    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [April 29, 1996]
    [Pages 657-659]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the National Drug Control Strategy in Coral Gables, Florida
    April 29, 1996

        Thank you very much. Thank you. Didn't Rachel do a good job? Give
    her another hand. She was great, wasn't she? [Applause]
        Principal Heise, thank you for hosting us today and for your fine
    remarks, which I heard from behind the way there. I'm delighted to be on
    this stage with our two Cabinet members from Miami, Attorney General
    Reno and Secretary Rubin, and with General McCaffrey, who moved the
    SOUTHCOM here and wishes he were from Miami. You can tell by the Spanish
    speech he gave you. And he's doing a wonderful job, and I'm very proud
    of him.
        I want to thank three of your distinguished State officials who came
    in with me today who are here: Lieutenant Governor Buddy MacKay,
    Attorney General Bob Butterworth, and Senator Daryl Jones, who has a son
    here somewhere--there he is. Your son is clapping for you, Daryl.
        I want to thank Alvah Chapman and Marilyn Culp and Tad Foote and
    local television and other media executives. Judge Goldstein, of the
    local drug court, I thank him and all those involved in the drug court.
    I thank Dorothy Perry and all the community leaders. I want to thank all
    these young people in D-FY-IT. And I thank not only those who are here
    but those who came out to the airport to meet me.
        We have the leader of America's Coast Guard, the leader of our
    Customs Service, and others here today, along with the Attorney General
    and the Secretary of the Treasury and General McCaffrey. We are here in
    Miami to announce a new drug strategy because of what Miami is doing to
    make the children of Miami and the future of Miami drug-free. I thank
    all of you who have been any part of that--the local officials, the
    religious leaders, the community leaders, the school leaders. And I
    agree with Rachel that if we keep working, we can have the children of
    America educating the rest of us about this problem, and then it will go
    away for sure.
        Miami has dealt with the biggest challenges that drugs present to
    America. And Miami knows that what I have said about the world toward
    which we are moving is true. We are going into a world of enormous
    possibility for our people, dominated by global trade and high
    technology. You have worked very hard to see that the people of southern
    Florida reap the benefits of global trade and high technology.
        But you also know that the more open our borders are, the more
    freely people can travel, the more freely money can move and information
    and technology can be transferred, the more vulnerable we are to people
    who would seek to undermine the very fabric of civilized life, whether
    through terrorism, the weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, or
    drugs, and sometimes through all of the above.
        So the great challenge we face, my fellow Americans, is how to get
    the benefits of this world toward which we are moving and not be exposed
    to the forces that would undermine our ability to raise strong children
    in strong families in good, strong communities.
        That's what this national drug strategy is about. It focuses on
    rising drug use among children. It confronts head-on the fact that crime
    and drugs are vicious co-conspirators. You heard General McCaffrey
    allude to that. A significant percentage of the people in the prison
    systems of America today are there because of drug problems. If they
    weren't stealing money to pay for a drug habit, dealing drugs in the
    first place,

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    or behaving irrationally because of an addiction to drugs, we would be
    spending that money on educating our children and building our future
    instead of maintaining a prison system. And that's what we ought to do.
        But all of you here at George Washington Carver are a shining
    example of what it will ultimately take to make a drug strategy work all
    across America, people at the grassroots level. This school--I've heard
    you cheering for it before, but I want you to know why we're here. We
    are not here by accident, and we are not here because of anything we
    have done. We are here because of what you have done: zero guns, zero
    assaults, zero incidents of drug-related violence, zero drugs. That's
    where America ought to go and where America can go.
        We are here because of what Miami has done. I have watched this city
    and this county recover from a massive storm to host the Summit of the
    Americas, to attract the Southern Command of the United States military,
    and now to set a standard that all other cities should follow in
    reducing the problem of drug abuse. The Coalition for a Safe and Drug-
    Free Community has worked hard with all the rest of the people here so
    that drug use dropped more than 50 percent between 1991 and 1993 alone.
    That was the biggest decline in any metropolitan area in the country.
    I'd like to see that on some of the TV shows on prime time about Miami.
        Let me again thank the members of the coalition. I thank the
    students here today and I thank the Attorney General, who was a founding
    member back when she had her other job here in Dade County. Or as those
    of us in the administration say, back when we had a life, Janet Reno
    lived in Miami, and I thank her for what she did and for what you are
    doing.
        Now, while it is true that in the end this work has to be done
    student by student, family by family, school by school, neighborhood by
    neighborhood, we must acknowledge that the Nation's Government has a
    role to play. In this new era, when we are reducing the size of
    Government and its burden, when we have a Federal Establishment that
    today in 1996 is the smallest the National Government has been since
    1965--and by the end of this year it will be the smallest it's been
    since 1962--we still have responsibilities to help people throughout
    America make the most of their own lives and their families and their
    communities. And a big part of that is to make sure Americans can feel
    secure in their homes, on their streets, and in their schools, with
    drug-free homes, drug-free streets, and drug-free schools.
        Our crime bill is helping reduce the crime rate by giving
    communities police officers, 100,000 of them, in community settings in
    America; banning 19 deadly assault weapons. The Brady bill, which now
    requires a waiting period before you can buy a handgun, has kept 60,000
    people with criminal records from purchasing guns and endangering
    innocent citizens. It is working.
        I was so inspired by my personal experience watching your drug court
    here, and the Attorney General's experience when she took office, that
    we have worked hard to help others establish drug courts around America.
    There are now more than 100 of them in the United States. And I think
    every community ought to have one, and we're going to keep going until
    every community has the chance to have one.
        We've also used the crime bill to help schools fight drugs and
    violence, to help them support programs like D.A.R.E. and GREAT, to help
    them with gang prevention, and when they're needed, with things like
    metal detectors and increased securities. We are opening the way to do
    more in this area.
        But I want to say a special word of thanks to the people here who
    have taken a pledge to abstain from drugs and alcohol. You heard Rachel
    talk about that. I believe that if every student in every school in
    America took that pledge and reaffirmed it on a regular basis, a lot of
    these other things would not be necessary. So I'd like to ask all the
    students who have taken that pledge to stand today. If you took a pledge
    to be free of drugs and alcohol, stand up, and the rest of us would like
    to applaud you. [Applause]
        While not every community in America can claim the results that
    Miami can, you should know that every year for the last 3 years, murders
    have dropped and robberies have dropped and drug use has dropped.
    Monthly drug use today is roughly half of what it was 10 years ago in
    America. The number of cocaine users has fallen by 30 percent in the
    last 3 years alone. But we have a lot to do. And again, it's why we're
    at this school. The most perplexing problem that we face in this area is
    this: While the drug rate has gone down, drug usage among people under
    18 has gone up. While the crime rate has gone down, random violence

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    among people under 18 has gone up. The children who are here today are
    the battleground of today and tomorrow. They are the people for whom we
    must fight this great battle, and they are the ones we must rely on to
    win it by working with them.
        That is why I am announcing today a new and intensified strategy to
    battle drugs that builds and improves on the work we have done over the
    last 3 years, calls for more resources from the Nation than ever before,
    and targets those resources better than ever. This National Drug Control
    Strategy of 1996, as General McCaffrey said, is meant to be a 10-year
    plan. He worked on it very, very hard with many others. I want to thank
    him again for it, and I want to thank him for being willing to give up
    his four stars and his military command to fight America's most
    important battle for the future.
        Very briefly, this strategy has five very concrete goals: Number
    one, to get young people to reject drugs--that's what you're doing here;
    number two, to use effective treatment and prevention to break this
    vicious cycle that links drugs to violent crime; third, to stop drugs at
    the border, the way we are doing at the Miami Customs Office where
    technology and street smarts are catching more drugs with less
    inconvenience to arriving visitors; fourth, to break up the sources of
    supply, whether they are cocaine farms in Colombia or methamphetamine
    labs in California; and finally, to reduce the terrible social and
    economic costs imposed by drugs on our society, $69 billion in the last
    year.
        Now, to meet these goals, we are asking Congress, as we cut spending
    and move toward a balanced budget, to increase funding for the drug war
    by 9.3 percent. We can't stop drugs if our schools, hospitals, and
    communities don't have the tools they need to get the job done. We have
    to have the support of Congress to do this.
        Make no mistake about it, this has got to be a bipartisan, American,
    nonpolitical effort. If we're going to keep our commitment to put
    100,000 new community police officers on the street, we are going to
    have to do that. If we are going to keep our commitment to give schools
    the funds they need for the safe and drug-free schools program, we have
    to do that. And I am proud that the budget I signed last week from the
    Congress included both those programs.
        We are also working hard in Washington to try to protect you from
    new problems before they come to your doorstep, and that's an important
    job of the Nation's Government. I thank Secretary Rubin for getting the
    early warning on Rohypnol, a powerful and dangerous sedative, to stop it
    from flooding across our borders. I thank the Attorney General for the
    work she has done with General McCaffrey and others on the
    methamphetamine strategy. That is a deadly drug. It is gaining in
    popularity. In 2 years, deaths from this drug have doubled. I'm glad
    it's not here yet, but we have to stop it before it becomes the crack of
    the 1990's, and we are going after it right now.
        So let me say again, if we're going to win this battle, we have to
    be prepared to pay the price of time. We have to be prepared to ask
    ourselves, each and every one of us, what is our job? This National Drug
    Control Strategy is our effort to answer the question: What is our job?
    What is the President's job? What is the Cabinet's job? What is General
    McCaffrey's job?
        But we know in the end it is all of you here at the community level
    doing your jobs that will determine the fate of the children who are
    here. And ultimately it is their job to say no to destructive forces in
    their lives and yes to the future, no to an empty fantasy land and yes
    to the fantasy of an unimaginable future that is out there for all of
    our young people who will prepare themselves for it. That is ultimately
    the goal we must all share and work for as Americans.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:46 a.m. at George Washington Carver
    Middle School. In his remarks, he referred to Rachel Berne, Drug-Free
    Youth in Town (D-FY-IT) program participant, who introduced the
    President; Pregri Heise, Carver Middle School principal; Alvah Chapman,
    director, Knight-Ridder, Inc.; Marilyn Culp, executive director, Miami
    Coalition for a Safe and Drug-Free Community; Edward T. Foote,
    president, University of Miami; Judge Stanley Goldstein, 11th Circuit;
    and Dorothy Perry, chief executive officer, Youth Progressing, Inc.