[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 2]
[House]
[Pages 1832-1833]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                       DEALING WITH DRUG PROBLEMS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I read with concern this week that we have 
had another incident on our southern border in Tijuana with Mexico and 
their inability to get control of the drug problem. The attorney 
general of Mexico was quoted, who has been a crusader in trying to 
establish law and order in Mexico on the drug issue, that one of our 
primary needs is to get control of consumption in this country.
  I want to suggest two different things: in addition, Mexico needs to 
continue to work to control the borders, because in San Diego, I will 
be at a hearing next week that the gentleman from California (Mr. Mica) 
is chairing in the district of the gentleman from California (Mr. 
Bilbray). There is only so much they can do in San Diego, across from 
Tijuana if we do not get some control of our borders.
  There is also only so much we can do in northeast Indiana, as I have 
talked with Sheriff Dukes in Noble County and Sheriff Jackson in 
Huntington County and Sheriff Herman in Allen County. There is only so 
much they can do in my district if the drugs keep coming across in 
California and Arizona and New Mexico and Texas that pour then into 
Indiana.
  So we need Mexico's continued help, and we need even more aggressive 
efforts to try to crack down on the drug problem.
  But I would suggest there are two other things that we will be 
addressing in this House before too long: one is the Colombia Plan, or 
better referred to as the Andes Region Plan. Clearly Colombia is in 
deep trouble. Clearly the cocaine and heroin that is pouring into our 
country through Mexico and corrupting Mexico is coming originally out 
of Colombia for the most part.
  We need to do whatever we can to help the brave people on the ground 
in Colombia who are fighting the narco-traffic thugs, whether they be 
FARC or whether they be others, in Colombia; and we need to be able to 
pass that passage through this House and through this Senate and get it 
signed by the President as soon as possible, because we cannot get 
control in the demand reduction side if the price keeps going down, if 
the purity goes up, and the supply is coming in the way it is.
  Secondly, as we address the Safe and Drugfree Schools Act and as we 
look at other acts in Congress, we need to make sure that we do not so 
water down our prevention programs in this country that they no longer 
have the antidrug bite in them. If we water these things down so much 
it becomes kind of a feel-good type of program rather than an 
accountability program, such as making sure we push drug testing and 
other methods of accountability. Rather than just talk, countries like 
Mexico and Colombia have a somewhat legitimate gripe, that we are 
always pointing the finger at them while we are consuming all this and 
not doing anything domestically.

[[Page 1833]]

  Another problem that I will be soon meeting with the Department of 
Education about is an amendment that former Congressman Solomon and I 
passed on the student loans that said if you are convicted of a drug 
offense, you lose your loan for 1 year. If you are convicted a second 
time after you come back in, you lose it for 2 years, and a third time 
and you are out.
  The Department of Education has put out a form that over 100,000, 
probably 150,000 students, did not even check.
  We need to take aggressive action to make sure that those students 
who did not check that cannot get their loan if they do not check that 
box. Furthermore, we need a random sampling procedure to make sure that 
they are actually telling the truth, that the Department of Education 
partly in my opinion as a gutting process said this applied to 
everybody in all their years prior to going to college.
  This was an accountability provision, not before you went to college. 
But once you take a student loan, we expect you to be clean, because 
you cannot be learning if you are on drugs. You cannot be exercising 
your responsibility if we give you a subsidized loan and then you are 
on drugs.
  I also had an amendment that said if you test clean twice during that 
process of your first suspension, you can get your loan back. I believe 
education is critical. But if we are really committed in this country, 
forget about just talking about Mexico or Colombia or Panama or Peru or 
Bolivia, if we are committed in this country and we really care about 
our kids and we care about the violence in the streets and violence in 
the families, we need to take some serious steps in this Congress to 
put some accountability at the high school level, at the elementary 
school level, at the college level and at the adult level, and put some 
dollars as well as some restrictions behind it.

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