[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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