director of the High 
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area in Detroit, as well as the Homeland 
Security, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement person, a special 
agent in charge of DEA, and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection 
person in charge of Detroit.
  In Detroit they had brought down a pseudoephedrine ring that was 
supplying at that time 40 percent of the illegal pseudoephedrine coming 
into the United States. It was the biggest bust in American history and 
dried up much of the quantity of pseudoephedrine that was coming in. It 
is still the kind of gold plate standard of what has happened on the 
north border. Of course this moved a lot to the south border then and 
to the Internet.
  The next hearing we held was 6/28/2004, ``Ice In The Ozarks: The 
Methamphetamine Epidemic in Arkansas.'' We held this at the request of 
the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Boozman). There we had the DEA, the 
U.S. Attorney, and the EPA, and then local people from the State drug 
director. We heard from the drug court about a very innovative program 
there. We had people from trucking, from children and policy, from drug 
treatment places.
  But the thing that highlighted northwest Arkansas is People Magazine 
did a story on a small town near there where 70-some percent of the 
people were addicted. They were people in the medical field, the law 
enforcement field, school teachers. It started like normal out in a 
mom-and-pop, fairly isolated individuals, and spread as meth tends to 
do into this whole town and grabbed it. And People Magazine did an 
incredible story.
  I will insert in the Record a list of subcommittee hearings at this 
point:

                 Subcommittee Meth Hearings Since 2001

     (** indicates a field hearing)


          07/12/01 ``Emerging Threats: Methamphetamines'' (DC)

     Panel I
       Joseph D. Keefe, Chief of Operations, Drug Enforcement 
     Administration
     Panel II
       Ron Brooks, Chairman, National Narcotic Officers 
     Associations Coalition
       Doug Dukes, Sheriff, and Doug Harp, Deputy Sheriff, Noble 
     County, Indiana
       Henry Serrano, Chief of Police, Citrus Heights, California
       John McCroskey, Sheriff, Louis County, Washington
     Panel III
       Susan Rook, Public Affairs Director, Step One


       7/18/03 Facing the Methamphetamine Problem in America (DC)

     Panel I
       Representative John Boozman
       Representative Ed Case
     Panel II
       Mr. Roger E. Guevara, Chief of Operations, Drug Enforcement 
     Administration
       Mr. John C. Horton, Associate Deputy Director for State and 
     Local Affairs, Office of National Drug Control Policy
     Panel III
       Captain William Kelly, Commander, Narcotics Division, 
     Sacramento County Sheriff's Department
       Mr. Brian J. Martinek, Chief, Vancouver, Washington Police 
     Department
       Sheriff Garry E. Lucas, Clark County, Washington Sheriff's 
     Office


**2/6/04 Fighting Methamphetamine in the Heartland: How can the Federal 
 Government Assist State and Local Efforts? (Field hearing in Elkhart, 
                                  IN)

     Panel I
       Mr. Scott Burns, Deputy Director for State and Local 
     Affairs, Office of National Drug Control Policy
       Mr. Armand McClintock, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, 
     Indianapolis, Indiana District Office, Drug Enforcement 
     Administration
     Panel II
       Mr. Melvin Carraway, Superintendent, Indiana State Police
       Mr. Curtis T. Hill, Jr., Prosecuting Attorney, Elkhart 
     County Prosecuting Attorney's Office
       Mr. Bill Wargo, Chief Investigator, Elkhart County 
     Prosecuting Attorney's Office
       Detective Daniel Anderson, Starke County Sheriffs 
     Department
       Corporal Tony Ciriello, Kosciusko County Sheriffs 
     Department
     Panel III
       Mr. Kevin Enyeart, Cass County Prosecutor
       Mr. Doug Harp, Chief Deputy, Noble County Sheriffs Office
       Sergeant Jeff Schnepp, Logansport-Cass County Drug Task 
     Force
       Mr. Brian Connor, Acting Executive Director, The Center for 
     the Homeless, South Bend
       Mr. Barry Humble, Executive Director, Drug & Alcohol 
     Consortium of Allen County
       Mr. Benjamin Martin, Serenity House, Inc.


 **4/20/04 ``Northern Ice: Stopping Methamphetamine Precursor Chemical 
 Smuggling Across the U.S.-Canada Border'' (Field hearing in Detroit, 
                                  MI)

       Mr. Abraham L. Azzam, Director, Southeast Michigan High 
     Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, Office of National Drug 
     Control Policy
       Mr. Michael Hodzen, Interim Special Agent in Charge, 
     Detroit, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department 
     of Homeland Security
       Mr. John Arvanitis, Acting Special Agent in Charge, Detroit 
     Field Division, Drug Enforcement Administration
       Mr. Kevin Weeks, Director, Field Operations, Detroit Field 
     Office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Department of 
     Homeland Security


    **6/28/04 ``Ice in the Ozarks: The Methamphetamine Epidemic in 
             Arkansas'' (Field hearing in Bentonville, AR)

     Panel I
       Mr. William J. Bryant, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, 
     Little Rock, Arkansas Office (New Orleans Field Division), 
     Drug Enforcement Administration
       Mr. William M. Cromwell, Acting United States Attorney, 
     Western District of Arkansas
       Mr. James MacDonald, Federal On Scene Coordinator, Region 
     7, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
     Panel II
       Mr. Keith Rutledge, State Drug Director, Office of the 
     Governor of Arkansas
       The Honorable David Hudson, Sebastian County Judge
       Mr. J.R. Howard, Executive Director, Arkansas State Crime 
     Lab
       Ms. Shirley Louie, M.S., CIH, Environmental Epidemiology 
     Supervisor, Arkansas Department of Health
       Sheriff Danny Hickman, Boone County Sheriff's Office
       Mr. David Gibbons, Prosecuting Attorney, 5th Judicial 
     District
     Panel III
       The Honorable Mary Ann Gunn, Circuit Judge, Fourth Judicial 
     District, Fourth Division
       Mr. Larry Counts, Director, Decision Point Drug Treatment 
     Facility
       Mr. Bob Dufour, RPH, Director of Professional and 
     Government Relations, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.
       Mr. Greg Hoggatt, Director, Drug Free Rogers-Lowell
       Mr. Lane Kidd, President, Arkansas Trucking Association

[[Page H10372]]

       Dr. Merlin D. Leach, Executive Director, Center for 
     Children & Public Policy
       Mr. Michael Pyle


   **8/2/04 ``The Poisoning of Paradise: Crystal Methamphetamine in 
            Hawaii'' (Field hearing in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii)

     Panel I
       The Honorable James R. Aiona, Jr., Lieutenant Governor, 
     State of Hawaii
       Mr. Larry D. Burnett, Director, Hawaii High Intensity Drug 
     Trafficking Area, Office of National Drug Control Policy
       Mr. Charles Goodwin, Special Agent in Charge, Honolulu 
     Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation
       Mr. Briane Grey, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, 
     Honolulu Office (Los Angeles Field Division), Drug 
     Enforcement Administration
     Panel II
       The Honorable Harry Kim, Mayor, County of Hawaii
       Mr. Keith Kamita, Chief, Narcotics Enforcement Division, 
     Hawaii Department of Public Safety
       Lawrence K. Mahuna, Police Chief, Hawaii County Police 
     Department
       Mr. Richard Botti, Executive Director, Hawaii Food Industry 
     Association
     Panel III
       Dr. Kevin Kunz, Kona Addiction Services
       Mr. Wesley Margheim, Big Island Substance Abuse Council
       Mr. Alan Salavea, Hawaii County Prosecutor's Office, Youth 
     Builders
       Dr. Jamal Wasan, Lokahi Treatment Program


11/18/04 ``Law Enforcement and the fight Against Methamphetamine'' (DC)

     Panel I
       Hon. Scott Burns, Deputy Director, State and Local Affairs, 
     Office of National Drug Control Policy
       Mr. Domingo S. Herraiz, Director, Bureau of Justice 
     Assistance, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of 
     Justice
       Mr. Joseph Rannazzisi, Deputy Chief, Office of Enforcement, 
     Drug Enforcement Administration
     Panel II
       Mr. Lonnie Wright, Director, Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics 
     and Dangerous Drugs
       Sheriff Steve Bundy, Rice County (Kansas) Sheriffs 
     Department
       Lt. George E. Colby, Division Commander/Project Director, 
     Allen County Drug Task Force, Allen County (Indiana) Sheriffs 
     Department
       Mr. Joseph Heerens, Senior Vice President, Government 
     Affairs, Marsh Supermarkets, Inc., on behalf of the Food 
     Marketing Institute
       Dr. Linda Suydam, President, Consumer Healthcare Products 
     Association
       Ms. Mary Ann Wagner, Vice President, Pharmacy Regulatory 
     Affairs, National Association of Chain Drug Stores


 **6/27/05 ``Fighting Meth in America's Heartland: assessing Federal, 
       State, and Local Efforts'' (Field Hearing in St. Paul, MN)

     Panel I
       Mr. Timothy Ogden, Associate Special Agent in Charge, 
     Chicago Field Division, Drug Enforcement Administration
       The Honorable Julie Rosen, Minnesota State Senator
       Sheriff Terese Amazi, Mower County Sheriffs Office
       Sheriff Brad Gerhardt, Martin County Sheriffs Office
       Lt. Todd Hoffman, Wright County Sheriffs Office
       Ms. Susan Gaertner, Ramsey County Attorney
     Panel II
       Commissioner Michael Campion, Minnesota Department of 
     Public Safety
       Mr. Bob Bushman, Senior Special Agent, Minnesota Bureau of 
     Criminal Apprehension; President, Minnesota State Association 
     of Narcotics Investigators; and President, Minnesota Police 
     and Peace Officers' Association
       Mr. Dennis D. Miller, Drug Court Coordinator, Hennepin 
     County Department of Community Corrections
       Ms. Kirsten Lindbloom, Social Program Specialist, Parenting 
     Resource Center; Coordinator, Mower County Chemical Health 
     Coalition
       Mr. Buzz Anderson, President, Minnesota Retailers 
     Association


7/26/05 ``Fighting Meth in America's Heartland: Assessing the Impact on 
        Local Law Enforcement and Child Welfare Agencies'' (DC)

     Panel I
       Hon. Scott Burns, Deputy Director for State and Local 
     Affairs, Office of National Drug Control Policy
       Joseph Rannazzisi, Deputy Chief, Office of Enforcement, 
     Drug Enforcement Administration
       Laura Birkmeyer, Assistant U.S. Attorney, San Diego, CA; 
     and Chairperson, National Alliance for Drug Endangered 
     Children
     Panel II
       Nancy K. Young, Ph.D., Director, National Center on 
     Substance Abuse and Child Welfare; and Director, Children and 
     Family Futures
       Valerie Brown, National Association of Counties
       Freida S. Baker, Deputy Director, Family and Children's 
     Services, Alabama Department of Human Resources
       Chief Deputy Phil Byers, Rutherford County Sheriffs Office 
     (NC)
       Sylvia Deporto, Deputy Director, Riverside County 
     Children's Services (CA)
       Betsy Dunn, Investigator, Peer Supervisor, Tennessee 
     Department of Children's Services, Child Protective Services 
     Division
       Chief Don Owens, Titusville Police Department (PA)
       Sheriff Mark Shook, Watauga County Sheriffs Department (NC)


  **8/23/05 ``Law Enforcement and the Fight Against Methamphetamine: 
    Improving Federal, State, and Local Efforts'' (Field hearing in 
                            Wilmington, OH)

     Panel I
       Gary W. Oetjen, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, 
     Louisville, Kentucky District Office, Drug Enforcement 
     Administration
       John Sommer, Director, Ohio High Intensity Drug Trafficking 
     Area (HIDTA)
     Panel II
       Sheriff Ralph Fizer, Jr., Clinton County Sheriff
       Sheriff Tom Ariss, Warren County Sheriff
       Sheriff Dave Vore, Montgomery County Sheriff
       Commander John Burke, Greater Warren County Drug Task Force
       Jim Grandey, Esq., Highland County Prosecutor


 **10/14/05 ``Stopping the Methamphetamine Epidemic: Lessons From the 
         Pacific Northwest'' (Field hearing: in Pendleton, OR)

     Panel I
       Rodney G. Benson, Special Agent in Charge, Seattle Field 
     Division, Drug Enforcement Administration
       Chuck Karl, Director, Oregon High Intensity Drug 
     Trafficking Area (HIDTA)
       Dave Rodriguez, Director, Northwest High Intensity Drug 
     Trafficking Area (HIDTA)
     Panel II
       Karen Ashbeck, mother and grandmother of recovering 
     methamphetamine addicts
       Sheriff John Trumbo, Umatilla County Sheriff's Office
       Sheriff Tim Evinger, Klamath County Sheriff's Office
       Rick Jones, Choices Counseling Center
       Kaleen Deatherage, Director of Public Policy, Oregon 
     Partnership--Governor's Meth Task Force
       Tammy Baney, Chair, Deschutes County Commission on Children 
     and Families
       Shawn Miller, Oregon Grocery Association

  If I can digress here from what I wanted to do here, I will lay out 
that meth first really, crystal meth has been in Hawaii for a long 
time. It is the longest study pattern that we have. Then we saw the 
superlabs in California and Oregon and Washington were early on. Then 
we saw in the Ozarks area, spreading through the kind of plains States 
of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and into Oklahoma. Then 
it started to go both east and west from there. Still mostly in small 
towns and rural areas, still heavily where there are national forests 
and open lands, and started to push into Colorado, Wyoming, up into 
Montana, Dakota and simultaneously towards Indiana, Tennessee, 
Kentucky.
  Only now is it starting to reach further into the Deep South, into 
Titusville, Pennsylvania and a little into Upstate New York. It has 
basically been a Western and Great Plains phenomenon filling out 
gradually, and even as we were dealing with June of last year, minimal 
in any urban area, even in my home State.
  Then in 8/2/04 then we went to ``Poisoning in Paradise: Crystal Meth 
in Hawaii.'' There we had the lieutenant governor who has been 
aggressive with this. The gentleman from Hawaii (Mr. Case) hosted this 
hearing. I was chair, but he was the Member host. We had multiple 
people we also met not only on the Big Island but over in Maui there 
with a separate group of individuals. And there they have some of the 
only 10- and 15-year addiction studies on meth and showing how much of 
a problem this is.
  In Honolulu while I was there, there was an announcement in the paper 
that one apartment complex, you would have to pay a fumigation fee 
coming in because so many were cooking inside the city of Honolulu that 
it was dangerous. If you rented the apartment, the fumes could be 
consumed by the kids in the apartment.
  Then on 11/18/2004 we had ``Law Enforcement and the Fight Against 
Methamphetamine'' where we came back to D.C. In D.C., like we had 
earlier, we had Oklahoma back to report on the pseudoephedrine control 
law in Oklahoma. We first heard from them approximately 2 years before 
that.
  We had the Kansas sheriff from Rice County. We had George Colby from 
my home area. We also had representatives of the health care industry, 
pharmacy, and the supermarket industry who were already starting to 
express concerns about some of the State laws and

[[Page H10373]]

things that Mr. King was already addressing.
  Then in June of this year, we held a hearing, ``Fighting Meth in 
America's Heartlands: Assessing Federal, State, and Local Efforts,'' a 
field hearing in St. Paul, Minnesota. The extraordinary thing about 
this particular hearing was this was the first time we were documenting 
heavy movement of methamphetamines into major urban areas. At this 
point, the mom-and-pop labs, and I am going to digress here for a 
second, and we have talked about this before, but I think it is 
important to have it in the Record at this point.
  Mom-and-pop labs, or Nazi labs, or however we want to describe the 
kind of home cookers, are usually different than other drug addiction. 
You usually have two people involved. It is not like alcohol where 
often there is an alcoholic and an enabler. The whole family gets 
involved in it. Sometimes they even get their kids caught up in this. 
These cookers basically supply for themselves, maybe two or three other 
people, just enough to fund their habit. Particularly if they lost 
their job, they start to expand and cook just a little bit more.
  But it is the incredible law enforcement problem in the United States 
because these mom-and-pop labs, we had a fire in a mobile home, I think 
it is now 2 to 4 weeks ago, in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The 
local fire chief was describing to me how they went in. They did not 
know it was caused by a cooker because they had not had a home cooker 
in the city of Fort Wayne, which is 230,000. It had been more of a 
problem in the rural areas, places on fire.
  They could have easily had anhydrous ammonia or something else in 
there which would have just torched the whole fire department going in, 
not to mention the chemical and toxic fumes. In this case, they figured 
out quick enough what was happening there. There was a death, not of 
the firemen, but of one of the individuals who lived there.
  Indianapolis had their first case in the Indianapolis area of a 
similar-type fire just a few days ago. So we are starting to see in 
Indiana now after a number of years starting to move into the urban 
areas. But these mom-and-pop labs are 8,000 of the 8,300 seized in 
2001, the last data that are compared. So you are looking at about 90 
percent of the labs in the United States that are seized are mom-and-
pop so-called home-user labs, whereas crystal meth, the superlabs 
represent only 4 percent but represent 67 percent of meth consumption 
in the United States.
  But that is not the problem in most of our areas, because in Indiana 
and in Iowa we are not dealing with superlabs. So our local police 
force is having to pay overtime. Often they go to this site that may 
only be supplying three people. They are tied up there. First they have 
to wait until once they realize it is a lab, if they do not have the 
equipment, they have to get somebody in who comes in with equipment. At 
that point, and they also find more guns, more children in danger that 
you have to come in.
  So they come into the site and then after they get the site secure, 
they then have to call the DEA to the environmental cleanup. The DEA 
does this. We budget for this through our programs here, but 
nevertheless it is a tremendous environmental cleanup cost. And 
probably a typical, and I imagine it is similar in Iowa, in my district 
it is 4 to 6 hours that the local drug task force is tied up, 
basically. While hundreds of people are running around abusing drugs in 
the area in many ways, the law enforcement are tied up at one house 
trying to deal with one to three people.
  So, understandably, they are very upset and the costs and social 
costs are high on these mini-labs as opposed to a mom-and-pop. Now let 
me give you an idea. A typical user meth lab, a mom-and-pop, Nazi lab, 
can basically make a maximum of 280 doses. That is the maximum a mom-
and-pop lab user makes.

  A superlab makes a minimum of 100,000 to a million doses in a run. 
And it is purer and cheaper. So we have two problems that are somewhat 
different from each other.
  Now, when we came into Minneapolis where I was in St. Paul, we had 
representatives from counties to southeast of Minneapolis, southwest of 
Minneapolis, and north of Minneapolis. That is the standard pattern 
that we see typically in a rural area, near a national forest or 
isolated areas or woods where people go out and hunt. They stumble 
across the labs. They get away from the population centers.
  What we had not seen was a deputy prosecutor in St. Paul, Ramsey 
County, if you take Minneapolis and St. Paul you have about a million 
and a quarter on each side of the city and the suburbs. On the St. Paul 
side, she reported that approximately 80 percent of the kids in child 
custody were because of meth cases. That had been a standing start from 
8 months before. It went from zero to 80 percent. Yet, they only had 
one lab. Crystal meth had hit St. Paul.
  On the Minneapolis side, they had much less of a problem. But in that 
case, one gang in the city and most African American gangs in the big 
cities will have a cocaine, heroine, and hydroponic marijuana 
trafficking program; and they had switched over to meth. So all of the 
sudden this one gang switching in one neighborhood all of the sudden 
meant that 40 percent of their arrests soared to meth. Whereas, for 
example, in Elkhart, Indiana, 90 percent of the people in jail right 
now are meth-related.
  So when you have your community get hit, it switches and it switches 
overnight. And here we have two major metropolitan areas.
  Now, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Terry), a member of our caucus, 
has said that it has hit Omaha as well. Then we moved down to a hearing 
over in my neighboring State of Ohio with the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. 
Turner), and we held it in a small town of Wilmington, which had been 
fairly hard hit. And Wilmington is in between Cincinnati and Dayton, 
two bigger cities.
  While we were there in Wilmington we had TV there from both of the 
major markets, which in itself shows an increasing interest in the 
United States, because they do not usually go to small towns to cover 
anything. While we were having the hearing, the City of Dayton had 
their first bust. They had some before in the suburbs but in the city. 
And there they found a string of seven houses, I believe it was, where 
the mom-and-pop labs had connected together so the smell did not 
permeate around, which is what we are starting to see in some of the 
urban areas, a clustering like they do when they do these hydroponic 
grows of marijuana that we see.
  That was an interesting thing, to watch it spread into the city of 
Dayton even as we were watching our hearing, because that was another 
city being hit.
  Then we had another hearing in Washington, picking up and once again 
reviewing what we have been picking up in the field. And then our last 
hearing that we had was out in Pendleton, Oregon at the request of the 
gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Walden) and in his district.
  Now, there we studied more the Pacific Northwest. We had DEA and the 
HIDA areas come down from Seattle as well as from Portland. Now, 
Seattle is famous more for heroine and hydroponic marijuana coming down 
from British Columbia, but they have had an increase too in meth. But 
the city of Portland has been overrun.
  Now, the reason I wanted to go through that is what we are seeing and 
the reason our meth caucus has been so concerned and the reason we are 
pushing for national legislation is this is a drug where we now have a 
history of watching the pattern. We can see the pattern starts with 
mom-and-pop labs, and then you can usually get some control over that 
and it move to crystal meth. We see it start in rural areas, often 
around forests and fairly isolated areas, moving into the small towns. 
And then it comes in and mashes the cities, usually with a mix of 
crystal meth and some mom-and-pop labs. This has been a steady march, 
and it has been going on for years. We can see it coming. The question 
is where has the national strategy been?
  Now, I believe that we have finally reached an agreement to get 
control of the pseudoephedrine. Let me step back. We can talk about 
trying to control it at each grocery store and pharmacy. But there are 
only nine places in the entire world that make the pseudoephedrine. Yet 
we have minimal tracking. We can check the raw pseudoephedrine, but we 
do not have an

[[Page H10374]]

international way of checking the pills. We are working with the United 
Nations to try to track the pills.
  Secondly, almost all the pseudoephedrine that is coming in in excess 
capacity is coming in through the Mexican border. So the legislation 
that we are trying to get adopted in the near future will have a better 
tracking mechanism that would hold the countries of China, India, and 
Mexico accountable for continuing to work with us and to help develop 
better reporting.
  It will also try to get at EPA questions of how we deal with cleanup. 
It will try to get into regulating because our problem when we work at 
this, we need laws like Iowa and Missouri. We need laws like Indiana 
where it is behind the counter.

                              {time}  1930

  We need the daily limit. We need the monthly limit. We need the 
logbooks. While it may not completely deter individuals, because it is 
difficult to check, the fact is, as you make a bust, you can go back 
and see where the person is. As it gets out we are checking that, we 
also are lowering the threshold for drug kingpins because meth is a 
different type of thing. You can go back through those books and 
realize that signing the logbooks does, in fact, do that. We are also 
going to train it, and we are going to move to that, and we also need a 
better wholesale regulation system.
  This has been a difficult process to work through because States like 
New York or New York City, we are now going to regulate the sale of 
pseudoephedrine, even though they have no meth. We are going to 
regulate the pseudoephedrine in Boston, even though they have no meth 
problem. It was a difficult process, and I appreciate our leadership, 
the Senate leadership, Senator Talent and Senator Feinstein, the 
leadership of the gentleman from Missouri (Mr. Blunt), acting leader, 
and the leadership of the Energy and Commerce chairman, his willingness 
to work through this, because I think by working together we have as 
strong a bill as we can get nationally.
  We also heard in Oregon, and this is one of the things that we learn 
in drugs, we just have to make it as difficult as possible. We have our 
first major case because Oregon has a tough law. They have been going 
to the Internet, and they are ordering the pseudoephedrine pills on the 
Internet. We are going to have to work long-term with FedEx, with UPS, 
with the other companies in distribution to track that.
  One last comment, I really want to thank the Partnership for a Drug-
Free America and their new meth campaign. I want to encourage Members 
of the House; they are willing to give these ads, both the TV, as well 
as developing radio, billboard and newspaper ads, to any Member of 
Congress who wants to work in his district to get this up on the air.
  We need to take leadership ourselves and not just point out everybody 
else and say, we are going to get involved like the gentleman from 
Kentucky (Mr. Rogers) did, like former Congressman Portman did in 
Cincinnati. More of us actually need to take the leadership, and so we 
need our local TV, radio, billboard and newspaper companies to get in 
front of this, to work with us. We need to use our offices to do it.
  Partnership has a prevention campaign because ultimately we are going 
to try to regulate this stuff. We are going to try to lock the people 
up, but we have got to win the hearts and minds in prevention. We have 
got to explain to our kids. It is there in the workplace. We need our 
employers to drug test because many people use this as an amphetamine 
to try and stay awake longer, and so we need the employers to drug 
test, and we need to have better treatment programs and better research 
on how to deal with meth. If we work these things, plus the law 
enforcement, we will have long-term changes, not just short-term bumps 
based on them readjusting at our law enforcement.
  I believe this bill will buy us 2 years until they adjust to the 
strategy. Meanwhile, we need to get our prevention and strategy and 
workplace programs in effect, too.
  I thank the gentleman for yielding and thank him for his leadership.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Indiana. 
This has been no small task on your part, and I appreciate the 
chronology and the narratives of the efforts at the hearings across 
this condition and the history you have brought to the floor of this 
Congress. I know I have got a fair sense of how much work was done 
here, but you chronicled it in a way that is broader than I 
appreciated, and I am glad I have a better perspective of it now.
  You pointed out some things that I think need to be explored a little 
bit further, and the language in there that lowers the threshold for 
drug kingpins is a plus, and the tracking of the few sources in the 
world that actually produce pseudoephedrine, ephedrine and PPAs is 
another important part of this legislation. It is things that have been 
brought together very thoughtfully, and of course, the gentleman from 
Missouri (Mr. Blunt) has been a leader on this, and we rolled up our 
sleeves and put this language together quite a while back.
  I want to point out something else, too, which is the concern, what 
happens with children when they are brought up in an environment where 
the ma and pa meth labs are and where the fumes are there replete 
throughout a connection of homes that these poor children are in this 
toxic environment?
  One of the things that we recognize is a statistic that I did not 
offer here is that, in that 5-month period of time that we have had our 
law in place that removes the precursors and makes it a lot harder to 
find those in Ohio, the number of abused children now has gone down in 
that 5-month period of time. The cumulative fewer number of children is 
455 for the State of Iowa, and if that is one child, it begins to be 
worth the effort; 455 is an astonishing number and a huge success.
  It saved $2.4 million in meth labs cleanup. As the gentleman from 
Indiana (Mr. Souder) mentioned, it is 4 to 6 hours to clean up a meth 
lab. That is not just a one-person team. It is a multiple-person team. 
These people are trained. They have to have equipment. They have to 
have the suits to protect them from the toxic material. When it is all 
done, then they have to throw that all away and go get new stuff.
  So between the manpower and the equipment cost and the time that is 
there and the logistics, and when you charge that back out, a cost to 
clean up the lab runs somewhere around $4,000 or more. You can kind of 
figure about $1,000 an hour, but there is a lot of capital involved in 
just having the equipment to clean up a meth lab.
  What we are after here, and I am sure that, Mr. Speaker, you have to 
be thinking and a lot of the listeners have to be thinking, well, if 
you are only going to be addressing 15 percent of the meth problem in 
Iowa and maybe none of the meth problem in New York or in Boston, what 
purpose is this to try to eliminate as much as we can of the ma and pa 
meth labs? The purpose is logical, and it is rational because there 
will be many fewer children that will be abused in that kind of an 
environment, for one thing. There will be a lot of money that is saved 
and a lot of law enforcement time that is saved and a lot of resources 
that are saved if we do not have these ma and pa meth labs out there.
  They are scattered. They are divided. They are diversified. They are 
hard to find. We cannot get them all. So, if we could get them all 
cleaned up, what remains in the area I represent is 85 percent of the 
meth now comes across the border from Mexico. We can turn our resources 
to that.
  I yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder).
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, the interrelationship between the mom and 
pop labs and the crystal meth lab is tied together in several ways in 
the pending legislation.
  First off, what the pharmaceutical companies are already preparing to 
do is come up with non pseudoephedrine products. There will be somewhat 
fewer choices at grocery stores and pharmacies, but still plenty of 
choices. Some of those choices may not be as effective, but they will 
be effective. But the net is they are already taking the 
pseudoephedrine out which also means there will be less pseudoephedrine 
to divert towards the superlabs.

  So while we are addressing at the pharmacy and grocery store level 
the

[[Page H10375]]

mom and pop labs, we are also affecting, because of the changes in the 
pharmaceutical company industry, which may have been adapting for State 
level and now are rushing, knowing this bill is about to pass, that we 
will see an effect on the supermeth, too, in addition, which is 
probably more like a third, two-thirds in most States, although nobody 
really knows.
  Also, because we are going at the primary sources, this bill will 
marry the two. In other words, the initial bill that I had drafted, 
combined with a revised Talent-Feinstein, married together, is going to 
give us a wall across the country.
  I appreciate, and many others like you in these hard hit States 
appreciate, that this is going to alter behavior patterns in some 
places where they do not yet have meth. Because of that, children are 
going to live. Children are not going to be beaten by their parents. 
They are not going to be abused, and they are not going to have as much 
problem. Guess what? Meth is coming to a block near you anyway. So this 
enables us to get in front of the curve, and I know this is going to be 
difficult in some areas where they have not had meth yet, but the bulk 
of the States have at least some.
  Thirty-five or 37 States are being fairly overrun, and by doing this 
nationally, we will not hear what you said earlier, is them going to 
the next State there. But I do believe this will affect not only the ma 
and pop labs but what you are talking about and what you have been 
talking about tonight actually helps us with the superlabs as well.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, you also pointed 
out something that I think is important when you talked about how we 
need testing and how we need that as a deterrent.
  Traditionally, what we have done with all of our drug enforcement 
that goes clear back to the heroin days is that we see it from two 
different ways. One of them is interdiction, and interdiction, you go 
out on the highway, pull a car over, check to see what they are hauling 
around, search somebody. When you arrest them, yeah, if they have drugs 
on them, you take them away from them. You prosecute them. We try to 
lock some people up in jail. That is the interdiction part of this.
  The other side of that is the rehabilitation part, the drug treatment 
part. Those two things are on opposite wings of the entire problem.
  I want to say to the interdiction portion of this, yes, it is 
important; yes, we need to be aggressive. That is really part of what 
we are doing. We are trying to take the components of meth out of the 
hands of the people that make it for one thing and remove some of those 
components from even overseas on the way that it is funneled through 
this distribution system that we have, make it harder to access. That 
is interdiction.
  What interdiction does, by definition, when you remove a product, the 
more successful you are with the interdiction, the higher prices are 
going to go because this law of supply and demand manifests itself. 
Another thing that happens is, and I am not particularly concerned 
about this, is the quality of the drugs will go down because they will 
be able to sell a lower quality than they can when there is an ample 
supply for a cheaper price.
  So the price of the drug goes up with interdiction because of this 
law of supply and demand. The quality will go down. In the end, if you 
only do the interdiction side of this thing, you can reduce that down. 
If it is hard enough to get, there will be fewer people that are 
addicted. There will be fewer people that will hand some over to their 
friend and get them started. It will become a more precious commodity. 
It will be held together in a smaller group of drug addicts. That is 
one of the functions that will come from interdiction.
  I believe we need to do it, but it is not a solution to it all 
because on the other side of this is the rehab, the treatment, and meth 
is one of the hardest things to be successful with the rehab.
  I want to at some point ask the gentleman from Indiana what the 
percentage of success is on rehabilitation and treatment. Do you have 
some numbers on that?
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, there is quite frankly some disagreement in 
the field. Generally speaking, we figure six to eight times somebody's 
going to go through drug treatment. Many times they are pressured by a 
family member, and they did not really make the commitment. If somebody 
makes an internal commitment you can usually do it in one time.
  I would also like to insert into the Record at this point the 
scientific reasons for the effect of meth. I think this will help 
answer the question. This is a fairly technical document here that 
comes from a meth report that we are about to release.


                  scientific reasons for meth effects

       Methamphetamine is a potent central nervous system 
     stimulant that affects the brain by acting on the mechanisms 
     responsible for regulating a class of neurotransmitters known 
     as the biogenic amines or monoamine neurotransmitters. This 
     broad class of neurotransmitters is generally responsible for 
     regulating heart rate, body temperature, blood pressure, 
     appetite, attention, mood and responses associated with 
     alertness or alarm conditions. Although the exact mechanism 
     of action is unknown, it is generally believed that 
     methamphetamine causes the release of these monoamines 
     through the monoamine transporter as well as blocking the re-
     uptake of these neurotransmitters, causing them to remain 
     within the synaptic cleft longer than otherwise. As in most 
     neurotransmitter chemistry, its effects are adapted by the 
     affected neurons by a decrease in the production of the 
     neurotransmitters being blocked from re-uptake, leading to 
     the tolerance and withdrawal effects. In medicine it is used 
     as an appetite suppressant in treating obesity, treating 
     anesthetic overdose and narcolepsy.
       The acute effects of the drug closely resemble the 
     physiological and psychological effects of the fight-or-
     flight response including increased heart rate and blood 
     pressure, vasoconstriction, pupil dilation, bronchial 
     dilation and increased blood sugar. The person who ingests 
     meth will experience an increased focus and mental alertness 
     and the elimination of the subjective effects of fatigue as 
     well as a decrease in appetite. Many of these effects are 
     broadly interpreted as euphoria or a sense of well-being, 
     intelligence and power.
       The 17th edition of The Merck Manual (1999) describes the 
     effects of heavy use of methamphetamines in these terms: 
     ``Continued high doses of methamphetamine produce anxiety 
     reactions during which the person is fearful, tremulous, and 
     concerned about his physical well-being; an amphetamine 
     psychosis in which the person misinterprets others' actions, 
     hallucinates, and becomes unrealistically suspicious; an 
     exhaustion syndrome, involving intense fatigue and need for 
     sleep, after the stimulation phase; and a prolonged 
     depression, during which suicide is possible'' (p. 1593--ch. 
     195).
       Depending on delivery method and dosage, a dose of 
     methamphetamine will potentially keep the user awake with a 
     feeling of euphoria for periods lasting 2-24 hours.
       The acute effects decline as the brain chemistry starts to 
     adapt to the chemical conditions and as the body metabolizes 
     the chemical, leading to a rapid loss of the initial effect 
     and a significant rebound effect as the previously saturated 
     synaptic cleft becomes depleted of the same neurotransmitters 
     that had previously been elevated. Many users then compensate 
     by administering more of the drug to maintain their current 
     state of euphoria and alertness. This process can be repeated 
     many times, often leading to the user remaining awake for 
     days, after which secondary sleep deprivation effects 
     manifest in the user. Classic sleep deprivation effects 
     include irritability, blurred vision, memory lapses, 
     confusion, paranoia, hallucinations, nausea, and (in extreme 
     cases) death. After prolonged use, the meth user will begin 
     to become irritable, most likely due to lack of sleep.
       Methamphetamine is reported to attack the immune system, so 
     meth users are often prone to infections of all different 
     kinds, one being an MRSA infection. This, too, may simply be 
     a result of long-term sleep deprivation and/or chronic 
     malnutrition.
       It is a common belief that methamphetamine gives people 
     super-human strength. This is not really true, but 
     methamphetamine inhibits pain and increases metabolism, which 
     allows a person to push muscles to points of failure that 
     would otherwise be harder or impossible to reach. (See the 
     article entitled Exercise and Stimulants for a better 
     description of the factors involved.)
       Other side effects include twitching, ``jitteriness'', 
     repetitive behavior (known as ``tweaking''), and jaw 
     clenching or teeth grinding. It has been noted anecdotally 
     that methamphetamine addicts lose their teeth abnormally 
     fast; this may be due to the jaw clenching, although heavy 
     meth users also tend to neglect personal hygiene, such as 
     brushing teeth. It is often claimed that smoking 
     methamphetamine speeds this process by leaving a crystalline 
     residue on the teeth, and while this is apparently confirmed 
     by dentists, no clinical studies have been done to 
     investigate.
       Some users exhibit sexually compulsive behavior and may 
     engage in extended sexual encounters with one or more 
     individuals, often strangers. This behavior is substantially 
     more common among gay and bisexual male methamphetamine users 
     than it is their heterosexual counterparts. As it is 
     symptomatic of the user to continue taking the drug to combat 
     fatigue, an encounter or

[[Page H10376]]

     series of encounters can last for several days. This 
     compulsive behavior has created a link between meth use and 
     sexually transmitted disease (STD) transmission, especially 
     HIV and syphilis. This caused great concern among larger gay 
     communities, particularly those in Atlanta, Miami, New York 
     City, and San Francisco, leading to outreach programs and 
     rapid growth in 12-step organizations such as Crystal Meth 
     Anonymous. See Crystal and sex.

  This meth behaves differently in your brain, much more like ecstasy 
and much more damaging in that it gives you a false sense of high, and 
therefore, you become addicted to it rapidly. Thus, you think you can 
perform better at work. You can go three nights sometimes without sleep 
if you are driving a truck, but it gets so addictive and it damages 
your brain so significantly, the gentleman from Nebraska (Mr. Osborne), 
soon to be Governor, has been on the floor with his chart showing how 
rapidly your teeth start to fall out and hair starts to fall out. It is 
a different thing that happens to your body.
  So part of the question is, how quick do you get treatment? Do you 
get it early? Do you get it medium? Do you get it late? Some people 
say, well, oh, meth is much harder to treat than other drugs, but that 
is really wrong.
  What has been disturbing is we finally have eight studies going on 
out of the national research under Director Charlie Curie, but we need 
more because, in fact, we are dealing with mom and pop meth. We are 
dealing with crystal meth. We are dealing with women who use it for 
weight loss. We are dealing with some who are just drug addicts, and 
there are some who are using it like an amphetamine at work. That means 
different types of treatment to deal with it.
  We are also not dealing with kids. We are mostly dealing with people 
in the workplace, 18 to 45, really 25 to 40. It is a different type of 
drug, and it means different kinds of treatment and success efforts 
vary.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. As I recall, the gentleman from Nebraska's (Mr. 
Osborne) charts are incremental pictures of a lady, by the way she was 
an Iowan, and I believe the last picture was in the morgue. So that is 
the end result of an addict that takes this to the `nth degree, and the 
odds of being successful on rehab, somewhere between the first time if 
there is conviction, maybe never if they really do not want to get 
cured, but six or eight times, one in six or eight might be one of 
those numbers then. So it sets the framework then I think for the 
center of this I would like to see us all focus more on.
  Yes, push interdiction as much as we can, and let us get treatment 
for the people that we can help but in between all that is the 
deterrent portion of it. In between that is the testing portion that 
you brought up and something that I worked with. Nine years ago, when I 
was elected to the Iowa Senate, one of my intense planks in my platform 
was I will work to rewrite Iowa's drug testing law.
  As a contractor and employer I have dealt with meth addicts on a 
construction crew. In fact, I was required to sign contracts where I 
would pledge a drug-free workplace in order to be able to apply for a 
Federal contract, and yet, there was no way I could guarantee a drug-
free workplace because we did not have a law that allowed me to test my 
employees.
  Well, today we do. On St. Patrick's Day of 1998, our Governor signed 
that bill into law, spent 2 years working on it, authored it, floor 
managed it, and pushed it through the legislation. No one's tried to 
amend it since then that I know of, but it allows for and sets up the 
legal parameters for an employer to voluntarily drug test their 
employees, provided that they treat each employee fairly and equally. 
If they offer treatment, they must offer it to every employee. They 
have to have a drug assistance personnel there that understands these 
issues, gone through and taken the educational and training.
  So now we have employers that are voluntarily testing their 
employees, and this drug testing, if I were charged with this 
responsibility to eradicate all illegal drug use and abuse in America, 
first, I would have to have the will of the people behind me that would 
support the will of the people in Congress because believe me these 
voices in here reflect the will of the people in America. I would say 
the solution to this is drug testing. Testing in the workplace, people 
make a decision then that they like their job better than they like 
their drugs. When that happens, their children go to the ball game, go 
fishing, spend time with dad, instead of not having a new pair of shoes 
because the money went for meth or mom for that matter.

                              {time}  1945

  We have got to be equal opportunity here even on the other side of 
this equation. But the positive decision that gets made because drug 
testing hangs over their head as an employee is deterrent enough to 
keep people from even trying it, many, many times. That is just in the 
workplace. We have also the educational. We have the welfare system. 
Each one of those zones out there, if we brought our drug testing to 
those zones, we would be able to eradicate drug abuse in America, and I 
think that is the most effective way to go.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. KING of Iowa. I yield to the gentleman from Indiana.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, in the legislation that hopefully will be 
before us tomorrow, Congresswoman Hooley and Congressman Kennedy and 
others were dealing with international, with drug kingpins. We have had 
many Members dealing with how to control the pseudoephedrine and some 
of that, but we still have some bills that we need to look at. 
Congressman Gordon and Congressman Boehlert have a bill on EPA because 
one of the things is this collective impact on water systems, and when 
we think of it, it is in the forests and it is up high and it is going 
down, the cumulative impact of all these little labs is fairly damaging 
from an environmental standpoint and yet they are not the Superfund 
sites that we deal with.
  But the workplace question, I believe, is the one that we are going 
to have to address next year. And I believe the gentleman from Iowa and 
Congressman Peterson have also been huge advocates of drug testing, and 
we have to understand that drug testing is the best deterrent in the 
workplace. This is where the meth battle is going to be won or lost, 
because if employees take meth at the workplace thinking they can 
produce more, the only real way to do this is targeted education at the 
workplace and, in effect, a check of responsibility.
  A number of Congresses ago when I was on the Small Business Committee 
and now-Senator Talent was chairman of the committee, we moved the 
drug-free workplace bill through that gave guidelines to small business 
and what kind of testing they needed to do, including testing the 
managers. I personally believe we in Congress ought to be drug tested 
and lead by example, but the managers need to be tested as well as 
employees. There needs to be security that they are not going to get 
false positives, and I understand all of that. But there needs to be 
drug testing, and ultimately we also need ad campaigns directed 
straight at the workplace, posters that can be there, handouts that can 
be there, education, because ultimately if they do not have a job, it 
chokes off the habit to some degree. It does not completely, because 
they can steal and so on; but, ultimately, the drug testing in the 
workplace, I believe, has been a lot of the missing link in how we have 
been approaching meth.
  Mr. KING of Iowa. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I am very happy to 
hear Mr. Souder present that here on this floor tonight, and I am an 
enthusiastic supporter of that philosophy, and I will tell him that I 
have invested hundreds and hundreds of hours in that very subject 
matter, and it lights me up to hear it come from him. I am anxious to 
engage in this battle next year, and I believe that I will be able to 
bring some background to this that will be part of this team that can 
bring a solution.
  And I have argued that if they test in the workplace, and I would be 
happy to drug test Members of Congress, but if they drug test in the 
workplace, that is a huge zone of influence in America, and we could 
clean up the workplace almost 100 percent. We would have a little 
trouble with the sole proprietors out there. It is going to be hard to 
get them to participate if they happen to be an addict. Most of them 
are responsible business people. But if we can

[[Page H10377]]

clean up the workplace, then the other zones of our country that we 
would address would be the educational system, for example, and that is 
a little harder nut to crack. There will be significant resistance in a 
place like that. But that is a place where a lot of the drug addiction 
gets started. Then the other place is on welfare, those people that are 
on public benefits.
  By the way, I would only do the random testing in any of those 
places. I would not make it 100 percent testing of anyone. And the way 
we set up our law, we allow that random to be on a sliding scale. The 
employer can decide what that percentage is. And if that employer 
decides that he wants to test 100 percent of his employees once a 
quarter, he can do that. If he wants to slide that random number 
selector down, and it must be random, it cannot be personal, down to 
one-tenth of 1 percent, then fine. Nobody needs to know what that 
equation is. But the deterrent is always there.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I think that we have given a good dialogue to 
methamphetamines here tonight on the floor of Congress and raised the 
issue. I hope that we bring this bill to the floor tomorrow. I know 
that we will do good things for methamphetamines and drug addiction in 
America.
  One of my concerns is we are going to end up with 19 stops to get 
enough precursor to make an ounce of meth versus the 380 if we have the 
model that I brought before here. As long as I continue to believe in 
that, I will continue to bring it to the floor of this Congress. But 
mainly we have got a broad thrust. We have got a good start, and by 
next year I hope we do take up drug testing. But this is good work done 
by the meth caucus led by Mr. Souder of Indiana. The hearings that he 
has had all over this country, the work that he has done deserve a 
great deal of applause from the parents of America.

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