    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [December 11, 1997]
    [Pages 1747-1749]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Coast Guard in Miami, Florida
    December 11, 1997

        Thank you very much, Lieutenant Britton, for your service and for
    that very thorough account of your activities. I hope that none of the
    Coast Guard will ever have to engage in ice-breaking in this area.
    [Laughter]
        Admiral Kramek, Admiral Saunders, Admiral Rufe, the men and women of
    the Coast Guard; Secretary Slater, thank you for your remarks and your
    work. General McCaffrey, thank you for the extraordinary job you have
    done in such a short time in focusing our Nation's attention on the drug
    problem and, even more importantly, coming up with a strategy with which
    to approach it, a strategy that is beginning to show significant
    results.
        Acting Customs Commissioner Banks, SOUTHCOM Commander General
    Wilhelm--I noticed that a lot of people laughed, General, when General
    McCaffrey said that you had a higher intellect than your two
    predecessors. One of them was General McCaffrey--I can understand him
    putting himself down--[laughter]--I don't know what General Clark thinks
    about it. [Laughter]
        Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart,
    and my good friend Lieutenant Governor MacKay, thank you all for being
    here and for the support that you give to the United States in the work
    we have to do here to deal with the drug problem. Thank all of you for
    coming. I see a lot of my friends out in the audience, including State
    Senator Daryl Jones--I'm glad to see you. And of all the men and women
    of the Coast Guard here, I can't help noticing that my immediate past
    Coast Guard military aide is now a deputy group commander in St.
    Petersburg, Lieutenant Commander June Ryan, and I'm glad to see her over
    there with General Wilhelm, earning an honest living for a change after
    escaping the political life of Washington. [Laughter]
        Before I get into my remarks about what you're doing here,
    Lieutenant Britton mentioned the fact that the Coast Guard is not
    involved in ice-breaking, but with El Nino, who knows. [Laughter] Now,
    we all laughed about that, but the truth is, as many of you know better
    than most of our fellow country men and women, there is an enormous body
    of evidence that the climate of the Earth is warming at a more rapid
    rate than at any time in the last 10,000 years. Many, many scientists
    believe in the next 100 years the climate will go--the average
    temperature will go up someplace between 2 and 6 degrees. To give you
    some idea of what the consequences of that kind of change were in the
    last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago, the average climate--average--climate
    temperature was only about 9 degrees lower than it is now.
        If it were to happen that we had a significant increase in
    temperature within a brief period, huge lowland areas in the United
    States, including big portions of south Florida, and island nations in
    the Pacific could be completely flooded. That is why the nations of the
    world have been meeting in Japan to try to find a way to reduce
    greenhouse gas emissions, to reduce global warming in a way that permits
    us to continue to grow our economies and work together in a responsible
    way.
        Yesterday, at the eleventh hour, the nations reached an agreement. I
    think it's of great relevance, especially to south Florida. It is
    environmentally strong, and it's economically sound. There's still a lot
    of challenges ahead. I believe we have to get the developing countries
    more involved because this is a global problem, not an American problem
    or a rich country problem. But this is a huge first step.
        And I would urge all of you--I see already the papers are full of
    people saying, ``The sky is falling; the sky is falling. It's a terrible
    thing.'' Every time we've tried to improve the American environment in
    the last 25 or 30 years, somebody has predicted that it would wreck the
    economy. And the air is cleaner, the water is cleaner, the food supply
    is safer, there are fewer toxic waste dumps, and the last time I
    checked,

    [[Page 1748]]

    we had the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years. So don't believe the
    skeptics. Give us a chance to make the case. And I just don't want the
    Coast Guard to be out there riding on any higher seas than we have
    already. And I think it's the right thing to do.
        Let me also say that I want to express sincere thanks to all the
    people in the Coast Guard who do this work. I thank the crew of the
    Cutter Chandeleur for the tour I just got. I had the chance to see some
    of the new technologies that are making a tough job just a little easier
    and making smugglers' lives quite a bit harder.
        For the last 5 years, we have been moving this country toward the
    21st century, with a vision to provide opportunity for everyone
    responsible enough to work for it, to maintain our leadership in the
    world, and to pull our increasingly diverse people closer together. That
    has required us to have an aggressive view of what the National
    Government's role is, but a very different one, not that we could sit on
    the sidelines or that we could solve all the problems but that we had a
    sharpened responsibility to create the conditions and give people the
    tools to solve their own problems and make the most of their own lives.
        Our economy is the healthiest in a generation. Our world leadership
    is strong. We're making headway across a whole range of social problems.
    Crime is at its lowest rate in 24 years. We've had a record drop in
    people on the welfare rolls, moving into the workplace. But surely we
    cannot meet all the challenges facing the American people unless we can
    break the deadly grip of crime related to drugs, and drug dependence
    itself, on our people especially and on our communities across the
    country.
        I've come to Causeway Island today because I want America to know
    that off the coast of Florida you are waging a battle for America's
    future and America's children. The ammo is live, the dangers are real,
    and I want America to know you are making a big difference.
        Almost 2 years ago, General McCaffrey and I came with the Attorney
    General to Miami to launch a comprehensive antidrug strategy for the
    Nation, a commonsense plan to address an uncommonly complex problem:
    prevention to keep children from turning to drugs, treatment to help
    break the cycle of addiction and crime, interdiction to reduce the flow
    of drugs, law enforcement to break up the sources of supply, and the
    largest counterdrug budget in history to back it up.
        Thanks in no small measure to heroic efforts on the high seas, in
    the air, and along our borders, the strategy is starting to show
    promising results. In the areas of interdiction, the Coast Guard and its
    partners have just completed a banner year, increasing arrests of
    traffickers by 1,000 percent and seizures of cocaine by 300 percent.
    You've been true to your motto, Semper Paratus, and I know you're too
    modest to do it, but I think all the rest of us--and you can join in if
    you like--should give the United States Coast Guard a big hand for a
    remarkable year. [Applause]
        I also want to congratulate the Customs Service on its success,
    particularly the drug seizure off the coast of Miami earlier this week.
    It's a feat worthy of one of these television movies--one officer,
    Senior Special Agent Joe Goulet, who is here with us today--stand up.
    Where are you? [Applause] Now, listen to this. You did not see this in a
    technologically altered movie. This happened. He singlehandedly pulled
    alongside a drug-running vessel cutting through the waves at 20 miles an
    hour, disabled the vessel, and dove back into his own vessel before it
    raced away. I can't tie my shoes that fast. [Laughter] With the help of
    Coast Guard personnel and air support, he and his fellow Customs
    officers seized more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine, the 10th major
    seizure in south Florida in the last 6 weeks alone.
        This is an impressive record. But we know we must do more because
    the drug cartels will do more; after all, there's a lot of money in
    this. So we're already deploying new technologies, increasing the
    Customs budget, doubling the number of Border Patrol agents along the
    Southwest border. And today I'm committing another $73 million to the
    Defense Department's $800 million counternarcotics budget to help
    support the interdiction efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean. I
    want to especially thank the Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen, for his
    leadership on these initiatives and to thank our Armed Forces leaders
    for their continuing dedication to this part of America's security
    mission.
        As General McCaffrey said, in all this we'll have to continue to
    work even more closely with our neighbors and our allies across the
    hemisphere. Mexico will soon launch with us our first joint counterdrug
    strategy. This spring we'll

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    be with all the democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean at the
    Summit of the Americas in Chile, where we will do our best to build a
    true hemispheric alliance against drugs.
        We'll also continue to work as we work to protect our borders, with
    law enforcement on the streets of America, targeting gang violence
    associated with drugs, helping people to adopt the kinds of strategies
    that where adopted have led to dramatic drops in drug trafficking and
    violence. I can just tell you, to cite one example, it has now been more
    than 2 years since a single child has been killed by a gun on the
    streets of the city of Boston, Massachusetts--more than 2 years in one
    of our largest American cities. If we can do that in one city, we ought
    to be able to do that in every city, and we owe our children and their
    future no less.
        The one thing General McCaffrey recognized not long after he took
    office is that we can spend all the money in the world on interdiction,
    we can spend all the money in the world on law enforcement, we can spend
    all the money in the world even on preventive strategies, but somehow,
    some way, our children have to decide that we will stop becoming the
    world's largest consumer of drugs. If we have 4 percent of the world's
    population and we consume nearly half the drugs, we're going to have
    trouble. There will be big money in it, and we'll have to put big money
    and enormous resources and the lives of our finest young people in
    uniform against the effort. We have got to change the culture in America
    which has so many of our young people becoming willing drug users. The
    numbers are encouraging. They're going down, but they're still far too
    large.
        A lot of this has to be done by people who deal with our young
    people one on one, starting with their parents. But Government can help.
    I want to applaud General McCaffrey for having the guts to go to
    Congress and ask them to give us $195 million for a media campaign next
    month. Every other serious endeavor in the United States is accompanied
    by a media campaign. But when we decided to ask for this, a lot of
    people thought we had slipped a gasket, because it made General
    McCaffrey and the whole effort so subject to cheap political attack. But
    in fairness to the Members of Congress, there was very little of it. And
    everyone understood that this was not a Democratic or a Republican
    issue, this was an American issue. And we had to reach our children
    however we could, whenever we could, in the best way that we could. So I
    thank you, General, for one more time risking a bullet for America's
    future.
        I want to say, when these things start, I hope they will remind the
    parents, the teachers, the coaches, the religious leaders that they have
    to take the lead in making our children strong enough to take the right
    stands and turn away from drugs. This is not--this war on drugs, as it's
    often called, is somehow misleading, I think, in the sense that it's not
    an offensive against a single enemy conducted by a single army. Instead,
    it's more like one of Lieutenant Britton's hobbies. She just ran in a
    marathon race where there are lots of people running at different paces
    in different ways. Everyone that finishes ought to get a medal. And it
    requires strength and determination and conditioning and unbelievable
    patience. It requires also a certain courage never, never to stop in the
    face of the relentless obstacles ahead. That's what this is. We're
    making progress in this marathon. The Coast Guard is leading the way.
    But all of us have a role to play, and we better determine to play it if
    we expect the 21st century to be America's best years. That's what I
    expect, and I think you do, too.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:20 a.m. at the U.S. Coast Guard Station.
    In his remarks, he referred to Lt. Megan Britton, USCG, Duty Officer,
    Seventh District Command Center; Adm. Robert E. Kramek, USCG, Coast
    Guard Commandant; Rear Adm. Norm Saunders, USCG, Commander, 7th Coast
    Guard District; Vice Adm. Roger T. Rufe, USCG, Commander, Atlantic Area;
    Gen. Charles E. Wilhelm, USMC, Commander in Chief, U.S. Southern
    Command; Gen. Wesley K. Clark, USA, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe;
    and Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay of Florida.