[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 1 (Tuesday, January 6, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S18-S19]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mrs. FEINSTEIN (for herself, Mr. Udall, Mr. Blumenthal, Ms. 
        Klobuchar, Mr. Grassley, and Ms. Heitkamp):
  S. 32. A bill to provide the Department of Justice with additional 
tools to target extraterritorial drug trafficking activity, and for 
other purposes; to the Committee on Finance.
  Mrs. FEINSTEIN. Mr. President, I am pleased to introduce the 
Transnational Drug Trafficking Act of 2015 with my colleagues and 
friends, Senators Charles Grassley, Richard Blumenthal, Heidi Heitkamp, 
Amy Klobuchar and Tom Udall.
  This bill, which passed the Senate unanimously in the last Congress, 
supports the Obama Administration's Strategy to Combat Transnational 
Organized Crime by providing the Department of Justice with crucial 
tools to combat the international drug trade. As drug traffickers find 
new and innovative ways to avoid prosecution, we cannot allow them to 
exploit loopholes because our laws lag behind.
  This legislation has three main components. First, it puts in place 
penalties for extraterritorial drug trafficking activity when 
individuals have reasonable cause to believe that illegal drugs will be 
trafficked into the United States. Current law says that drug 
traffickers must know that illegal drugs will be trafficked into the 
United States and this legislation would lower the knowledge threshold 
to reasonable cause to believe.
  The Department of Justice has informed my office that, it sees drug 
traffickers from countries like Colombia, Bolivia and Peru who produce 
cocaine but then outsource transportation of the cocaine to the United 
States to violent Mexican drug trafficking organizations. Under current 
law, our ability to prosecute source-nation traffickers from these 
countries is limited since there is often no direct evidence of their 
knowledge that illegal drugs were intended for the United

[[Page S19]]

States. But let me be clear: drugs produced in these countries fuel 
violent crime throughout the Western Hemisphere as well as addiction 
and death in the United States.
  Second, this bill puts in place penalties for precursor chemical 
producers from foreign countries, such as those producing 
pseudoephedrine used for methamphetamine, who illegally ship precursor 
chemicals into the United States knowing that these chemicals will be 
used to make illegal drugs.
  Third, this bill makes a technical fix to the Counterfeit Drug 
Penalty Enhancement Act, which increases penalties for the trafficking 
of counterfeit drugs. The fix, requested by the Department of Justice, 
puts in place a ``knowing'' requirement which was unintentionally left 
out of the original bill. The original bill makes the mere sale of a 
counterfeit drug a Federal felony offense regardless of whether the 
seller knew the drug was counterfeit. Under the original bill, a 
pharmacist could be held criminally liable if he or she unwittingly 
sold counterfeit drugs to a customer. Adding a ``knowing'' requirement 
corrects this problem.
  As Co-Chair of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control 
and as a public servant who has focused on narcotics issues for many 
years, I know that we cannot sit idly by as drug traffickers find new 
ways to circumvent our laws. The illegal drug trade is constantly 
evolving and it is critical that our legal framework keeps pace. We 
must provide the Department of Justice with all of the tools it needs 
to prosecute drug kingpins both here at home and abroad.
                                 ______