John Mica

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, how did we get ourselves into this situation? How did we get the flood of illegal narcotics coming in, in unprecedented amounts, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, designer drugs, in a torrent which we have never before seen? Someone mentioned to me, a visiting female constituent from Florida, ``You know, I haven't heard the President talk much about a war on drugs, and many people lately have said the war on drugs is a failure.'' In this discussion, I said, ``You know, I think you are right. I don't think we have really heard the President speak either to the Congress or to the American people about the war on drugs.'' In this little search that I had conducted by our staff, we went through all of the times that President Clinton has publicly mentioned the war on drugs since taking office. We did a search of all of his public speeches and statements. We find eight mentions in 7 years; two in 1993, March 18, 1993, and April 28, 1993, and that during the appointment primarily of his new Drug Czar, who turned out to be a disaster, or as the President was gutting the drug czar's office from some 130 positions to some less than 30 positions. We hear other mentions, just casual mentions, about once per year of a war on drugs. That is basically because this administration has closed down the war on drugs. Finally, the last time we can find a mention of the President, once last year, February 15, 1999, mentioning the war on drugs in casual passing. In fact, the war on drugs was closed down by the Clinton Administration with the appointment of the chief health officer of the United States, the Surgeon General, Jocelyn Elders, who adopted the ``Just Say Maybe,'' which, again, we can look at the statistics of drug abuse and misuse by our young people reaching record proportions. They understand a message or lack of a message from the highest office of our land to the highest health office of our land. The close-down on the war on drugs continued on the international scene. I do not have time to get into all the statistics tonight, but there is no question that this administration closed down the international programs that were so successful under the Reagan and Bush Administrations, that stopped drugs at their source, that stopped drugs before they came in to the United States and came in to our borders. What is sad is they perpetuated a myth that the war on drugs has been a failure, and some of their policies, again, closing down the efforts to stop drugs at their source, have resulted in an incredible volume of heroin, cocaine, coming into the United States. The most dramatic example, of course, is Colombia. For 6 or 7 years now this administration has done everything possible to stop resources, assistance, right up until the last few months, from getting to Colombia, and even the efforts to get equipment, resources, there, surplus materials, equipment authorized by the Congress, has been a bungled effort. That has had some direct impact. Colombia in 1992-1993 almost produced zero cocaine. There was almost no coca produced in Colombia. There was almost zero, none produced, of heroin. The poppies were almost nonexistent except for floral bouquets when this administration adopted its policy of stopping assistance in aid and drug combatting resources getting to Colombia. Now we are overwhelmed with the sheer volume. If that did not do enough damage, the policy of this administration is revealed in this Dallas Morning News article that appeared March 13, 2000, about going after drug traffickers. ``Federal drug offenders spending less time in prison, study finds.'' Now, liberal papers like the New York Times would have you believe that everyone who puffed a joint or was guilty of some minor possession would be behind bars. In fact, recently I have heard that comment after they editorialized and said we have to do away with the harsh Rockefeller laws. Our subcommittee in fact found that you really have to work hard to get in prison on a drug offense in the State of New York; that in fact 70 percent of the people behind bars, according to the most recent and most extensive study ever taken by judicial officials in New York that was revealed to our committee, are in jail for committing two or more felonies. Of the 30 percent who remain, they have committed at least one felony, and very few of those who were in prison on lesser charges are there because of small possessions of drugs. In fact, most of them that are there on lower charges, the study found, are there because the charge was reduced. It was plea bargained down. So we have people who have committed in fact multiple felonies and serious offenses behind bars for these offenses. Our prisons and jails in New York, in particular, this study confirms, are not there because of minor drug offenses. Unfortunately, tonight we do not have time to get into further detail. We will try to do that in subsequent special orders and update the Congress, you, Mr. Speaker, and my colleagues on these issues, to try to separate fact from fiction and shed some light on how we can do a better job in a multifaceted approach to bringing one of the most serious social challenges we have ever faced as a Nation or a Congress under control. With those comments, unfortunately, my time has expired, and the business of the House has been completed.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, I come to the floor tonight with just a few minutes remaining before the magic hour of midnight when the House adjourns. I know the hour is late and my colleagues are tired and staff is tired, but I always try on Tuesday nights to address the House on the subject of illegal narcotics and drug abuse and the ravages that has placed upon our Nation. We heard earlier a resolution relating to music; and as I sat and heard the speakers talk about music and the importance of music in people's lives, I translated that also into the thought that there are 15,973 Americans who died as a direct result of illegal narcotics in the latest statistical year, 1998. None of those individuals will ever hear music again. The drug czar has told us that over 52,000 people die as a result of direct and indirect causes of illegal narcotics, and none of those people will hear music in their lives. In fact, the only lives that the parents, mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers will hear are funeral dirges and, unfortunately, that music for funerals over the victims of drug abuse and misuse. That music is much too loud across our land and repeated over and over. It is equivalent for our young people to three Columbines every day across this country. And the latest statistics, and I would like to cite them, each week I come before the House to confirm that this situation is getting worse, rather than better. The latest report that we have on drug use being up is from USA Today, June 8, 2000, just a few days ago. This is an Associated Press story, and it is from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from the Center in Atlanta. They just released this report. The story says cocaine, marijuana, and cigarette use among high school students consistently increased during the 1990s according to a government survey. The report went on to say the increases in smoking and drug use came despite years of government-funded media campaigns urging teenagers to stay clean and sober. The record, again, from CDC went on to say that in 1991, 14.7 percent of the students surveyed said that they used marijuana. This was a survey involving 15,349 students in grade 9 through 12. That number steadily increased to some 26.7 percent in 1999, and students reporting that they tried marijuana at least once increased from 31.3 percent in 1991 to 47.2 percent in 1999; and in 1991, 1.7 percent of the students surveyed said they had used cocaine at least once in the prior month. By 1999, that number rose to 4 percent. Those who had tried cocaine, who had at least tried cocaine, increased from 5.9 percent in 1991 to 9.5 percent in 1999. The latest survey on drug use and abuse by the Centers for Disease Control, again, confirms the problem that we are facing across the land, and this is with cocaine, marijuana, and cigarettes. Of course, some of you may have seen this headline in the Washington papers, Suburban Teen Heroin Use On The Increase, and suburban teen heroin use and youth use of heroin and deadly, more purer heroin than we have seen back in the 1980s when we had single digit purity levels are now reaching some 70 percent and 80 percent deadly purity are affecting our young people; that deadly highly pure heroin is affecting our young people across the land. The number of heroin users in the United States has increased from 500,000 in 1996 to 980,000 in 1999. The rate of use by children age 12 to 17 is extremely alarming. It increased from less than 1 in 1,000 in the 1980s to 2.7 per 1,000 in 1996. First-time heroin users are getting younger. They averaged some 26 years of age in 1991, now down to 17 years of age by 1997. Some of the latest statistics on drug use and abuse of heroin. I also have the latest DAWN interagency domestic heroin threat assessment, which was produced in February of this year, and it shows the emergency department heroin related incidents involving 12 to 17- year-olds. From 1991 it was around 182, 1992, 232, and that soared in 1997 to 1,397 mentions, again, dramatic increases. We see from CDC, we see from the DAWN heroin report, drugs across the board. That does not take into account our most recent epidemic, which is the problem of Ecstacy. I recently conducted a hearing in Central Florida on the problem of club drugs and designer drugs, Ecstacy, and we find that now we have another raging epidemic of drug use featured in Time Magazine, which is this past week's edition. ``The lure of Ecstacy,'' one of the designer drugs of choice for our young people, which we barely had mention of a year or two ago, and now we have incredible incidence of drug use of Ecstacy and abuse of Ecstacy and other designer drugs among our young people. The problems created by these illegal narcotics are pretty dramatic to our society. I cited the 15,973 deaths, and that in itself is serious, but the cost to our society is a quarter of a trillion dollars a year, plus incarceration of tens of thousands of individuals who commit felonies under the influence of illegal narcotics. How did we get ourselves into this situation? Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, not long ago I was privileged to take part in a ceremony in Orlando, Florida to commemorate the Battle of the Bulge and those who fought in that historic battle. The ceremony was conducted to dedicate an impressive new memorial erected to honor the 600,000 Americans who fought in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. The keynote speaker at the dedication was Brigadier General William E. Carlson (USA/Ret.), a distinguished and exceptional gentleman who resides in Winter Park, Florida. At the age of 12, General Carlson was a Congressional Page serving in the House of Representatives on that historic day when President Roosevelt asked a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war. To commemorate the Battle of the Bulge Monument, General Carlson gave a moving and graphic description of the battle and the historic events which preceded it. His speech should be read by others so that this story will never be forgotten. In Washington we are working to build a long overdue monument to World War II and honor the heroes who fought in it. In Orlando, we are proud to honor our World War II soldiers with our monument to the Battle of the Bulge. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to submit General Carlson's Battle of the Bulge speech for inclusion in the Record: It was the 16th of September, 1944. Adolf Hitler had summoned a group of his senior officers to his study in the huge, underground bunker in the Wolf's Lair, Hitler's field headquarters, located deep in a pine forest in East Prussia. Those summoned were his closest and most trusted military advisors. Among them was only one who wore the red stripes of the German General Staff. He was the head of the Operations Staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, General Alfred Jodl. The officers were waiting when Hitler entered. Taking a seat, Hitler instructed Jodl to sum up the situation on the Western Front. During the briefing, Jodl noted that there was one area of particular concern where the Americans were attacking and where the Germans had almost no troops: That area was the region of Belgium and Luxembourg called the Ardennes. At the word ``Ardennes '', Hitler suddenly ordered Jodl to stop the briefing. There was a long pause. Then with firmness in his voice Hitler said, ``I shall go on the offensive here!'' and he slapped his hand down on the map--``Here, out of the Ardennes! The objective is Antwerp!'' With those words Hitler set in motion preparations for a battle that was to assume epic proportions: the greatest German attack in the West since the campaign of 1940. Hitler named this Operations Plan Wacht Am Rhein. He personally selected this name to imply a defensive Operation, rather than an offensive operation, in order to deceive the Allies. During the planning, the German General Staff made numerous changes to Hitler's original concept for the operation. When the battle began, the German code name for the operation was Autumn Mist. A split second after five-thirty a.m. on Saturday, December the 16th an American soldier manning an observation post high on top of a water tower in the village of Hosingen telephoned his Company Commander. He reported that in the distance on the German side he could see a strange phenomenon: countless flickering pinpoints of light. Within a few seconds both he and his Company Commander had an explanation. They were the muzzle flashes of over 2,000 German artillery pieces. The early morning stillness of the fog-shrouded forest was suddenly shattered with the thunderclap of a massive artillery barrage landing on the Americans. Operation Autumn Mist was underway. The onslaught had begun. The Americans called it the Battle of the Bulge. The Battle of the Bulge lasted from the 16th of December 1944 until the 25th of January 1945. It was the greatest battle ever fought by the United States Army. More than a million men participated in this battle including 600,000 American soldiers, 500,000 Germans, and 55,000 British. The American military force consisted of a total of three Armies with 33 Divisions. While the German military force consisted of two Panzer Armies with 29 Divisions. More than 120,000 Germans were killed, wounded or captured during the battle. Each side lost over 800 tanks. Wars are planned by old men in council rooms far from the battlefield. But at the end of the most grandiose plans of the highest-ranking Generals is the soldier walking the point or manning the outposts. The monument we dedicate today is a monument to those soldiers. The real story of the Battle of the Bulge is the story of those soldiers and the intense combat action of the small units--the squads, the platoons and the companies--and the soldiers who filled their ranks. These are the men that made up the fighting strength of the divisions, engaged the Germans in combat and suffered the casualties. Battalion Commanders and Company Commanders--young, lean, tough, battle-wise and toil worn. Fuzzy-cheeked lieutenants, grizzly NCO's, and seasoned troopers; battle-hardened and disciplined in automatic habits of combat never learned in school. And green replacements, fresh off the ships from home, marched off into battle for the first time and in their hearts was fear of the unknown. Around their necks hung their dog tags and rosaries. On their heads was the steel pot and in their pocket was a picture of the girl back home. Surprised, stunned and not understanding what was happening to him, the American soldier nevertheless held fast--he was as tenacious as the old junkyard dog until he was overwhelmed by the German onslaught, or until his commanders ordered him to withdraw. The Battle was a very personal fight for them. Concerned with the fearful and consuming task of fighting and staying alive, those men did not think of the battle in terms of the big Picture represented on the situation maps at higher headquarters. They knew only what they could see and hear in the chaos of the battle around them. They knew and understood the earth for which they fought, the advantage of holding the high ground and the protection of the trench or foxhole. They could distinguish the sounds of the German weffers and the screaming sound of incoming German 88s. And they knew the fear of German artillery rounds falling around them without pattern in the snow. They knew the satisfying sound of friendly artillery shells passing overhead. They were reassured by the sudden stabs of flame in the night as friendly artillery belched bullets into the air, spreading a glow of flickering light above the blackened trees of the snow-covered forest. They knew the overwhelming loneliness of the battlefield, the feeling of despair, confusion and the uncertainty that prevails in units in retreat. They knew first hand the violent pounding of the heart, the cold sweat, the trembling of the body and the stark terror that mortal combat brings. Even Mother Nature was their enemy with bitterly cold weather and over-cast skies. The days were short--daylight at 8 and darkness by 4. The nights were long and bitterly cold. Snow, knee-deep, covered the battleground. Overcast skies and heavy fog shrouded the snow-covered limbs of the fir trees in the dark forest. GIs, their bodies numb, were blue-lipped and chilled to the bone. At night, the German ground assault was assisted by artificial moonlight created by giant German searchlights bouncing their light off the low-hanging clouds casting an eerie, ghostly light in the fog, over the snow-covered field of battle. Other nights were ablaze with more flame and noise than one thought possible for man to create. For a brief moment in history, those men held our nation's destiny in their hands. In the end they did not fail us. They prevailed and the fires of hell were extinguished. They blew the trumpets that tumbled the walls. Theirs was the face of victory. Super heroes--super patriots. Their legacy--victory in the greatest battle ever fought by the United States Army. But the cost of victory was high. Young Americans answered the angel's trumpet call and were sacrificed on the altar of the god of war--brave heroes whose valor in many cases died unrecognized with them on the battlefield. Young warriors whose names the grim reaper carved on marble tombstones across our land. It was a time of great sacrifice and in most cases the dead were hardly more than boys. 19,000 new Gold Stars were hung in the windows back home: Mothers who lost their songs; Wives who lost their husbands; And Children who lost their fathers. Over 23,000 American soldiers were captured during the heat of battle. Prisoners of war who were forced to serve behind barbed wire, in silence and with courage, each in his own way, until the war ended. Purple Hearts were awarded by the thousands. The snow turned red with American blood. The wounds of 81,000 young Americans in that battle left the `red badge of courage' on the battlefield of the Ardennes. We are reminded of what their journey through life has left behind for us: a great nation, a great state and a City Beautiful with freedom and prosperity unknown in the annals of history. Today, in the quiet of an autumn breeze blowing across Lake Eola, we are gathered here to dedicate a monument and pay tribute to the men this monument represents. As you look at the monument placed in this beautiful park, also look around you. Look at the old warriors gathered here--they were the vibrant youth of that time--men who were there on that battlefield 55 years ago today. Men like: PFC Jim Hendrix who was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroic action during the battle. Young, Fuzzy-cheeked lieutenants such as John Newell, a tank commander, and Bill Cain, platoon leader. They were in the armored column of old ``blood and guts'' Patton as they raced 150 miles under the severest of winter conditions in their valiant effort to relieve Bastogne. Bob Stevenson, ``one of those damned engineers'', an accolade from the German SS Colonel Peiper, about our engineers for blowing bridges and building obstacles at every turn and bend in the road, obstacles that slowed the advance of his SS Panzer column. Bob has with him today his WWII helmet that he wore during that battle, a helmet with a jagged shrapnel hole in the back of it, a helmet that probably saved him for the scythe of the grim reaper. And Jim Mckearney, a Mortar Platoon Sgt. in the 101st Airborne Division who just days before had received a battlefield commission while fighting in Holland. As a new lieutenant leading a platoon in the defense of Bastogne, he and his platoon stood as firm as the solid granite pedestal of the monument we dedicate today. To this day he bears the scars of the wounds he received in that battle. Young American men, hardly more than boys, men such as Harry Meisel and Earl K. Wood, our Orange County Tax Collector, men who wear an Ardennes Battle Star on their European Campaign ribbon for their participation in the battle. And Angels of Mercy, such as Lieutenant Evelyn Gilberg, an Army Nurse who went to sleep at night sobbing, thinking about the mangled bodies of the young American Soldiers in the field hospital that she had cared for that day. Men like the lone soldier in Chet Morgan's outfit, digging a foxhole atop a small knoll beside a road. A vehicle loaded with fleeing American soldiers came speeding down the road heading for the rear. The vehicle stopped and the soldiers hollered to him, ``the Germans are coming! Come on we have room for you!'' He looked up and in words his mother never taught him, replied: ``You can stop now because the Germans aren't going past this position while I'm alive! This is the 82nd Airborne Division area.'' These soldiers, and the thousands of others like them, are the soldiers who stood their ground in the days when the heavens were falling and the battlefield was in flames with all the fire and noise humanly possible for over a million warriors to create. These are the men who in the hours when the earth's foundation shook like an earthquake, stood their ground. These are the men who followed duty's call and lived the code of the soldier. They sacrificed and paid the price for freedom. They stayed--and the earth became theirs again. They defended and what was abandoned--they recaptured. They saved the sum of all things we hold dear--and all this for love of their country--and the meager pay of a soldier. Ask yourselves now--with head bowed--From where, Oh God, came such men as these? Our Country was truly blessed. Today we gather here to dedicate a monument. A monument that stands as a legacy to the Greatest Battle Ever fought By The United States Army and to those veterans who fought and won that battle with their blood and their courage. But let also stand as a reminder to future generations of the high cost of freedom. God bless the United States of America.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor as we return from the Memorial Day work recess and am again pleased to appear before the House and my colleagues to talk about what I consider the most important subject facing this country and this Congress and that is the problem of illegal narcotics. During this recess, as chair of the oversight and investigation Subcommittee on Criminal, Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the House of Representatives, I had the opportunity to continue our series of hearings, both here in the Congress the day before we left and adjourned and then during this holiday recess to conduct three national field hearings. One of those was in New Orleans at the request of the gentleman from Louisiana (Mr. Vitter), also a member of the Subcommittee on Criminal, Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, to look at a drug testing program that had been instituted in some of the private schools and is being expanded to the public schools in New Orleans. That hearing was conducted during the recess. Then we moved our field hearings to Orlando, my own backyard, the area immediately south of me where we conducted a field hearing on the subject of club drugs and designer drugs and their impact now in central Florida, the State of Florida, and across the Nation. Then we conducted a third hearing in the Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas area, actually in the city of Mesquite outside of Dallas at the request of the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Sessions). We looked at an area that had been hard hit by narcotics, illegal narcotics, primarily heroin, looked at the trend in illegal narcotic trafficking, particularly some of the designer drugs, methamphetamine, and focused our attention on what that community had done in successful treatment and prevention education, community-based programs to deal with the problem of illegal narcotics and drug abuse. So we have had a full schedule, and tonight I want to update my colleagues and the American people on where we stand in our efforts to combat illegal narcotics. Now, today is the 6th of June, and we come back from Memorial Day, a time when we remembered those who fought and died in service to this country to our great Nation. We remember today of course D-Day, such a memorable day in the history of the country, the beginning of the end of World War II when thousands of Americans died on the beaches of Normandy in attempting to bring the Second World War to an end. As we remember each of those fallen heroes on Memorial Day and remember this day, we must realize that these individuals gave up their lives for service to this country and respect their great sacrifice and always honor that great sacrifice. Tonight our country does not face the threat of a Cold War, of nuclear bombs possibly being rained from a Soviet Union. We still have many external threats. But today we face probably the most serious domestic threat since the very founding of this Nation. The toll continues to mount. I asked my staff to research the number of American dead in some of the wars. In World War I, 117,000, nearly 117,000 Americans lost their lives. In World War II, over 408,000 Americans lost their lives. In the Korean War, some 52,246 Americans died in service of their country. The Vietnam War, some 58,219. In the Persian Gulf conflict in the past decade, 363 Americans gave their life in those battles. It is incredible to note the loss of life directly and indirectly to illegal narcotics. Our Drug Czar, head of the National Office of Drug Control Policy, Barry McCaffrey, testified before our Subcommittee on Criminal, Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources in the neighborhood of 52,000 Americans lost their lives the last year as a result of direct and indirect deaths. As a result of direct deaths, the last statistic that we have is 1998, and that figure was 15,973 Americans lost their lives. It is only to be compared to the external conflicts in which we have lost so many Americans. So it is fitting that in the light of Memorial Day that we remember those who lost their lives in service to this great Nation, but it is sad to come back and face the reality of tens of thousands of Americans dying at the hands and at the call and at the destruction of illegal narcotics across our land. The toll in dead and destroyed families goes on and on. We have conducted field hearings across the Nation in the past year and a half since I have assumed the chairmanship and this responsibility. I am concerned that this situation may be getting even worse, rather than better. Tonight I want to talk about where we are, some of the things we learned in our field hearings, where we can go from here, what we have done in the past that was correct, and what we have done most recently that has been incorrect, and what path we need to follow to get this situation under control. But, again, we have a very, very serious situation. It was brought to light in the hearing that was conducted in my own backyard in central Florida. The last hearing we held focused on the last year and a half. That hearing focused on the number of deaths from heroin overdoses, which unfortunately continues to rise and even the number of admissions from overdoses of heroin continues to rise dramatically. The only reason we have not had more deaths, I am told by medical and law enforcement experts, is that they have developed better techniques to save our young people. And those who suffer from overdoses, they do not fall victim; but, nonetheless, we have even greater numbers of deaths from heroin. We have taken a measure to create a high intensity drug traffic area, which is just getting underway the last year and a half in central Florida, and that may well be expanded up until Jacksonville and go through Orlando to Tampa, combined with the Miami HIDTA and Puerto Rican HIDTA, high intensity drug traffic area, Federal designation by Federal law that allows every possible Federal asset to be combined with State, local, other law enforcement efforts, to go after traffickers, certainly, a Federal responsibility. But even with those efforts underway, the incidents of death by heroin are still dramatically high. Now we have learned about and we focused our hearing on club drugs, designer drugs and particularly Ecstasy. The cover of this week's Time magazine features Ecstasy, and it was ironic that we would have this national publication come out at the same time that we had this hearing in Orlando. We had planned the hearing in advance of this publication, but certainly the problem that we heard in Orlando with Ecstasy and designer drugs, unfortunately, in this article, for those of us who will read it, will disclose, in fact, that Ecstasy and designer drugs are now rampant across the United States. Club drugs, those drugs that are in dance and rave clubs in central Florida and around the country now, where sometimes parents think that their children are going to a dance or a music concert or activity where there is security, where there is no alcohol, these places that seem and sound secure have now turned, according to testimony we have had, into major sources of illegal designer drugs for our young people. In Florida, the head of our State office of drug control policy, Jim McDonough, testified that we lost 200 individuals in Florida in the last several years to designer and club drugs and overdoses of these new fancy narcotics. I do not think I have ever seen a more insidious threat to this country than what we face probably in the next year, not only from external heroin and cocaine coming in to the United States in unprecedented quantities and waves. And I will talk about how we got ourselves into that situation. Now we find the threat of these designer drugs, Ecstasy, coming in also through every conceivable means, huge quantities coming in from the Netherlands, which has had lax laws relating to narcotics distribution and consumption; huge quantities coming in from Mexico, our neighbor to the south, which we have given free and open trade access to the United States and to our markets. Also the problem of methamphetamine, which really was not on the charts some 6 years ago or 7 years ago, and now we see an epidemic of methamphetamine from the West Coast, to the East Coast, from the North to the South, methamphetamine with consequences on individuals, that puts crack to shame. The crack epidemic that we had in the 1980s was brought under control by the Reagan administration. And this crack that caused people to do such bizarre actions, commit such bizarre crimes is nothing compared to what we are seeing around this country with methamphetamine. It is hitting the rural areas. We are going out to Iowa to conduct a hearing at the request of the representative from Iowa (Mr. Latham), the heartland and core of America. Minnesota, another area filled full of family and tradition is now also ravaged by methamphetamine. We conducted a hearing several weeks ago and had for the first time the Federal Sentencing Commission in, and the Sentencing Commission provided us with some charts, which I would like to put up and have my colleagues and the speaker pay attention to for a minute, this problem has gotten entirely out of control since 1992. We look at the crack problem that we had, and I mentioned in the 1980s that was brought under control and rather limited. If we look at this chart in two areas, in 1992, at the end of the Bush administration, Bush and Reagan had done an incredible job in bringing that situation under control. Methamphetamine in 1992, and again, I did not produce this chart, this was given by the Federal Sentencing Commission to our subcommittee, there is almost no meth on the chart in 1992. If we go to 1993, we see the spread of crack, the appearance of methamphetamine. In 1994, you have to remember some of the situations which we developed; this is the end of the Bush and Reagan administration. This is the beginning of the Clinton/Gore just say maybe to drugs. Here is just say no era. Here is the just say maybe. Here is the appointment of a chief health officer of the United States, Jocelyn Elders, who said to our children, if it feels good, do it, the just say maybe generation. Here we see the beginning of the meth epidemic, the cocaine, the crack reappearance. Again, these charts are just absolutely dramatic and revealing. 1994, in 1993, they began the closedown of the war on drugs. During the break, I was home and heard one of our local councilmen, who is also an active Democrat, say that well, in fact, the problem is the war on drugs is a failure, and we just have not put enough money into treatment. Let me just, if I may, show how much money we have put in treatment. Here is 1991, 1992, even in the Bush administration in these eras, we had put money into treatment. In almost every succeeding year and from this point on here, we have almost doubled the amount of money in treatment. At the same time, this administration began the employment of an unprecedented number of people, and even the White House Executive Office of the President with such recent drug use histories that they could not pass security checks, the situation was so bad that, in fact, the Secret Service required a drug testing program be instituted before they would grant additional clearances to these individuals. We ended up with an administration that began the dismantling of the war on drugs, cutting, with a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, the entire executive branch, the presidency, the House and the Senate, the other body, by huge majorities, from 1993 to 1995 controlled this whole process. They began the dismantling of the war on drugs. The money that had previously been used, the funds that had been previously used for stopping drugs at their source called international programs or funds were cut in half, gutted by, again, a White House and a Democrat-controlled Congress bent on just going for treatment, ignoring a war on drugs, closing down on a war on drugs. The drug czar's office was slashed from 120 positions to some 30 positions in 1993. The use of the military for interdiction to stop drugs most cost effectively from their source before they got into the country, and our military people must understand, do not become involved in drug enforcement, they provide surveillance information; that information is given to source countries, and the source countries go after the drug traffickers. That is the pattern, and that is what can work, worked so effectively in the Bush and Reagan administration, no question about it. They chose another path. This is, again, the result, another chart showing what took place from almost, again, if we went back to 1992, we had no methamphetamine on this chart and two spots of crack showing up. 1996, this is the result of that policy. 1997, almost the entire country now engulfed, finishing the job in 1998 and 1999. These are some of the most dramatic charts, again, ever supplied, I think, to Congress showing the failure of a policy of this Congress, and the damage that was done in a 2-year, 3-year period by this administration. I can only say to those that think the war on drugs is a failure to, again, please look at this chart. And no matter how I stand, if I got up on top of this and looked down, if I look at it from the side, or if I get underneath, these are the facts. The source is the University of Michigan. In the Reagan administration, we see the long-term prevalence of drug use taking a decline; in the Bush administration, a dramatic decline. I have not doctored these. I have not touched these. These were presented to our subcommittee. For any illicit drug, this is probably the best barometer that is produced on this. You look at the Clinton administration, you look at the emphasis of putting all of the money into treatment, closing down the enforcement or closing down the interdiction, closing down the source country, failing to stop drugs at their source, closing down the drug czar's operation, as we knew it, and these are the results. So this, my friends, is not failure. This is success. This is a reduction. This is failure. It is incredible to see that where the Republicans took over, and even with the thwarting of this administration blocking the new majority's efforts to stop drugs at their source, to regain the cooperation and use of the military for surveillance purposes, and going after tough prosecution on some of the things that we have done, have we even begun to stabilize this in the last several years. But now I submit that the situation is again getting out of hand, and for several specific reasons. First, during the holidays, the headline is very telling in The Washington Post. It says, ``Antidrug Efforts Stalls in Colombia.'' And it is ironic that on the same page they have ``U.S. Calls Peruvian Election Invalid.'' This shows two great failures of this administration. First, we begged, we pleaded with this President since 1994, when they started first of all closing down the sharing of information with Peru and Colombia and other countries that were sources of hard narcotics, we pleaded with them to continue allowing that surveillance information to be given. Liberals from this administration and others who went into these various agencies, including the Department of Defense, came up with a cockamamie, and I am not sure, for the benefit of the Speaker and the stenographer, how ``cockamamie'' is spelled, but a cockamamie opinion was drafted by these liberals that we could no longer share that information and they closed down the surveillance, they closed down stopping us providing that information and, basically, shut down the shoot-down policies that these countries had adopted. When we would provide these countries information on drugs leaving their source, they would, in fact, send their pilot out after warning and shoot down drug traffickers. It worked. It worked in the Bush administration. It worked in the Reagan administration. And we saw this decline. I always ask, how many people have HD TVs? Not many people have HD TVs. That is because there is not a big supply of HD TVs, there is a very small supply available and the price is very high. With the policy of closing down the war on drugs, you would not have your planes shot down, if the surveillance is prohibited, which it was by this administration, and that mistake was made back in 1994 and 1995 and only corrected after a bipartisan effort, everyone in the House who dealt with this issue knew the great mistake that was made, the damage that was made, and we changed the law and allowed that information to be shared. And then in the last 2 or 3 years, we see the same pattern over and over again. This administration has failed to provide the interdiction effort. The Department of Defense does not have the will. And I just thought of this the other day. Have my colleagues ever heard the President of the United States mention the war on drugs? Have we ever heard Bill Clinton, the Chief Executive Officer, from this podium, in a joint session of Congress or in any public forum? I cannot recall. At one time I know that a search was done on one of these Nexus searches to see how many times he had mentioned illegal narcotics or an effort to deal with the drug problem; and, in fact, it is almost the lowest recorded of any President. That is why we see the lack of leadership from the White House and not only the lack of leadership and the message that is sent to our young people and our population, but also the policy and the policy is an antidrug effort stalled in Colombia. Why did it stall? This administration never brought up until the last minute, almost to the week of the presentation of the budget, their proposal for dealing with this problem in Colombia. Now, when the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) chaired the subcommittee responsible for trying to deal with that narcotics problem, he actually was the chair of the subcommittee that had this responsibility in the last Congress, he began restoration in several countries and was able to get in Peru and Bolivia efforts started. They have eliminated between 55 and 60 percent of the cocaine production in both of those countries, successful programs. That is why I thought this was ironic that the U.S. calls the Peruvian election invalid. I think they backed off today. But here, this administration, instead of praising President Fujimori, is condemning President Fujimori. Why in the world would we take a president who has stabilized the country, and I can tell my colleagues firsthand because I flew into Lima, Peru in 1990, the end of 1993, with the airport sandbagged, with people sleeping in the streets, with chaos, with thousands of displaced Indian population, hungry people, I will never forget going to a village outside of Lima and meeting a peasant woman and she had five children and the interpreter told me what she was saying, and she said that her difficulty, her problem, was she only had enough food for four of those children so she had to choose which child not to feed that would die. This is the situation that President Fujimori inherited, complete chaos, 60, 70 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States produced in that country. Here is someone who brought law and order, who calmed a country that was in total disruption, and here is this administration condemning him for a candidate who called not to have a runoff election and would not commit to a date certain. Could you imagine the Republicans saying, we will not have a runoff election or the Democrats in this country saying we will not have a runoff election or do not have a runoff election, and we will figure out at some time when the election will be? This is a slap in the face to President Fujimori who has done an incredible job of first stabilizing that country. I remember going down when I took over chairmanship of this responsibility on our drug policy and trying to put these programs back together both with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) and myself when I assumed this chair and met with President Fujimori, I was stunned at Lima, I was stunned at the countryside, at the order, the ability of people to conduct their daily business, of glass everywhere, which everything had been boarded, people sleeping in the alleyways, bombs going off at night, gunfire. And that was a situation he inherited, brought the cocaine trafficking under control, brought down the terrorism that disrupted so many lives, and stabilized the economy so a mother would not have to make a decision whether she fed four children and let one die. This is the type of foreign policy. Even the President of the United States's representative in Peru wrote this administration and said, your policy for, and this is the policy of a second time, they made the mistake in 1994 and 1993 by stopping the surveillance information, they stopped it again, and the President's representative, the ambassador of the United States of America, appointed by the President of the United States, said, this is a mistake in a report that was given to me in December by GAO, the General Accounting Office. I asked for a report from an impartial panel to see what was going on. So mistake after mistake, error after error, has been made. Now, again, in the 1980s, we had most of the cocaine coming in from South America and from Peru and Bolivia. About 95 percent of it really was coming in from those two countries. We were able to stem that. We were able to bring down the prevalence of drug use. This is the new picture; and we have almost all of the cocaine, probably 80 to 90 percent of the cocaine, now being produced in Colombia. Now, in 6 or 7 years, we managed to turn Colombia from a transit and trafficking country into a producing country. Fortunately, the policies of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) and the new Republican majority were instituted at very low cost, $20 million, $30 million, $40 million in those source countries to stop incredible volumes of cocaine coming into the United States. But what happened is the Clinton administration blocked aid, blocked helicopters, blocked equipment again because the liberals in the administration said, oh, we cannot harm the hair on the back of any leftist, Marxist guerilla. It does not matter if they, in fact, were trafficking and supporting their guerilla activities through the sale of illegal narcotics that were coming into the United States. So now we have really, protected by the Clinton-Gore administration, Colombia with no resources. It is almost farcical what has happened. And until the first couple of months of this year were we able to get to the National Police three Blackhawk helicopters, which we have been pleading and begging for 4 or 5 years to get down to Colombia. We knew what was going to happen, and it happened. This administration ignored it. They sent the military assets to Haiti. Ironically, Haiti is now one of the biggest traffickers in the Caribbean, lawless killing. We have one corrupted administration replacing another one. After billions of American taxpayer dollars, this is now one of the main routes. And Colombia is another disaster. The two foreign policy disasters unparalleled in the history of this hemisphere. Billions spent there, nothing spent there, creating a market, creating a source for drug trafficking. There was almost no heroin produced in 1993 in January when this President took office, President Clinton; and this is now the source of some 75 percent of the heroin killing kids in Orlando and Plano, Texas and California; Chicago; and New York. And now it is transiting through the country, where we spent $3 billion in nation building, in establishing a judicial system and electoral processes that have been, in fact, a farce. It is the bad leading, the bad destroying American business activity there, forcing the whole island, at least this half, which is Haiti, of Dominica, the island nation of Haiti into a welfare state supported by U.S. taxpayers, one of the saddest chapters in failed policy of this administration. And then what was not diverted here, the Defense Department will tell you was diverted to Kosovo, to Bosnia, to the other many deployments of this administration. What are the results of these policies? For the first time again, we are seeing with the blocking of aid to Colombia, and I must say that at this point the Republicans must take some heat in the United States Senate, the other body, and some blame and responsibility for blocking the aid. The House did act and had a package ready to go to aid Colombia to get additional resources. The other body did not act with the speed they should have. But again, there is some justification because the President dragged his heels in getting this request to the Congress. This is what is happening now. We are seeing a resurgence of cocaine. The chart that I showed just a few minutes ago showed the crack coming in. Crack is part of the cocaine trafficking. This was presented to us by the Customs Service. These are boats mostly coming through Haiti with literally tons of cocaine which is smuggled in through the hulls of these vessels. This is 706 pounds of cocaine seized. This is just what they are seizing, January 31, 2000. This is another vessel, 1,083 pounds of cocaine coming in at the beginning of February. Another one, February 5, 539 pounds of cocaine. Another one, February 10, 226 pounds of cocaine, most of it coming into the United States through Haiti, some of it being transshipped through Puerto Rico, the Bahamas and into Florida. We are seeing an unprecedented amount of cocaine again for the first time coming in. We are seeing an unprecedented amount of methamphetamine labs. Most of the meth we hear about is tied to Mexican gangs, Mexican drug dealers and chemical dealers who are selling the precursors or organizing the lab efforts. We have had testimony that their operations from Mexico extend, of course, through Texas, through Oklahoma. We heard testimony that from 60 labs in the Oklahoma area that the FBI controls Oklahoma and Texas, there is now over 1,000 labs that have been busted. In Iowa, the heartland again of America. On the West Coast in Sacramento, up in the north central area, incredible amounts of methamphetamine all the way down to the base of California with methamphetamine. Methamphetamine we have done hearings on. I want to digress for a minute and talk about methamphetamine. Because I do not think we have ever seen a more damaging substance than methamphetamine. These are some charts provided to us by the National Drug Institute. Dr. Leschner presented these before our subcommittee, showing the normal brain with dopamine which helps with the brain function which is shown in the bright yellow. This is the normal brain. The second is a brain that has had a small amount of methamphetamine. The third is someone addicted to methamphetamine. The last one is someone who has Parkinson's Disease in a serious stage. This drug, methamphetamine, does incredible things to human beings. It causes the most bizarre actions. This is what chemically happens to the brain and destroys the brain function. It is not something that can be regenerated. This is permanent damage. This is damage so severe that mothers and fathers abandon their children not to reclaim them, as we found in testimony in California, where in a small county some 600 addicted to methamphetamine, only a handful were even capable or could take back or would take back their children. This is what happens to the brain. Meth is absolutely a destructive substance and again causes people to commit the most bizarre actions. The worst case we heard was a mother and father that tortured their child and then boiled the child to finally kill the child. Again, just incredibly bizarre acts that are committed on this drug. Mr. Speaker, we are facing a very, very difficult situation. When you have in one small locale 1,000 meth labs and this methamphetamine being produced by recipes provided over the Internet, by people experimenting and getting substances from their drug stores, chemicals, and then the larger problem, the Mexican meth dealers and getting the precursor chemicals from predominantly Mexico, China, and the Netherlands according to testimony we have had. We are facing an incredible challenge with these narcotics coming into the United States. I am convinced, too, given the ability to produce these drugs domestically, such as methamphetamine, and we can do our best, we have a responsibility to do our best to control the precursor chemicals and find them before they come into the country and then as they come into the country and are used for these illicit purposes; but we must do an even better job of education and prevention. Treatment is fine, but treatment assumes that someone is already addicted and a victim. If we fought World War II and we only treated victims, we did not invent the equipment that we did, the bomb that we did to go after the source, we did not stop the production of the German rockets, if we did not stop their war machine, we never would have brought the war under control. The war on drugs, it does not take a rocket scientist to figure out, you stop the drugs at their source. This also, though, as I have said, is a much more insidious threat than anything we have seen, again with Ecstasy, again with methamphetamine, again with GHB, and I believe it is GHB, I really do not know that much other than what I have heard at the last hearings about this new drug. This is another drug that has an incredible consequence in its use. People are using it, mixing it with alcohol and dropping dead. The difference with GHB is that there is almost no trace left in the blood stream. There is almost no trace left in the body to detect. So it is a much more insidious drug; it is a deadly drug, and people are dying from it; and we do not even know they are dying. We had expert testimony that tells us because it dissipates from the body that what happens is the only way that you can really detect it is by doing a dissection of the brain and an autopsy after death and finding minute traces of this substance. But we are facing with these designer drugs an incredible challenge to this Nation, to our young people, to parents. Parents have no idea about these drugs that are out there and again available in these clubs that sound like they would be something that you could securely send your children to with no alcohol, with security posted, with other limits. Yet these clubs, and we now have the term club drugs and we have this wide variety of small tablets and pills. Some of them we saw at the hearing that were presented in the Orlando hearing by this drug enforcement and customs agency that had been seized that are small pills with designer emblems, designer emblems of Nike, of other trademarks that are imposed, and the drugs have such an attractive appearance and seem almost harmless that now our young people are being victimized by even the appearance of these drugs. Again, the dramatic rise in death in Florida has been recounted, and the deaths that we cannot count because of, again, drugs like GHB that are almost impossible to detect. Again, I think it is important that we look at what is happening. Our hearing focused on that in Orlando. This chart talks about a comparison of designer drugs and other drug overdoses and shows in 1999, this would be other drugs and this is designer drugs in the year 2000 so far to date, we see we are well on our way to breaking the records of 1999, and we are only partially through the year. What is interesting is we conducted this hearing in Orlando; we moved to New Orleans. I heard the same scenario being laid out by the district attorney there, Harry Connick, and others who testified, local sheriffs, the same problem is being repeated. Then we went on to Dallas and we hear the Dallas-Fort Worth area also being victimized by designer drugs and incredible increases in activity. One of the problems that we have had in this administration, not only a failure in closing down some of the war on drugs, again, source country interdiction, the drug czar's office, getting that back up and running full speed, which I might say Barry McCaffrey is doing his best. General McCaffrey inherited a disaster from Lee Brown who should have been run out of office, who dismantled the drug czar's office, did the most damage of any public official probably in the history of the United States, just an incredible disaster. Barry McCaffrey and others like myself are now stuck with trying to bring us out of this morass. One of the additional policy failures we have had, I talked about Haiti, the nation-building effort and now a disaster, one of the major sources of drug transit operations. This administration knew that Panama was going to cease our military operations in Panama. Panama was key to the war on drugs because all of the forward operating locations were centered from Panama. This little yellow dot here represents and is right over Panama. We had Howard Air Force Base, part of the $10.5 billion in assets that we turned over to the Panamanians last year. May 1 of last year was an important date, about a year ago. The U.S. knew this was going to happen, but this administration failed to negotiate with Panama not for continued military use but for continued use of drug surveillance flights, because this was such a key area, and it covered this whole area very cost effectively. We had also built the infrastructure, billions of dollars for those bases, and we could have in fact even leased them for a small amount of money. Instead, the talks collapsed. Instead, the administration was left in the cold and they quickly scurried to the Department of Defense and Department of State to find other locations. Now, that is a responsible thing to do. It was irresponsible in the fashion it was done because it was delayed. We called them before our committee even before I was chair of this subcommittee; said, are things getting in place, are you ready, are you negotiating with the Panamanians, could we not just keep the drug operations out of there, this forward operation going and do it cost effectively with cutting a deal with the Panamanians? In fact, what happened is it all fell apart. We were totally asked to leave, kicked out of Panama. Even Barry McCaffrey told me that corrupt tenders by the Panamanians allowed the Chinese to take control of the two port activities and the U.S. was excluded from any flights as of May 1. So as of May 1 last year, we have had a wide-open field day for drug traffickers because the United States, the Department of Defense and the State Department, have been handicapped in getting these forward- operating locations, drug surveillance operations back in place. When we do not have that information, we have this huge supply. Remember what I said about HDTVs? Not too many people have them because there is not a big supply. Well, on every street in this country we can find cocaine in unprecedented quantities today. On every street in this country we can find heroin in unprecedented quantities today, because we have an incredible supply. Just doing treatment, as this administration put its eggs all in the treatment basket, it just does not cut it. We have to stop some of this supply from its source. We know it is coming from Colombia. The American taxpayers are now stuck with the bill in trying to put together this operation in a piecemeal fashion with a base in Ecuador, a base in Curacao and Aruba, and possibly a base in El Salvador. Unfortunately, the price tag will probably be $100 million. Ecuador, in a recent hearing we conducted, and we will be talking about this again in a hearing on Friday with the Department of Defense and Department of State, it will not be until 2002 that this runway, which is incapable of supporting some of the aircraft that we need to do this surveillance work, it will not be until 2002 until that is in place, so that is one reason we have tons of this stuff coming in unchecked. In Aruba, we do have some flights going out of Aruba. Unfortunately, they take off from a commercial field, and our staff has said that sometimes these flights are even delayed. Now we have a problem with Venezuela, who has thumbed its nose at the President of the United States, at the United States' efforts to conduct surveillance flights in Venezuelan airspace or pursue traffickers, even when we provide them with information. In the final area, we have two 10-year contracts here. We will be investing that money for 10 years, and again, not up until 2002. The last location that they have suggested and recently signed an agreement, but I believe it has not been approved by the El Salvador parliament, is a location in El Salvador. So we have three that will not be in place for a long time. More drugs will be coming into the country. It is another disaster at our doorstep. Let me again look at, if we can, the money that was spent for interdiction and also international programs, which is source country programs. These are the figures in 1991, 1992, and 1993. This would be the end of the Bush administration, the beginning of the Clinton administration. Members will see the dramatic drop, the dramatic drop here. In fact, we are barely at, and with the efforts of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who was able to fund additional money when he had responsibility for chairing drug policy, we are barely back at the levels at the end of the Bush-Reagan administration when these programs were gutted. As we gut these programs, it is interesting, and we turn to treatment, and we saw the graphs on treatment, we see again in the Reagan-Bush era that this is a lifetime annual and 30-day drug use, and we see it declining in the Bush and Reagan administration. We see it on a steep incline, and again, this is the policy of success of this administration. We only see here where we began, again, the Republican and new majority takeover, some slight change. But I will tell the Members that this chart, if we continue and not stop drugs coming in from Colombia, not stop drugs coming in from their source, not interdicting drugs, not stopping the precursor chemicals that allow the production of deeper drugs and methamphetamine, Mr. Speaker, we are about to have this again go off the charts. The damage to our 12th graders and others will be unbelievable. This is long-term trend of prevalence of heroin use, and also produced by the University of Michigan. We see in the Reagan administration pretty much a flat line, some downturn, another downturn in the Bush administration. In the Clinton administration, it is off the charts. I did not make these charts. We enlarged them. This obviously is a story of failure. This is success. Now, any administration like the Clinton administration that can get us long-term trends on prevalence of heroin use going up like that, that is a success. That means that the war on drugs was a failure, but this is a success. Again, we see the first bleep there, again after some of the policies of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), the new Republican administration of the Congress took over, not of the executive branch. Again, we see in the Reagan era, this is long-term prevalence use of cocaine, and in the Bush era a dramatic success. This is the beginning of the Andean strategy, stopping the cocaine at its source. This was the Vice President's task force that Vice President Bush led. This is blue lightning and other initiatives to go after this stuff. This did not work, Mr. Speaker. These are imaginary downturn lines, but then we see the Clinton administration, and I would be afraid to rechart this given what we now know about the Clinton administration diverting assets, with Vice President Gore sending AWACs to Alaska to look for oil spills, the President of the United States in his many deployments in Haiti diverting resources from this anti-narcotics effort to nationbuilding while our people are falling like flies, particularly our young people. If Members do not believe those charts, there is a 1999 GAO report that I requested that shows in fact that in 1992-1993, the beginning of the Clinton administration, dramatic drops occurred in this. First is the total use of DOD assets in the war on drugs. This is, again, not produced by me but the General Accounting Office; overall assets down dramatically. This next line in red, the DOD, down dramatically. The Coast Guard was up slightly, but also leveled off here. Mr. Speaker, I will continue next week on more information relating to our efforts to stem illegal narcotics and drug abuse in this country.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to come before the House again tonight to apologize to the staff that is working late into the evening, and appreciate the Speaker's indulgence and other Members who are listening tonight. I always try to come before the House on Tuesday nights during these Special Orders to bring to the attention of the Members of the House of Representatives the Congress and also the American people, the number one social problem that we face, and that is the problem of drug abuse, illegal narcotics, and drug addiction in this country. Over and over, I have repeated some of the statistics, and the statistics are mind boggling. The National Office of Drug Control Policy and our Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey have estimated that, each year, over 52,000 Americans die directly and indirectly as a result of narcotics abuse in this country; that in the last recorded report to the Congress in 1998, in fact, 15,973 Americans lost their lives as a direct result of narcotics abuse. I have not yet seen the 1999 figures, but I am sure they are even worse. The situation is basically out of control with 70 percent of those behind bars in our prisons and jails, incarcerated across this land are there because of some drug related offense. The cost to our economy is in the quarter of a trillion dollars a year range. The destruction of lives, not only lost, but those left behind in families torn apart in the agony of drug abuse, an addiction that so many families have experienced, is devastating. Almost every report that we have that comes before us today in our media, the account of a 6 year old killing a 6 year old, drugs were at the heart of the problem of that family, and that 6 year old coming from a crack house. A 12 year old taking a gun to school and threatening his classmates wanted to be with his mother who was in jail on a prison charge. A 17 year old who attacks at the National Zoo during the recent holidays, crowds of people, innocent bystanders, he comes from a family involved in drugs, a father and gangs involved in illegal narcotics. This story goes on and on. We can place the blame on a weapon or something else, but we do not pay attention, as I have stated before, to the root problem in many, many of these instances, which is illegal narcotics, drug abuse, and addiction. Tonight, I want to pick up from where I left off last week and talk a bit about some of the impact of illegal narcotics. Now, we know in our land that nearly half of Americans have tried some type of form of illegal narcotic, and we know that, in fact, using some illegal drugs such as marijuana does lead to use of other types of illegal narcotics. We have seen the results which are devastating in our communities. I come from Central Florida. I represent the area between Orlando and Daytona Beach, probably one of the most economic prosperous growing areas in our country and one of the most beautiful areas across our land, and that area has also been ravaged by illegal narcotics, particularly heroin abuse. Heroin in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s was somewhat limited to the inner cities, to lower socioeconomic and minority population abuse. It was intravenously abused by drug addicts. The availability of heroin was really not that extensive in Central Florida or in most areas of our Nation, again mostly an inner city problem. Most people did not pay attention to it. But in 7 short years of this administration, we have seen the tide of heroin coming into our States from the foreign production, predominantly Colombia, in unprecedented quantities. In fact, in 1992- 1993, the beginning of this administration, there was almost no production of heroin in the country of Colombia, and today Colombia accounts for 75 percent of the heroin. That heroin is finding its way into our streets and our neighborhoods, our schools, and now our young population. I have a copy of a recent May 8 headline, and it says Suburban Teen Heroin Use on the Rise. So what was confined to our inner cities, what was confined to hard addicts is now really becoming a plague upon our teenagers and those in our suburban communities. In my area of Central Florida, we have had headlines that have blurted out that heroin overdose deaths and drug deaths now exceed homicides. And the same, unfortunately, is true in many other areas of our land. Part of this article, which is just several weeks old, says, and let me quote, ``Heroin is back. It's cheaper, more potent, and more deadly than ever, said Bob Weiner, an aide to White House drug policy director Barry McCaffery.'' And what he is saying is, in fact, that the heroin on our streets today, as opposed to the heroin in the 1970s, even the 1980s, is of a much purer, much more deadly content, sometimes reaching 70, 80 percent purity. In my area in particular they are getting very pure heroin, and that is deadly heroin. That is why it is killing our young people and others in such incredible numbers. Unfortunately, this report talks about teenagers, but, in fact, the spread of heroin has also affected other parts of our population that have really not seen the ill effects of heroin in the past. This headline is from May 9 in USA Today and it says Heroin's Resurgence Closing Gender Gap. This article says that girls are now becoming the victims. Again, previously, this was limited to inner city populations and also a male drug of choice. Let me quote from that USA Today article, if I may. ``Heroin's reemergence comes at a time when girls, far less likely than boys to drink, smoke marijuana, or use harder drugs, such as heroin, now appear to be keeping pace with them, says Mark Webster, a spokesman for the Federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. Webster's agency, after finding that existing drug prevention programs helped reduce drugs only among boys, recently helped create an advertising campaign called Girl Power to deliver antidrug messages to girls.'' Fortunately, in the billion dollar campaign that Congress has funded to deal with the emerging narcotics problem on a multifaceted basis, we are starting to address this. But, nonetheless, there is an incredible explosion of use among the female population and also among the youth population. I also began a week or two ago citing part of a report, and I wanted to refer to it tonight. It is an interagency domestic heroin threat assessment that just came out about a month or two ago from the National Drug Intelligence Center in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. That interagency domestic drug assessment had some interesting new data that I would like to make part of the record tonight and also call to the attention of the American people and the Congress. First of all, this report talked about heroin use in the United States of America and particularly in the West. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, which is also known as DAWN, heroin-related emergency department mentions in the western United States increased some 28 percent in recent years; heroin-related deaths between 1993 and 1996 rose in all 12 States of the western region during that time frame. In Oregon, the State Medical Examiner's office reports an average of five people a week died of heroin-related causes in the first 6 months of 1999. To further look at some of the more recent statistics and data in this report, and again focusing on the western part of the United States, the report says that seizures at the southwest border increased from 52 events and 103.8 kilograms seized in 1997 to 80 events and 145.9 kilograms in 1998. What is interesting about the heroin that we see coming in from this area is not only do we have the Colombian heroin that almost did not exist at the beginning of this administration, we now have, in double digits, very strong, very pure, very deadly black tar heroin coming from Mexico. Mexico, in fact, and not too many people will publicize this, particularly at a sensitive time, with elections in Mexico and elections in the United States, but from 1997 to 1998, in the most recent statistics we have of heroin seized in the United States, Mexican black tar deadly heroin has increased some 20 percent in just a 1-year period, again a dramatic increase in heroin coming from our neighbor to the south. According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network, again the acronym DAWN, heroin-morphine related emergency department mentions in the southern United States increased 165 percent between 1990 and 1997. Heroin- related drug treatment admissions in the southern United States increased 13 percent between 1992 and 1997, according to DAWN's treatment episode data report. Heroin use in the north central United States is also on the increase. So this is not just a regional problem, a limited regional problem to Florida and the southeast or the Southwest, but this report also details what is going on in the north central States. Heroin-morphine related emergency department mentions increased some 225 percent in the major cities in the north central United States in the period between 1990 and 1997. Chicago heroin-morphine related incidents increased 323 percent in that same period. St. Louis morphine and heroin-related deaths increased some 350 percent from 105 in 1990 to 472 in 1997. And then this report also details the Northeast United States statistics and what is been happening with heroin in that area of the country. According to this report, heroin-related emergency department admissions increased 116 percent between 1990 and 1997 in the Northeast United States. Heroin-related drug treatment administrations increased 50 percent between 1992 and 1997 according to the DAWN episode data report. The most significant increase according to this report was in Buffalo, New York, where heroin-related emergency department mentions increased some 344 percent from 106 in 1990 to 471 in 1997. I think a very interesting report that does show the dramatic increase of drug use and abuse particularly heroin across the United States and that deadly substance and what its effect is having in cities that my subcommittee has examined is quite remarkable. I want to use tonight the example again of Baltimore, Maryland. Our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources recently conducted an oversight and investigations hearing in Baltimore. Baltimore is really one of the most historic and beautiful cities on our eastern coast, and Baltimore for nearly a decade had a mayor with a very liberal attitude towards illegal narcotics, a liberal needle exchange program, a lack of enforcement of narcotics laws that are on the books of not only Baltimore but also this State of Maryland and a lack of cooperation in going after drug users and abuser. That type of action has related in an incredible record of drug addiction in Baltimore. Baltimore is an example of a city whose population has gone down, down, and down from over 900,000 to somewhere in the 600,000 range, while the addiction population has gone from somewhere about 39,000 in 1996 to some estimated 70,000 or 80,000. In fact, one of the city council members was recently quoted saying that one in eight individuals, citizens of Baltimore are now addicted and primarily to heroin. This is a city whose experiment is a failure. This is a mayor whose legacy is death and destruction and addiction. If this was replicated across the United States, we would have tens and tens of millions of our population addicted. Again, a liberal policy possibly well intended, but the liberalization in fact did not work, and it has addicted an incredible percentage of the population of Baltimore. I am pleased that after the hearing that we conducted there and after the testimony of the police chief, the police commissioner of the city of Baltimore who really had a lackadaisical attitude towards enforcement and going after open air drug markets and after his testimony was heard by the mayor and others that he was, in fact, dismissed. It is my hope that the new mayor, Mayor O'Malley, and I am pleased to see that he is considering a new policy, a cleanup campaign for Baltimore that I hope will be unprecedented. Baltimore has suffered this level of addiction, has also consistently experienced a high level of deaths per population, over 300 deaths in each of the last 3 years in Baltimore. And we compare that to New York City, some 650, 670 deaths, the last several years. New York City with a zero tolerance policy has cut the murders by some 60 percent. They cut the overall top felony record in that city by some 58 percent with Mayor Rudy Giuliani's zero-tolerance policy. But, in fact, Baltimore is an example of a city who attempted a severe legalization and liberalization of drugs and experienced, in fact, an unmitigated disaster. That is a little bit of where we are and an update of what is happening with the heroin across our land. Again, I would like to point out to my colleagues and the American people that, in fact, we know what does work in the area of drug abuse. I am sure the liberal colleagues all choke when they see this chart come up, because the chart is probably the most graphic evidence of a policy of success in the Reagan and Bush administration when there was a real multifaceted war on illegal narcotics. When we had source country programs, an Andean strategy devised under the Reagan administration, a Vice Presidential task force lead by former Vice President Bush, in which they went after illegal narcotics as they were leaving the source countries in a tough interdiction policy, utilizing in fact in a war against drugs all the resources of the United States, and we see that in the Reagan administration. And again this is untouched. I have only added the names of the administration and put a little divider in here to show where they began and ended. But you see a successful multifaceted war on narcotics. Again, the source country, reduction, interdiction, use of all of our resources in that effort, a President that said, in fact, we will have a full war on drugs, two Presidents that said that, and we see the success. Now, many will tell you that the war on drugs is a failure, but I submit that the war on drugs began failing at the beginning of the Clinton administration, when we saw the dismantling of the source country programs, the gutting of the Andean strategy, the dismantling of use of the military against illegal narcotics, the closedown of surveillance operations that provided information to our allies in the war on drugs. So we see the total failure and the very direct closedown of a war on drugs. If you want to talk about a war on drugs that was a success, you need only look at the Reagan/Bush era. If you look at when you had a failure on the war of drugs, it is when you dismantle piece by piece directly the war on illegal narcotics. The only change we see here is with the coming of the Republican- controlled, the new majority in Congress, that we began putting some of these programs back together again. And we have only begun to see a leveling off with that effort. But, in fact, one of our major problems is that even authorizations by the Congress are ignored by this administration. Let me just put up a couple more charts, if I may. Tonight I was talking about update on heroin, heroin use and its prevalence. Again, you see a leveling and some decline during the Reagan administration. During the Bush administration, you see a concerted effort and a reduction. And then you see a dramatic increase practically off the chart in the Clinton administration. When you do not have a multifaceted approach, when you do not stop illegal drugs at their source or before they come to our borders, these statistics cite what happens and very graphically show why we have an incredible amount of heroin on our streets, why we have the reports like I just read. The same thing happens with our young people. This shows 12th grade drug use. The first chart we showed was lifetime prevalence of drug use. But each of these charts and each of these lines on the chart in fact show the trends here with illegal narcotics use. This line, the top line, is lifetime use. The red center line is annual use. The third line is 30 day use. Again, if we take this back to the Reagan-Bush era, we are coming with a reduction in 1992, with the election of the President Clinton, with the just-say-maybe, with the appointment of a Surgeon General, the chief health officer of the United States, saying just-say-maybe, with a White House which had so many people in its employ that had recent drug abuse histories and problems that the Secret Service insisted on a drug testing program. That was one of the reasons that they in fact wanted to do away with some of the background checks for White House employees, is because they were not passing them, and only after the Secret Service insisted on instituting a drug testing program for White House employees did we see any change there. But in fact some of these people were setting the policy. You see again upward movement in all of these areas through the Clinton Administration of 12th graders in drug use. Here again you see the leveling off, the beginning of the period in which the Republicans took control of both the House and the Senate and some of the efforts that were put into place in restarting some of those programs. So you see a beginning of a leveling off in that period. This again is a statistic that I cited tonight in the news report about suburban teen heroin use, and gave the headline from a few weeks ago. This shows in 1996, again, when we took over the House of Representatives, the situation that we inherited as far as suburban teen use. This is the situation we are now faced with, a flood of heroin coming in, predominantly from Colombia, but also from Mexico, as I mentioned. Colombia and Mexico are probably two of the crowning failures of this administration and resulting in the incredible volume of heroin coming into the United States. Time and time again, this administration has thwarted, as I said, both legislative directives and appropriations to stop heroin production in Colombia. The entire Colombia scenario started in 1994 when this administration closed off information sharing with Colombia. That measure, which was opposed, I must say by even Democrats and all of the people on my side of the aisle, but it outraged everyone, because it brought an end to information sharing with our allies, Colombia, Peru and other countries, and was the beginning of the end of a policy that had begun to make some dramatic changes in Colombia. If you remember in Colombia, steps had been taken to dismantle some of the drug cartels, and we were on our way to bringing that Nation into some balance. All that fell apart with the beginning of ending surveillance information sharing. The next mistake by this administration was in fact to decertify Colombia without a national interest waiver, which meant that even equipment and resources which the Congress had appropriated would be denied to Colombia. In fact, when you do not have any war in Colombia or effort by the United States to stem the production of illegal narcotics, when you do not have equipment and resources going in to that region to eliminate the production of the crop, to eliminate the transshipment from the source zone, and you do not use the military and others to provide information and surveillance back to the source country to stop the illegal narcotics and interdict them as they come out, this is the result that we see, is an incredible volume of heroin coming into the United States at lower cost, at higher and more deadly purity levels, and we see now suburban teen heroin use on a dramatic rise in the United States. Again, it can be traced to Colombia and also to Mexico. Another failure in this administration's policy, which in fact certified Mexico as cooperating when Mexico has done everything to the contrary but assist the United States, failing to extradite even a single Mexican drug dealer after dozens and dozens of extradition requests, failing to sign or negotiate a maritime agreement, which this Congress just several years ago insisted that Mexico do as a part of its cooperative effort to eliminate narcotics trafficking, failing to allow our agents to adequately arm and protect themselves, and also keeping a limit of just a handful of DEA agents in that country. They do not want drug agents in that country, because the corruption from the police level to the President's office and throughout the states of Mexico has in fact run rampant, and in fact Mexico has thwarted again all of our efforts at enforcement, going so far as in the largest operation in the hemisphere, probably the history of this hemisphere, to go after corrupt money laundering in Mexico, operation Casa Blanca, where Mexican officials threatened the arrest of United States customs officials and others involved in bringing to justice Mexican and U.S. and other banking officials who were involved in that huge money laundering scheme. So, another failure, a failure in Colombia, now a source of 70 to 80 percent of the heroin. Again, almost zero was produced in 1992-1993. Further, Mexico, after giving Mexico incredible trade benefits, financial benefits, opening our borders to Mexico, in fact this administration had failed to gain their cooperation in the devastation that is raining on our communities, and a 20 percent increase in black tar Mexican heroin on our streets in a 1 year period of time. Mr. Speaker, as I continue talking about the drug narcotic problem and I focus some on heroin tonight and also on teen use of heroin, which we have seen a dramatic increase in, and also the tremendous volume of heroin coming across our borders, I wanted to report some of the other statistics that we found relating to this new phenomena. The number of heroin users in the United States has increased, again, according to the last chart I showed, from 500,000, half a million in 1996 to 980,000 in 1999; and we know exactly where that heroin is coming from. We know why that heroin is coming into the United States. One of the interesting statistics in this report was that the rate of first use by children age 12 to 17 increased from less than 1 in 1,000 in the 1980s to 2.7 in 1,000 in 1996. First-time heroin users are getting younger, from an average age of 26 years old in 1991 to an average age in 1997 of only 17 years of age. Again, I have cited the failure of this administration's policy in curtailing some 60, 70 percent of the heroin coming in, which is produced in Colombia now and, again, almost none produced there in 1992, through 1993; 17 percent of the heroin in the United States now coming from Mexico. We know, looking at this map, we have Colombia, which is the source of most of the heroin; we know that it is leaving this area. We also know that since we have instituted very successful programs in Peru and Bolivia where they have cut coca production and cocaine production by some 50 to 60 percent in this area through a successful program set up by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), the previous Chair of the Subcommittee on Drug Policy, those successful programs, coupled with the failure of the administration's program to institute the same type of actions in Colombia, again, even though the Congress appropriated funds; even though the Congress directed those programs to take place in Colombia, we now have some 80 percent of the cocaine produced and coca produced in Colombia. So we know we need Colombia covered as far as surveillance information, as far as knowing where drugs are coming from, as far as going after drugs at their source. Unfortunately, in May of last year, the surveillance flights stopped from our major forward operating location in the Caribbean, that was in Panama, and of course the United States, it is now history, was forced to remove all of its operations, turn over $10 billion in assets to Panama, close down its antinarcotics flights from that area. This chart that I have here shows the patchwork that is being put together by the administration in trying to replace what we had in Panama. Panama had a strategic location and could cover all of this region with flights out of that area. Unfortunately, between 1992 and 1999, one of our more recent reports that we requested showed that the administration had cut these flights some 68 percent. Additionally, maritime actions and surveillance operations were cut by some 62 percent. So that is why we have a flood of heroin coming into this area. We do not have these locations that are starred here and circled here, which we intended as substitutes for the Panama operation in place or fully operational. At this time we have in Manta, Ecuador an air strip. We have just signed a 10-year agreement after a year delay; but unfortunately, there is somewhere in the neighborhood of $80 million to $100 million in work that has to be done, and an outdate of the year 2002 before this operation will become fully capable of functioning. We have in Curacao and Aruba a limited amount of coverage from that location, and the star here in El Salvador, we have no operations in that location. We are just in the process of concluding an agreement which must be presented to their legislature. When we get through with this, we are probably looking at $150 million. Now, we lost $10 billion in assets to Panama, were kicked, basically, out of Howard Air Force base, so we have no drug operations in that location. We only have a fraction of the former drug surveillance flights, so there is a fraction of the information getting to stop illegal narcotics. Of course, we know the history of the administration blocking aid and equipment to Colombia. Repeated requests for 5 years to get Black Hawk helicopters to Colombia which can operate in high altitudes, eradicate crops, go after drug traffickers, and we know that the narco-traffickers who were involved in drug production are also financing the civil war in that country in which some 35,000 people have been slaughtered; 5,000 police, elected officials, supreme court members, members of their congress have been slaughtered; and yet we have not been able to get even basic equipment in there in the form of helicopters that have been promised for some number of years now. Even when that equipment was delivered at the end of last year, after numerous delays, it was delivered there without the proper armoring and without the proper ammunition. Mr. Speaker, we found that some of the ammunition that we had been requesting for years to get down to Colombia to go after the drug traffickers was, in fact, delivered to the loading dock of the State Department during the Christmas holidays; and now we find, even more disturbing, that some of the bulk of the ammunition that has been supplied to Colombia is outdated, possibly dangerous, 1952 ammunition that was purchased by the State Department in a bungled procurement. This is a very sad picture, but it is a very true picture of what has taken place. Again, this is not in place, this is what is proposed, but this accounts for the flood of heroin coming into the United States out of that transit through Mexico, through the Caribbean. Much of it, we found in recent hearings, is transshipped through Haiti. Here is another incredible failure of this administration, spending some $3 billion, one of the most farcical foreign policy adventures in the history of the entire Western Hemisphere. Mr. Speaker, after repeated pleas with President Clinton, I came to this floor many times saying, we cannot impose an economic embargo on a country where people are making less than a dollar a day, where the country is basically operating with 60,000 to 80,000 manufacturing jobs by U.S. businesses who have invested in that country, imposing an embargo that closed down industry, manufacturing, private sector activity through the entire population on to a Clinton-style welfare program which we are now supporting, and Haiti is a country in which taxpayers of the United States not only got into this subsidization and welfare because the Clinton policy destroyed the economy, but we now see Haiti as the major transshipment point through the Caribbean in a lawless society which, just within the last number of hours, has conducted an election and we will see how that goes. In the meantime, the puppets that we have put in place have slaughtered people in unprecedented numbers; and chaos reigns on the island, which is now open to drug traffickers. We had before our subcommittee some videotapes of drug traffickers landing at will and transshipping heroin and other illegal narcotics, cocaine, through Haiti, again where we spent hundreds of millions of dollars supposedly building judicial institutions, police forces and other expenditures to so-called nation build that have been a complete failure. So this is why we have unprecedented quantities of heroin coming into the United States. It would be bad enough if we just had heroin and cocaine, but these charts which I showed last week, I would like to bring up again tonight, and again I did not produce them. The administration's own Commission on Sentencing brought these to our subcommittee and it shows crack in yellow and the darker color here is methamphetamine and it shows 1992 almost not on the charts. The prevalence in 1993 begins to increase with the advent of this administration; 1994, it becomes an even broader pattern across the United States; 1995, spreads even further. One would think this was something put out by the Republican National Committee here as propaganda but, in fact, these are the charts that were given to us by the administration's own Sentencing Commission. Look at the prevalence of crack in 1996 and methamphetamines, 1997; 1998 reaching epidemic proportions. We not only have heroin epidemics in parts of the country, an increase as a result again of this huge influx coming from Colombia and also from Mexico, two major failures of U.S. foreign policy, some of it through Haiti, another failure of policy, we now have an incredible meth and crack epidemic in many parts of our country. The chemical that helps produce this, and meth gangs in our hearings have produced some incredible results and documentation, the meth dealers and the meth product is coming out of Mexico to communities like Iowa and we will be going out there to do a hearing shortly, our subcommittee. We held hearings in Sacramento, in that area of the State, and San Diego. Meth epidemics, incredible tales of how methamphetamines destroys people's lives, causes them to abandon their children. It is far worse than the crack epidemic that we had in the 1980s, and meth does incredible damage to people, causes them to commit bizarre acts. What was interesting, again these two charts show the meth epidemic and crack epidemic across this country, is that we have had in our Subcommittee on Drug Policy criminal justice drug policy scientists who show us what meth does to the brain. Tonight, as we get towards the end, I wanted to show a little bit to the Members of Congress and others who are watching what takes place. This is a scientific brain scan presented again to our subcommittee. It shows the normal brain here, and we see a lot of the yellow here. This would be the normal brain pattern. Then it shows a gradual reduction in dopamine, which is so important to brain function, because of meth use. This is additional methamphetamine use. The only thing a habitual methamphetamine user has differently from this last brain scan, if we look at that, is a tiny bit of brain capability left. The last scan is severe Parkinson's's disease. So meth destroys the brain and brain function. It is not something that regenerates, according to the scientists. This is a very graphic illustration of the destruction of the human mind, the brain, and it accounts for the incredible acts of violence, the spouse abuse, the child abuse, the abandonment of family and life as we know it when people become addicted and their brain is destroyed by methamphetamine. Unfortunately, as I said also, heroin, which has such a glamorous connotation today, is more deadly than it has ever been. In the 60, 70 percent purity levels, when mixed with other substances, it is accounting for incredible record numbers of deaths across the United States. When used sometimes by first-time users it results in fatalities and drug-related deaths at record levels. The only thing that has kept our level of heroin deaths at a gradual increase in deaths and not even higher records is the ability now to provide anecdote medical treatment, emergency treatment. However, admissions for overdoses are, in fact, soaring, as I cited, throughout every region of the United States. Unfortunately, it is not a very pretty picture. Unfortunately there have been some serious mistakes made by this administration, by the Congress when it was controlled by the other side from 1992 to 1994. It is a difficult task to pick up humpty-dumpty, so to speak, and put it back together. It is a difficult task to conduct a war on drugs after a war, in fact, has been dismantled. I am pleased that the Republican-controlled Congress has dramatically increased the funding of programs across the board in a very balanced fashion. The success that we knew in the Reagan and Bush administration when drugs were going down, according to charts not produced by me but universities and others, very competent sources, showed that that was a successful program. So this Republican-controlled Congress has increased source country programs back to the 1992 levels, the 1991 levels. Interdiction, we are trying to bring the military back in to this program. The military does not arrest anyone. It merely provides surveillance information. And reinstitute forward operating locations which have been dismantled under this administration and allowed that incredible volume of hard, deadly, more pure drugs come in to our border. We have begun a billion dollar unprecedented match by a billion dollars in donated time; a national media campaign which is one year underway; and we are working to improve that. We are trying to fund treatment and prevention programs at an unparalleled level, in fact have dramatically increased the Federal funding for treatment programs and again put in place hopefully a balanced approach to the problem of illegal narcotics. It is my hope, Mr. Speaker, that we can work, as we conclude the 13 appropriation bills, in funding a real effort against illegal narcotics, a real war against illegal drugs as a multifaceted project in the Congress because we have 13 appropriation bills and many of them deal with pieces of this puzzle. Putting it back together, in fact, is important. We have stalled in getting the money to Colombia and that is a horrible mistake and shame on both sides of the aisle. Shame on this administration and this President for not getting that package here in a timely fashion and acting on it. We know that heroin is coming from Colombia and Mexico and we must stop illegal narcotics at their source.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to come before the House again on a Tuesday night to talk about a subject that I usually discuss with my colleagues in the House of Representatives, and that is the problem we face in our Nation and across our communities in America of illegal narcotics. We also have an incredibly serious problem with drug abuse that is affecting almost every family in our Nation. If we look at the root of the real problems in our society, criminal problems, disruption in families, serious crimes committed, we need look no further than the problem of illegal narcotics. I know much of the attention of Washington and some of the Nation was focused here on the events Sunday, on Mothers Day. I think that every American abhors violence. I think it is rightful that mothers would come to this city and plead for an end to violence. I think that everyone who is a rational human being would be against gun violence, gun violence against another human being, using a weapon to destroy life, to harm an individual. So I think we all abhor that. But what we fail to address really is the core problem. This past Monday, I had the opportunity to attend the National Memorial and Recognition Service for police officers who had been slain. Some 139 police officers across our Nation were slain this past year. Talking to police officers who were visiting from my community and from around the Nation and speaking to police officers and law enforcement officials as I go about my responsibilities as a Member of Congress, they all tell me the same thing; and that is, that illegal narcotics are at the core and again the source of so many of our crime problems, so many of our felonies committed. So many of the people behind a weapon whether it is a gun, a knife, some other instrument of death and destruction are motivated by illegal narcotics. In fact, in hearings that I have conducted as chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, hearing after hearing, we have heard individuals testify that illegal narcotics contribute to crime, disruption of our social life. That is 60 to 70 percent of those behind bars, and we now have some 2 million Americans behind bars, are there because of a drug-related offense. Most of these offenses are not mere possession of small amounts of marijuana. They are not small drug offenses, in some localities misdemeanors. These are multiple felonies. One really has to try hard, according to a New York State judicial survey of those surveying in that State taken last spring. That survey indicated most of the people in New York State prisons are there because of multiple felonies. One really has to try hard to get in prison in some of our jurisdictions, and it takes multiple and very serious offenses to be there. There are exceptions to that, and we have heard testimony of tough minimum mandatory sentencing. But for the most part, illegal narcotics drives crime in this country. Not only does it drive murders, but it drives drug-related deaths. In the last recorded year, 1998, we do not have the 1999 figures yet, 15,973 Americans lost their life as a direct result of illegal narcotics, consuming illegal narcotics. These are not the flashy news reports that one sees that are publicized, say, with the action of a young child shooting a young child with a handgun. These are silent, nonetheless deadly incidents of overdose, of young people in the numbers three and four times those lost in one incident in Columbine, a horrible national tragedy. But that horrible national tragedy is repeated three and four times each day if we count all of the drug overdoses across this country. Our Drug Czar, General McCaffrey, has estimated that the deaths, if we took into account all of the causes related to use and abuse of illegal narcotics, would exceed some 52,000 a year, an incredible impact. As much of an impact as our last major conflict, international conflict, the Vietnam War. Again, a deadly problem for this country and for our society and sometimes pushed into the background. The march that was held on Sunday focused on violence and in particular gun violence. The media stories, as I have recounted over the past month or two, have focused on several incidents involving guns. A 6 year old shooting a 6 year old, and again the focus was the gun. But the real problem was the 6 year old came from a crack cocaine family. The 6 year old came from a family whose parent was in prison because of narcotics, serious narcotics offenses, an environment that was harmful, an environment that provided the motivation and the setting for a 6 year old to commit mayhem. Then of course the media focused on, I believe it was, a 12-year-old who brought a gun to school and had all of his fellow students on the floor and threatened them. When asked why he brought that gun to school, he said it was because he wanted to join his mother, be with his mother. She was in prison because of a drug offense. Another tragedy. Most recently, we had in Washington, D.C., during the spring and Easter Passover break a horrible incident when African American families in our Nation's capital were celebrating a day in our National Zoo; and what took place there was mayhem among young teenagers, I believe a 16 or 17-year-old teenager who fired the weapons in that case, wounding a number of individuals. The focus was again on the gun. But here is another young individual in our Nation's capital, the victim, not just of gun violence and participating in gun violence, but coming from a home of drug violence. His father is in prison because he was part of a Washington, D.C. drug gang. That is a sad event for our Nation's capital. But, unfortunately, that sad event has been repeated for the last decade day and day and day again. I cannot tell my colleagues how many times I have come to the capital and read on a Monday or Tuesday of the violence over the weekend. Some of that has been curtailed by tougher enforcement, by change of administration, which is long overdue in our Nation's capital. This year, the drug- related deaths are down. But year after year, 300 to 400 young African American males were slaughtered in this city in a pattern of violence, and almost all of those incidents of death brought about by involvement with illegal narcotics. I would venture today, if we quizzed our Capitol Police and our Washington Metropolitan Police Officers, they would tell us the same statistics prevail. Sixty, 70, 80 percent of those who are murdered in our Nation's capital, 60 to 70 percent of the violence, the felonies committed in this great city with so many great people, are caused because someone is involved with illegal narcotics. Here of course we have a city in which most firearms, individual possession of an unregistered firearm is not allowed. We have some of the tightest laws relating to weapons. In fact, most of the weapons that are used in these murders are stolen or illegally obtained. Again, I think it is important that, rather than to focus on guns, that we need to focus as a Congress and as responsible legislators on the root cause. Certainly the root cause, if we ask anyone involved in law enforcement, is illegal narcotics. I thought I would recite some statistics relating to other types of violence that my colleagues may not have heard about, and how they too are brought about by the use of illegal narcotics. Most of the cases of child abuse that we read about, if we look a little further behind the news, at the child abuse itself, the motivation that someone has become involved in child abuse is because of drug use. A study that was recently done indicated that 80 to 90 percent of all referrals for child abuse to social services in Butte County, California, cases were, in fact, drug related. Social service workers estimated that 80 percent of the child abuse cases statewide in California, in that same study, are drug related. Social service workers across the United States attribute 62 percent or more of the child abuse cases to an adult substance abuse problem. Not only is child abuse driven by illegal narcotics and substance abuse, but the same thing applies to spousal abuse. Spousal abuse attributed to drug use was also reviewed by another study, and we found in the study recently that social service workers across the United States attributed a large percentage of spousal abuse cases to drug- related causes. A full 50 percent of all domestic violence cases involved substance abuse in a study conducted in New York State. Suicide is also another major social problem, and studies have recently been conducted to see the impact of illegal narcotics and drug use as it relates to suicide. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, also known in Washington as SAMSHA, estimated that 90 percent of the suicide victims have had a mental and/or substance abuse disorder. SAMSHA, again our HHS, Health and Human Services agency, followed up studies of adults with substance abuse disorders and it revealed an inordinately high risk of suicide for those who were victimized by illegal drugs and by substance abuse. Youth who abuse substances combined with serious behavioral problems are much more likely to commit suicide than those without substance abuse problems, this study also found. Of course, I have related in a previous special order, after conducting a hearing on the problems of methamphetamine in California, we conducted two hearings there, our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources recently, and I did provide a detailed report in a special order on the methamphetamine problem both in the Sacramento, north central area of California, and also in San Diego, where we conducted our second hearing. Some pretty startling cases of child abuse, actually beyond description, where children were abandoned by their parents in incredible numbers because of their problems of being addicted to methamphetamine. Methamphetamine causes some of the most irrational behavior in human beings I think I have ever seen recorded. The crack epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s is nothing compared to the methamphetamine problems we are experiencing. This past week, our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources conducted a hearing on the question of minimum mandatory sentencing, particularly as it relates to drug offenses, and there is some controversy about how those laws have been applied. But I was startled to learn from one of the witnesses in that hearing what has taken place in this country relating to methamphetamine and crack abuse since 1992, since the beginning of this administration. One of our witnesses was a United States Sentencing Commission commissioner. That commission has had vacancies, but they have recently been filled and we were pleased to have testimony from that commission provided to our subcommittee so that we can find out what is happening as far as sentencing and also the prevalence of drug abuse in this country. Submitted for the record of that hearing were several charts, and these charts are exactly as submitted to our subcommittee. This chart is entitled Predominant Drug Type by State, and it covers the period starting in 1992 and going up to 1995 with this series. I think if we look at the lighter yellow here we see crack. In 1992, there is almost very little crack in these States, almost no methamphetamine, which is in the other color here. In 1993, we see the beginning of methamphetamine abuse, some in the Midwest. We see the spreading of the crack problem. That is 1993. In 1994, we could focus here and we see methamphetamine, crack in the yellow, spreading. In 1995, we see what has taken place. Now, this is under the policy of the Clinton-Gore administration in their change of emphasis to get away from source country programs; stopping illegal narcotics at their source. The source of crack is cocaine. Cocaine comes from only three countries: Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. Methamphetamine, most of the precursors, the chemicals used in processing methamphetamine, come from Mexico. This is the record from 1992, untouched, submitted by this administration's sentencing commission. This is the rest of the story, so to speak; 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999. Again, we are talking about crack, methamphetamine. Crack in the yellow, methamphetamine in this other color here. Until we get to 1999, when we see almost the entire Nation covered by methamphetamine and/or crack. This is one of the most telling sets of graphs showing again the dramatic increase in these two drugs across the Nation since 1992. Now, I have often heard liberal commentators and liberal legislators talking about the failure of the war on drugs. This is a chart that I have not altered in any way, except we have added the Reagan-Bush era during their presidency and the Clinton presidency with this bar and just labeling here. The chart itself was produced by the University of Michigan, and it really tracks the long-term trend and lifetime prevalence of drug use. I have used this several times in special orders. But, to me, this is the most telling and graphic representation of what took place in a real war on drugs. Again, the liberals both in the media and in the House and other body would tell us that this is a record of failure. We have a decline in long-term trend in lifetime prevalence of drug use. And if we took up other illegal narcotics, we would see, again, we could go back to cocaine or to heroin or some of these other narcotics, methamphetamine, which was not even on the charts, but we would see a decline in those illegal narcotics during the Reagan and Bush era. Now, they will tell us that this is a failure, both failure in the war on drugs, the war on drugs failed. I submit that if we look at this point where the Clinton administration up to the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, we see a steady incline in the use of illegal narcotics, the prevalence of lifetime use. And again, we can bring the other charts that were just supplied by the Sentencing Commission or take charts relating to heroin and other narcotics and we show the same pattern. Again, this is what they are trying to tell us is a record of failure. This is a record of success. I submit there is absolutely no way the war on drugs was a failure when it was adequately conducted. When it was a multifaceted effort, when we had source country programs where we stopped illegal narcotics where they are produced. Again, crack and cocaine, it does not take a Harvard Ph.D., it does not take a rocket scientist when we know that crack and its derivative, cocaine and coca, are only produced in a small Andean region are really only capable of being produced in that region, Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia. When the Republicans took over the House of Representatives, one of the things that they did was try to restore some of the international programs that had been sliced and slashed by the Clinton administration. The Clinton administration, when it took office in 1993 to 1995 controlled in very large majorities both this body, the House of Representatives, and the other body, the United States Senate. One of the first things that they did was to cut money on the international programs. That would be stopping drugs at their source. Federal drug spending on international programs declined 21 percent in just 1 year after the Clinton administration took office. Federal drug spending on the international programs decreased from $660 million in 1992 to 1993. And it is interesting, if we look at these years, as they cut international programs, drug use and abuse increased. The same thing happened with interdiction. Interdiction would be stopping illegal narcotics as they leave the source country before they get to our borders. The prime area of assistance is really in surveillance of illegal narcotics, both at the source so that the host country or the source country can destroy the illegal narcotics at their source or get the illegal narcotics as they are leaving the source from airfields, from waterways, from transit routes. The United States military has been involved in providing that surveillance information. Unfortunately, one of the first decisions of the Clinton administration, again, back here when we see the beginning of the end of the war on drugs and the failure of, again, fighting illegal narcotics, Federal spending on drug interdiction declined 23 percent in 1 year after the Clinton administration took office, again, with very significant majorities of both Houses here in Congress. Federal drug spending decreased from $1.96 billion in 1992 to $1.5 billion in 1993. Actually, it went down even more if we take into consideration several years that they controlled this body in large numbers. This is the Federal drug spending chart on international programs. Again, we see dramatic decreases from the Reagan-Bush era on down to about half. So if we want to see how we can get more drugs from the source into this country, we cut these international programs. When the Republicans took over in 1995, and it does take several years to get into this process, since then we have been able to get back to 1991 and 1992 figures. However, even with these programs, money which we ask to be sent, for example, to Colombia, funds never made it to Colombia, either through ineptness or through just pure ignoring the will of the Congress. So even though funds have been appropriated to go back to the equal equivalent of 1991-1992 Bush-Reagan era dollars, the actual resources getting into the war on drugs have not been there. So this is the era in which there was a dramatic decline. This is the era in which we had a dramatic increase in prevalence of drug use among our young people. I have a second chart which deals with interdiction, and we see the same pattern again of cutting interdiction, use of military, for surveillance information gathering. The military does not arrest anyone, does not become involved in enforcement. It merely provides that information. Here again, we have the same pattern of behavior. Back in 1996, the Republicans did up this and in 1998 we are bringing it back. Again, we have to use equivalent of 1991-1992 dollars. So in the past 4 or 5 years of our control of the House and the other body, we have managed to get us back to 1991-1992 levels with great difficulty. Unfortunately, in the international area, as I said, resources have not gotten to the countries which are producing the illegal narcotics. We have had two success stories, both of those developed by the current Speaker of the House when he chaired the responsibility of the subcommittee, which I now chair, for our national drug policy. The gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) chaired, again, this responsibility and got funds and resources into some of these programs. However, many of the funds and resources, again, were diverted time and again by this administration and did not, in fact, get to Colombia, which is now the main source of heroin and cocaine and illegal substances that are coming into this country. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I will continue part of what I am discussing tonight, which is the history of how we got ourselves into this fix. It is a very difficult situation, made even more so by, again, the incredible quantity of illegal narcotics coming into our borders. I submit, Mr. Speaker, that there is no more important responsibility for us to attend to as Members of Congress than, first, to keep illegal narcotics from coming into our borders. Stopping illegal narcotics in the international arena is not the responsibility of our local police force, it is not the responsibility of our State police, it is not the responsibility of the localities or the school boards. Our number one responsibility is to make certain that those hard narcotics are kept from our shores, from our borders. Once they come into the United States, it is very difficult to go after them, and it does take a great deal of resources. This, again, is a record, in my estimation, of failure, the war on drugs being very systematically closed down. Statistics show, again, a record of success in the Reagan and Bush era. I have not doctored the figures. This is not meant to be partisan in any way. These are in fact the facts. If we see success with an increase, as the media, the liberals would have you know success, an increase in drug use, then in fact that is success. We have more heroin addicts, more people on illegal narcotics, more deaths, almost double the deaths. Again, if we flip the other charts of the changes in policy made in interdiction and international programs, we can almost trace again the end of any war on illegal narcotics. Again, these are the results released last week by the administration themselves. I do not know if we can get both of these up here, but from 1992 to 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, what an incredibly graphic description of what has taken place. This is only with several of the drugs, the very serious narcotics that are affecting our cities and our communities across the land. Again, the situation with illegal narcotics is affecting all of us. Recently I participated in an International Association of Chiefs of Police meeting, and I asked if I could get from the Drug Enforcement Administration, our U.S. anti-narcotics agency, information about the purity levels of heroin, because I come from an area that has been the victim of heroin abuse, heroin overdose. Deaths now exceed homicides in central Florida, which is the area I represent. We know that we are getting more and more illegal narcotics in from the source countries because we do not have intervention in place, because we are just back to the 1992 levels and because the administration has thwarted our efforts to stop illegal narcotics coming from their source. One of the things that startled me in receiving this information on heroin trends in central Florida is, again, we have an incredible death rate, but that death rate is linked almost directly to the purity level of the heroin coming in. In the eighties and seventies the purity level of heroin was in single digits, sometimes very, very low purity. In 1995-1996 that began to change. In fact, we have ranged from 71 percent to 60 percent on average since 1995, the purity rate in central Florida with the heroin that is seized there and analyzed. What that means is that the heroin is so pure that it is deadly, it is killing in unprecedented numbers, it is killing first-time users, and it is killing those who use heroin with other substances. The only reason the deaths have not gotten worse than they are, and they have increased in the last several years, is that in fact our medical personnel are able to resuscitate more of the victims of drug overdose in central Florida and also around the Nation, but we have a startling increase in number of drug overdose admissions and in emergency rooms. Part of it is dealing with the deadly heroin that is on the streets of central Florida, again between 60 and 72 percent pure. That compares to a national purity level of between 40 and 37 percent, still very deadly. But the people in my district are particularly vulnerable to, again, a very deadly type of heroin that is coming in. Now, we know exactly where that heroin is coming in. We have the ability through our agencies, and, again in this case, DEA, Drug Enforcement Agency, to analyze the heroin that comes in and other drugs that come into our borders. They can conduct signature analysis, which basically tells us almost to the field where that heroin or the poppies are grown and where that heroin comes from. Now we have some 60 to 70 percent of the heroin coming into the United States from Colombia. This is an incredible figure, if you consider that in 1992 there is almost zero heroin being produced in Colombia. In six or seven short years of this administration, through, again, neglect of getting equipment, resources to fight illegal narcotics, again in the source country or interdicting it as it came to our shores, before it came to our shores, we have turned Colombia into the largest producer of heroin. Following Colombia, is, of course, our good trading partner who we have given so many trade benefits to, underwritten their finances when they faltered, opened our borders in unprecedented fashion to trade and commerce and business, and that is Mexico, which has jumped, again, the media will not report it, but a 20 percent increase in the last two recorded years in heroin production, from 14 to 17 percent of the heroin, black tar heroin on our streets, killing our kids and our young adults and others, is coming from the fields of Mexico, our good trading partner. So between Colombia and Mexico, and Colombia, of course, is way out there with some 65 to 70 percent of the heroin being produced, none of that being produced some 6 or 7 years ago. In 6 or 7 years, through the policy of this administration, we also find that Colombia, which was really a single digit producer of cocaine, now produces some 80 percent, according to DEA and other estimates, of the cocaine and crack coming in to the United States of America. We are fortunate that the plan devised by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) and the Republicans 3 or 4 years ago to curtail illegal production of cocaine in Peru and Bolivia has stopped production in those countries to the tune of 55 percent reduction in Bolivia, and a 60-plus percent reduction in Peru. Those two countries were the major producers in the past. The production has shifted and operations have shifted to Colombia which formerly was just a transit country in the last 6 or 7 years. Of course, we all know that Colombia is a disaster. The situation in Colombia gets worse every week. This morning's news, President Pastrana of Colombia suspended a round of Colombia's peace process plan for the end of May, something we have all been trying to work to get accomplished. His action came as a result of Marxist rebels killing a woman in a most horrible fashion. They rigged a bomb around her neck and she was killed when the bomb disposal specialists of Colombia tried to diffuse the dynamite-packed necklace bomb which the Army said had been rigged by the Marxist FARC leftist rebels who demanded ransom from her husband. President Pastrana said to his nation, the men of violence have placed a necklace of dynamite around the hope of all Colombians. Of course, many people say well, why should we worry about Colombia; why should we be concerned? Of course, we know where the source is, again, of the hard narcotics coming into this country. We know where the death and violence is coming from, and that is Colombia. Unfortunately, the administration turned its back on this problem since 1993 and has very systematically kept any assistance coming to Colombia and, in fact, even the assistance that has gotten to Colombia has been almost farcical. Some people may say why is Colombia so important in this, other than the production of illegal narcotics which in itself should justify our involvement? But, in fact, Colombia and the region surrounding Colombia produces some 20 percent of our daily oil supply. Some 35,000 individuals have been killed in Colombia through a war, a civil war, of various factions and that war is being financed by narcoterrorists. General Barry McCaffrey described Colombia as an emergency situation last year after, again, this region exploded not only with narcotics production but also violence which is now spilling over into the region. In fact, Colombia has become a basket case. Americans have already died in Colombia. U.S. contract pilots have been killed in Colombia, who have been on missions to eradicate illegal narcotics. Robert Ernest Martin was killed in 1997. Dane Milgrew was killed in 1998 and Jerry Chestnut, another pilot, in 1999. Also in Colombia we have had the deaths of five individuals on July 23, when a U.S. Army reconnaissance aircraft crashed into Southern Colombia on a surveillance mission. The officers killed there were Captain Jennifer Odom of Maryland; Captain Jose Santiago of Florida, my central Florida area; Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Moore from Arkansas; Private First Class Bruce Cluff of Utah; and Private First Class Ray Kruegar of Texas. These are some of the deaths that have occurred there, including DEA agents, Special Agent Frank Moreno, who was killed in November of 1998. So indeed we have a great deal at stake in Colombia and, again, if we linked each of the 52,000 deaths last year related in the total picture of illegal narcotics and narcotics abuses and murders and suicides and other things that have brought about death, or the 15,973 deaths in 1998, we could trace a vast percentage of those deaths to Colombian narcotics that are coming across our borders. So indeed this has been identified by this administration finally as a priority. That is in spite of blocking, at the beginning of the Clinton administration, Clinton-Gore, of course, slashed the drug czar's staff from 112 personnel to 27, and the Democrat-controlled Congress cut the source country and interdiction programs by more than 50 percent. Then appointing just-say-maybe Surgeon General of the United States, Jocelyn Elders, who again I think said just say maybe and the results are very dramatic in the increases of illegal narcotics as they closed down very systematically the war on drugs. In 1994 and 1995, this administration single-handedly closed down information and intelligence-sharing with Colombia and Peru and slashed U.S. military and Coast Guard involvement in antidrug programs. If you are going to conduct a war on drugs and if you see why the liberal and Clinton-Gore program to stop illegal narcotics was a failure, if you look at cutting, again, the assistance in these most effective source country programs, the interdiction programs, the Coast Guard programs, taking the military out of the effort, that is why you had no war on drugs. Then to stop information-sharing which is so important to stop the drugs both at the source and as they leave the source and interdict the drugs before they come into our borders year after year, this administration blocked assistance to Colombia again through a bungled decertification of Colombia, a direct action of the President, without providing a waiver to give Colombia the needed assistance. The latest part of the fiasco, again by the Clinton-Gore administration, is news that we received this week. It was in the Washington Times and other papers across the Nation, the U.S. Sends Colombia Unsafe Shells from 1952. Now since I came to Congress in 1993 we have done everything we can to get this administration to get resources to Colombia because we knew narcotics were going to be produced there more; we knew they were going to be transited from there. We knew it was the source of death and destruction coming to our shores. The latest part of the fiasco is even after the Congress appropriates money, the administration supplied recently, and this is within the last few weeks we have sent our staff down to check on the ammunition that is being sent there, the manufacturer actually said that these shells and this ammunition which was produced in 1952, which we have given the Colombians with some of the taxpayer money, is, in fact, unsafe. The story, of course, gets even worse because for at least some 4 or 5 years we have been trying to get helicopters, and in this case Black Hawk helicopters, which could be most effective to go into the mountains, eradicate narcotics, go after drug traffickers. It is very difficult in Colombia, with the high Andean regions, to go after traffickers without the right resources. This is another headline, Delay of Copters Hobbles Colombia in Stopping Drugs. This is 1998, and I could take these headlines back to 1997 and 1996, time and time again. Time and time again, the administration blocked equipment getting there. Finally when they declared an emergency last August, we were able to get at the end of last year three Black Hawk helicopters to Colombia. They were sent there without proper armoring, so just recently they have gotten them into the position where they are combat ready. Now we find the ammunition was sent down there in fact was outdated and may be in fact dangerous for the Colombians to use. This story continues to get worse. We asked the President and the administration to send surplus military equipment to Colombia. We had in mind equipment that could be used. We unfortunately learned, and we do have quite a bit of surplus military equipment, that Colombia was provided with dilapidated trucks, military trucks, and the cost of actually rehabilitating them was high. I think some of them were used in an arctic terrain and not suitable for the mission at hand. Unfortunately, Colombia had to turn these down because it would have cost them more to rehabilitate them than to use them. Finally, again, how important it is to have intelligence and surveillance information available to stop illegal narcotics. Peru has been great about stopping illegal narcotics. President Fujimora, who has eliminated 60 percent of the production in that country, has used in the past, when we were able to get information, surveillance information to him, a shoot-down policy which in fact has resulted in, again, that lowering of production, the lowering of transiting of, in this case, particularly cocaine coming out of that country. This is a March 13 headline from the Washington Post. ``U.S. Officials See Trend in Colombia: Lack of Air Support Hindering the Drug War.'' I have said before, there has not been a drug war in this country since 1993. We have tried to restart it in the last 2 or 3 years, but every time we get on course, we find the administration diverts resources. They diverted resources to Haiti. The Vice President diverted some of the planes for surveillance to check on oil spills in Alaska. The President diverted military resources to Kosovo, to Bosnia, and to any one of the number of other deployments, and took them out of in fact action and the war on drugs. The inability to provide surveillance is now, for the first time, resulting in an increased production in Peru, according to reports we are getting, in cocaine. Without source country programs, without interdiction, without surveillance and intelligence, the missions fail. I do not want to just talk about the failure of the Clinton record. I must say that what we have done is the Republican majority in a positive fashion I think has been on target. We have gotten our levels of funding for source country back to 1991-1992 levels. We have not only concentrated on source country, but also on interdiction, trying to get those resources where they were not diverted. In these cases, we see in March again a third time the administration is making a fatal mistake and again closing down our war on drugs, if there ever was under this administration a war on drugs. The Republicans have funded a $1 billion campaign, an education and media campaign. Maybe Members have seen those ads on television. We hope they are effective. We are testing them in various markets. We are going to do everything to see that we reach our young people in education and prevention. That $1 billion through our efforts, and the administration, of course, wanted to spend the $1 billion, but we thought it was important to have also donated an equivalent amount, at least. So with that compromise we will now have $2 billion in that program, both through direct taxpayer funding and through private sector donations. We have dramatically increased the amount of money for prevention. In fact, one of the primary goals of this administration was to treat our way out of this problem. We see examples like Baltimore, Maryland, where they have gone from just a handful of heroin addicts to now one in eight in the population of Baltimore is an addict, a drug addict. They could not treat their way out of the problem. It has grown out of control, while the murder rate has stayed dramatically high in that city. The liberals would have us believe that the war on drugs is a failure. The liberals would have us believe that if we liberalize the policy, we can just treat people out of this problem. In fact, Baltimore is a great example of that philosophy gone wrong. Thank goodness they have a new mayor, a new philosophy, and are instituting it at this time. I am very pleased with the action they have taken after we conducted a hearing in the city of Baltimore, and now we will have a new police chief, someone more inclined to zero tolerance and tough enforcement, to bring the death and destruction in that great city on our East Coast to a halt. Those are some of the things that the Republicans have done, again, in spite of opposition. I wanted to close tonight, I only have a few minutes more, and talk about something else we have asked the administration to do. That is since 1992. If we are going to go after, again, illegal narcotics and those who deal in death and destruction, then we prosecute those people. We have been after the administration, because in 1992 we were having prosecutions in Federal courts for drug offenses at the rate of nearly 30,000. In 1996, the administration dropped to 26,000. So we have been hammering the administration to go after prosecution of drugs. This is almost an embarrassment, again, if we are going to have a war or serious efforts against those who are dealing in death and destruction, contributing to the thousands and thousands of deaths and mayhem around, and 70 percent of the crime, this is their record. Now, I will say that in 1997 and 1998 they started up, but they are getting just back to the level of 1992 with our hammering. This is prosecution. Then we found this last week when we had in the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Commissioners, we found a report that was provided recently that shows that Federal drug offenders are spending less time in prison, according to a study that was released about the same time as their testimony. So we had prosecutions down, we were trying to get prosecutions up, but then we find that the administration is now reducing sentences and drug offenders, and this case serious drug offenders, are spending less time in prison. It seems like everything is being done to thwart a real effort against illegal narcotics.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, today I am introducing legislation in the name of a special and dear friend who valiantly served in World War II and survived the treacherous Bataan Death March. The ``Samuel B. Moody Bataan Death March Compensation Act'' would provide compensation to those individuals who were forced to partake and held imprisoned following the ruthless procession. Last year, Sam Moody passed away in Central Florida. I first met Sam in my civic activities in central Florida some years ago. However, I never really knew much about his background until some years ago when I invited Sam and several other veteran leaders to a small luncheon gathering. As we sat together, I asked each of the veterans to relate some of their military service recollections after lunch to our group. Sam Moody started off rather hesitantly but he began telling an incredible story. In 1942, American and Filipino troops fought bravely against the Japanese army during the Second World War on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines. Due to the low supplies and no hope of reinforcements, these men fought valiantly until they were forced to surrender to the enemy. Within six days, the troops were corralled in the Mariveles, just south of Bataan. Little did they know, they were in for the journey of their lives--the Bataan Death March. In April of 1942 they began their march from Mariveles to their yet unknown destination of San Fernando-- more than 60 miles away. The tropical temperatures in the Philippines during this season were excruciating, many men dying from dehydration and some from exhaustion. Treatment by their Japanese captors was brutal and often fatal as those who could not continue marching were summarily beaten or executed on the spot. Many marchers attempted to escape into the jungles and some succeeded, however, most were forced to continue on their journey. Once they reached the railroad sidings, the troops were crammed into railroad cars like cattle. They continued to feel the torture of the tropical sun and their 30 mile train journey took close to 4 hours with long stops at various points. After reaching camp O'Donnel in the jungles of Arlac Province, these soldiers were held as prisoners of war for over 3\1/2\ years. Mr. Speaker, the purpose of the ``Samuel B. Moody Bataan Death March Compensation Act'' is to illustrate that while food and clothing allowances existed for our soldiers the United States failed to pay these benefits to the Bataan Death March survivors during their time spent in captivity. In fact, those who survived to see their liberation in 1945 also did not receive the promotions or pay grade increases given to their counterparts who were not held as POWs. Pay increases and benefits were a standard part of military service, however, these brave individuals have yet to receive their lost payment. In an effort to give these brave men their just benefits, I am introducing this legislation to compensate those survivors who were held captive after the Bataan Death March with their earned pay and benefits. I would like to invite each member of this body to join me in this effort by cosponsoring this legislation. For those who gave so much in service to our Nation deserve to be duly compensated for their sacrifice and valor.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to come before the House again on a Tuesday night to address the topic that I normally address on Tuesday night before the House and to the American people on the subject of illegal narcotics and drug abuse and its effect upon our Nation and the responsibility of this Congress to address that terrible social problem that we face. Tonight, I would like to provide an update. We were in recess during the spring work period, and I would like to update the House and again the American people on some of the things that have happened relating to illegal narcotics. When I make these presentations, I try to look at what has been in the recent news and highlighted, sometimes violence which is highlighted, unfortunately, in our newscasts about what is happening in our society. Again, I think there is no greater social problem facing this Nation than that of illegal narcotics. It has a dramatic impact on our communities and our children. Before we left for recess, I addressed the House and spoke about the untold story. The untold story of a 6-year-old bringing a gun into school and shooting a 6-year-old and all of the attention focused on the gun. We did look a little bit behind the scenes and found that the 6-year-old was the victim of a crack house family that was disjointed; drugs and narcotics prevalent. I believe the father was in jail on a narcotics charge. Again, if we look at the root problem, we see narcotics, we see again a dysfunctional family, and societal problems. The gun was the means by which this 6-year-old committed a terrible act, a murder, but the root of the problem is, I think, what this Congress and the American people must focus upon in their attention to correct the situation. Then I think the American people were focused and the news also riveted in on a 12-year-old who brought a gun into school and had his classmates I believe at bay with a weapon, and again, if we look behind the scenes, and I related to the Congress, we found that the child, the 12-year-old had taken a gun to school and attempted to get attention and get arrested because he wanted to join his mother, who was in jail on a drug charge. Another incident of illegal narcotics being at the root of the problem, the gun manifesting itself again is certainly a very serious problem, a problem of bringing a weapon into school, but again, a child with many problems, illegal narcotics at the root of some of his family problems. Then, during the holidays, right at the season of Easter and Passover, I think the entire Nation and the world was focused on Washington, D.C., our Nation's Capital, which has some of the strongest gun control legislation and laws on the books of any locality in the United States. In fact, it is almost illegal to own a weapon that is unregistered and there are very tight control laws. Yet, a 16-year-old terrorized a family day at the National Zoo here in the District of Columbia. The report, of course, focused on the young teenager who was using a weapon and fired into the crowd. But the rest of the story was not told. Let me just cite a little bit about this young man, a 16-year-old by the name of Jones who was actually the son of an enforcer in the District's biggest drug gang, his father was one of the biggest drug gang participants in the 1980s, and this young man, again, was the victim of illegal narcotics, and what it had done to his family. He was brought up as really the product of illegal narcotics and crime that emanated from illegal narcotics. His father, this article went on to say, James Antonio Jones, was already in jail, a source to the family confirmed. The elder Jones, 43, is serving a life sentence in a Federal maximum security prison in Beaumont, Texas, after a 1990 conviction for his role in the drug hierarchy run by Raphael Edmond, who was a notorious drug dealer and head of a crack cocaine gang here in the District of Columbia. Mr. Speaker, in almost every one of these instances I have cited and others that we see on the nightly news with the attention of the media, in fact, all of these cases have illegal narcotics at the root of their problems. Some 70 to 80 percent of those in our prisons, in our jails, in our Federal penitentiaries are there because of drug-related offenses. Many would have us believe that these folks are in prison for possessing small amounts of marijuana or some other drug. The fact is, most of these people are there for repeated felonies. Some of them, in fact, have been on drugs when they have committed these repeated crimes. Many of them have repeated their crimes time and time again, are multiple offenders. Most of the people in our prisons, in fact, have two or more felony convictions in our Federal penitentiaries and State penitentiaries, according to the studies that our staff from our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice has undertaken. So there are a lot of myths about what is going on, there is a lot of misinformation about who is committing crime and these illegal acts. In fact, we try through these weekly presentations before the House of Representatives to get the facts to the American people and the Congress. Again, this is the worst social problem that we face. It is a horrendous problem. The toll is not only those behind bars, but those who die annually. The most recent statistics that we have on deaths, direct deaths from illegal narcotics are 1998 figures, and that is 15,973 Americans died. If we take all of the other deaths related to illegal narcotics, people driving under the influence of illegal narcotics, people who die as a result of illegal narcotics, not necessarily an overdose, but some other act, total, according to our National Drug Czar, Barry McCaffrey, more than 50,000, almost as many in one year as killed in some of our international conflicts. So this, indeed, is a great problem. It is a problem that can cost our society as much as a quarter of a trillion, $250 billion a year. That is in dollars and cents, not in heartaches to mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and parents and grandparents who have children and sons and daughters involved in illegal narcotics. During this past recess, it was my privilege to talk to some of the local law enforcement people in my community. I have cited the impact of illegal narcotics in central Florida, and I represent probably one of the most tranquil areas in the country and in the State of Florida and on the East Coast, and that is the area between Orlando and Daytona Beach. Central Florida has had a heroin epidemic. I have cited that before on the floor of the House. In the past several years, we have had in the neighborhood of 60 deaths from drug overdoses. We have had a record number of heroin overdoses and deaths. Unfortunately, I have had to meet with many of the parents who have lost young people to heroin overdoses, and they die a horrible death. It is none of the glamour that is portrayed by Hollywood or by films or the word of mouth that heroin is a great experience. It is a horrible experience and a horrible death, and any of these parents will testify to that. I brought before the House rather gruesome pictures of the results of overdoses of heroin and they are not pretty pictures. I hate to bring them back up here again, but there is no glamor in death by heroin. The heroin that we have on the streets of the United States today is not the low purity heroin that we had in the 1980s, now some of the heroin is 80, 90 percent pure. It is as deadly as any substance can be, particularly when used with other drugs or alcohol, and first time users unfortunately do not survive. In meeting with some of the local law enforcement people, we are matching our deaths in central Florida. Again, our deaths are record in number. Our deaths by heroin overdoses now exceed our homicides, according to the latest statistics, which is absolutely alarming. In fact, we find the situation getting worse, not only in central Florida, but across the Nation. In meeting again with these local officials, they told me that while the deaths are equal or slightly above previous years' death count, the only reason they have not shot off the charts even at an even greater rate is the ability of our emergency medical personnel to provide better attention, quicker attention, and better medical survival equipment available to save more of these individuals. The problem we have, though, is we are seeing more and more incidents, emergency room incidents of heroin overdoses. We are just able to save a few more folks, and the deaths continue to spiral. One of the headlines that was in the newspaper just this week in the Washington Times here, which always does such a good job in reporting, I brought a copy of this tonight, suburban teen heroin use on the increase. This is the headline that blurted out. This is an absolutely shocking statistic that was presented, and this is part of a study that was done. I have a copy of the study here. It is an interagency domestic heroin threat assessment, and these statistics on the increase in illegal narcotics is, again, quite remarkable. If we look at 1996, we had suburban teen heroin use, and we are looking at about a half a million young people using heroin, that figure has doubled just about to 1 million, 980,000 according to this report. In a very brief period of time, we have had a near doubling of the number of heroin users in the United States, teenage heroin users. The rate of first use by children aged 12 to 17 increased from less than 1 in 1,000 in the 1980s to 2.7 per thousand in 1996. First time heroin users are getting younger, from an average age of 26 year olds in 1991 to an average of 17 years of age by 1997. Again, some of the statistics from this report are startling. Again, we see teen heroin use on the increase. What I also wanted to address tonight is the question of where this heroin is coming from and how did we get into a situation where we have a doubling of the amount of teenagers in our country on heroin. Unfortunately, the chart that I present now shows a rather sad record for the Clinton/Gore administration on the question of long-term prevalence and use of heroin. This chart was prepared by monitoring the future study at University of Michigan. It is not something I made up in a partisan fashion. If we look at the chart for a minute, we see the percent of 12th graders, and if we look at this record here, see pretty much stable, some downturn, some slight increase and then a dramatic downturn under the Bush administration. It is pretty level and in some cases there are reductions, some valleys, mostly leveling out and valleys from the Reagan and Bush administration. Actually heroin was not quite as much of a problem because President Reagan had developed a methadone strategy, an interdiction strategy, source country programs, many of which were eliminated in this period from 1993 forward. In 1993, and I have not touched the chart in any way or doctored it, you can see a dramatic increase in heroin use. We actually see some stabilization here, that stabilization and a slight decrease is right after the Republicans took over the House and Senate and began an effort to restore some of the source country programs, the interdiction programs. We have also had a tremendous problem in heroin, and I will talk about that, but part of the problem that we have is, again, a lack of attention to heroin and its production and entry into the United States. In fact, in the same period we have since the beginning of the Clinton administration doubled the amount of money on treatment, but we have again the situation that we see here. We know where the heroin is coming from. If we can put this chart up here, in 1998, we know today, according to this DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration chart which they have provided me, that 65 percent of the heroin that is seized in the United States comes from South America, and probably 99 percent of that comes from Colombia. We know this for a fact. They can do a chemical analysis, almost a DNA analysis, and find out almost to the field where the heroin comes from. The heroin that is seized across the country, samples are sent in to DEA and they perform this analysis, so we know pretty well the picture of where heroin is coming from. It is coming from Colombia. We also see it coming from Mexico. The bulk of it, of course, again is from Colombia. If we had this chart for 1992, 1993, we would see almost no heroin coming from South America. In fact, heroin was not produced in Colombia until the beginning of the Clinton administration, for all intents and purposes. Heroin was probably in the single digits from Mexico. It has crept up a bit since even the last report we had in 1997. It was at 14 percent. It is now at 17 percent. Mexico, who we have given incredible trade advantages to, this administration has certified repeatedly as far as cooperating in the drug wars, now in 1 year increased production by some 20 percent of black tar heroin. Again, we know exactly where this is coming from, according to the tests that are conducted. This is where heroin is coming from in 1992, almost none of the heroin produced in Colombia and single digit in Mexico, and dramatic increases in both of those countries, from both of those countries. We know the pattern of drug traffickers. Let me take this down. This is the pattern of drug traffickers. We know since 1992, 1993, with the election of the Gore and Clinton team that there was a change in strategy; that they wanted to in fact close down the Reagan and Bush programs for source countries, stopping drugs at their source, and also interdicting drugs as they came from the source, and they effectively did that. They closed down most of the international programs, slashed the budgets by some 50 percent. We know the pattern of heroin coming out of Colombia now because we can identify it by the signature program. We also know that Colombia, which was not producing but a small, small percentage, probably again in single digits of cocaine, is now the world's major producer of cocaine. Some 80 percent of the cocaine in the world is coming out of Colombia. This is also since the inception of the Clinton-Gore policy, where they dismantled these source country programs. During the past 4 or 5 years of the Republican administration, we have made a concerted effort to put back together some of the programs that the Clinton-Gore team and the Democrat-controlled Congress in 2 years did incredible damage to. It is a monumental effort. It took President Reagan most of his term and President Bush to get the illegal narcotics problem in the right direction, and that is on a downward trend. Again, these are not doctored in any way. These are not partisan charts. This chart, also produced by the University of Michigan, shows the record, and it is a very clear record. I know this drives the Clinton-Gore people crazy, and it drives the people on the other side of the aisle, the liberal side, who changed policy crazy, but this shows very clearly that with President Reagan, we see the long-term trend and prevalence of drug use. This really is the major measure of what is going on with illegal narcotics. We see it going down in a steady fashion under President Reagan. We see a dramatic drop under President Bush, an incredible job here done. Then again, undoctored, and we do not play with any of these charts, but the facts are very clear, that again, with President Clinton, with the close-down of the interdiction programs, the source country programs, taking the military out, cutting the Coast Guard budget, all this was done in a very short period of time, but the damage has been absolutely incredible. When the Republicans took over, having participated in this, we knew that this policy needed to be reversed. Under the leadership of the now Speaker of the House, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who chaired the subcommittee that I now chair, actually, the responsibility for drug policy, it was a different title, it is now titled the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, but the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) was the one responsible, along with his predecessor, Mr. Zeliff, who left the Congress, in restarting the war on drugs. This is basically the war on drugs, and we will hear people say the war on drugs was a failure. Mr. Speaker, if this is a failure, I am either reading the chart wrong, and we can bring back the heroin chart. We also have them for cocaine and other narcotics. This is pretty dramatic and pretty evident of a successful program. Again, the use of illegal narcotics is going down, down, down. This certainly has to be a patent failure with the Clinton-Gore administration, by any measure. It is interesting that, if we looked at the resources that were committed, again, this chart is not doctored. It shows the exact figures in the millions of dollars for international programs. Now, when we think about drug programs, we spend billions and billions in drug program, it costs us billions and billions of dollars. Here we have a chart that starts out with about $600 million in international source country programs. These programs were started under President Reagan and President Bush to stop drugs at their source, because it really is the most cost-effective way. Where drugs are produced by peasants in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, these peasants get very few pesos or the equivalent of dollars for their harvest. And we know that 100 percent of the cocaine comes from Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. One hundred percent. Maybe I should say 99.99 percent. Maybe there is a little bit on the slopes of Ecuador or some other bordering country, but it all comes from that region. We know that the programs under President Bush and President Reagan worked. We know that the programs under President Clinton have not worked in eliminating international drug programs or slashing them. Here we can see from this chart, 1992-1993 here, and again with a Democrat-controlled Congress implementing their policy and gutting the international programs to less than half of what they were. We see increases with the advent of the Republican Majority. We are back up to, and if we take this 1999 dollars and put it into 1991 dollars, we are just about back at 1991 levels. But this is a clear pattern. If we took this and did an overlay with the previous chart, we can see that as they cut drug use here, they had those programs in place, as they took the programs for international out of place, the drug use started to soar and that is because we had an even greater supply coming. This chart shows Federal spending for interdiction also gutted by the Democrat-controlled Congress. Gutted here in 1993. It looks a little delayed, but we have to remember that we start a fiscal year a little bit later, like we will start the next one in October of this year. But we can see the devastation of the cuts in interdiction programs here. And we see, getting back to the equivalent of the 1991 figures, actually, if we look at this little peak that we have gotten to here, it coincides with the slight downturn that we have seen here in drug use. Also, if I got the heroin chart out, we would see some stabilization. The problem we have in heroin is that heroin is now produced in Colombia in incredible quantities. The quantity is completely uncontained as far as coming into the United States. Because the Clinton administration has thwarted every single attempt, up to, I would say, last October when the situation in Colombia got totally out of hand. Colombia is about to lose its country. We sent the Drug Czar down, we have sent other officials down. But the policy of the Clinton-Gore administration, the Democrat-controlled Congress, was one of one error after another in Colombia. First, we stopped information sharing with Colombia back in 1994, which brought the outrage even from Democrat Members of the Congress. That was information sharing which we provide through interdiction. And we can see if we look at this interdiction chart, we see the gutting of the interdiction program. Our military does not get involved in an enforcement manner in the narcotics issue. It is prohibited from actually conducting law enforcement by the Constitution. We do not want the military in law enforcement. But what the military does is surveillance in the international area outside our borders. If we had missiles coming in that were killing 15,973 citizens in one year, 100,000 in 7 years, and 50,000 deaths related to that action, we certainly would use our national security forces. What we do is we use the military to conduct surveillance. Our planes provide that information to other countries. We, again, through the Republican new majority, started programs for source country, for interdiction, restarted them in 1996 and 1997 for Peru and for Bolivia. Mr. Speaker, those programs have been phenomenally successful. The amount of cocaine has been cut, production in Bolivia has been cut some 55 percent. In Peru, we are up in the 65 percent, 66 percent range. The only change that we have seen is further cuts of providing this interdiction and surveillance information to Peru, and there have been some downturns in the United States providing that information. We immediately see some increase in drug trafficking or drug production. It is almost guaranteed to happen according to, again, all the research and evidence and information that we have. So, where we let up, we in fact have illegal narcotics coming into this country. Nothing is more evident than Colombia. Again, in 1994, the administration stopped information sharing. The next thing they did was they decertified Colombia without a national interest waiver, which meant that we could not send assistance to Colombia to fight illegal narcotics. In Colombia, illegal narcotics and the narcoterrorist activity that has caused tens of thousands of deaths and disruption of that country are synonymous. The narcoterrorists fund their terrorist activities through narcotics trafficking. That is well-known. The right and the left, extreme right and extreme left in that civil war fund their activities through narcotics trafficking, narcotics taxes and income from the production of narcotics. We know it, our Drug Czar has stated that many times. That is why it has become in the United States' national interest to provide assistance to Colombia to stop the narcotics trafficking, stop the terrorist activities that are going on there. Not to provide any troops or any active military participation there. We have agreed to provide some training. But year after year since 1993 with the Clinton-Gore administration, they have stopped resources getting to Colombia. The results are very evident. We have, again, production from no production in Colombia of heroin to now producing some 65 percent, probably closer to 70 percent of the heroin, where there was almost none. Cocaine. We have some 80 percent now being produced in Colombia. Before it was being transshipped through Colombia from Peru and Bolivia. And we do know that the program instituted by the Republican Majority has worked very well in those countries to cut production. But right now the reason we have this report on heroin flooding our streets, young people being victimized and dying at incredible numbers from heroin, is the sheer quantity, the sheer supply. Now, it is bad enough that we have this record of all of these activities being stopped here which has allowed some of this to happen. But what is even worse is the reaction of the administration to provide assets. If we are going to fight a war on drugs, or if we are going to fight a war, we need assets and we need to have those assets committed to that war effort. Mr. Speaker, this chart is part of a report that was prepared at my request by the General Accounting Office in December of 1999. What this chart shows is the various assets. Some of these are DOD. This is the DOD assets, which have been dedicated to the war on drugs. And we see this decline from 1993 here, this continuous decline of DOD assets to the war on drugs. The next little triangle, the yellow triangle, the Customs Service assets declining. Some beginning of increase with the Republican Majority, and the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) was responsible for this. We see the beginning of the return back to this 1992 level. The Coast Guard, we see steady decline. If we took the budgets for these various agencies, we would see them gutted by the Clinton-Gore administration and also by the Democratically controlled Congress. So if we have a war on drugs, we must commit assets. The report that I had conducted said that flight hours have been reduced 68 percent for fiscal years 1992 to 1999. So this is flying hours dedicated to tracking suspect shipments of illegal narcotics in transit to the United States. The number declined from 46,264 to 14,770. So I submit that the war on drugs was a success, but basically closed down by this administration and this is pretty good evidence. The other area, if drugs are not shipped by air, they ship by sea. I also asked GAO to look at trafficking patterns and also what we were doing as far as providing assets in the war on drugs as far as maritime activities. If we look again from some of these highs here, we see DOD in the red declining and a steady decline of ship days. If if we look at the Coast Guard, we see some slight increase. This follows the other pattern, and the total overall is still below what it was in 1992. In fact, the report given to me indicates that assets that were used in shipping and going after illegal narcotics declined some 62 percent during this period from 1992 to 1999. So the ship days for going after illegal narcotics and those resources in a war on drugs declined dramatically during that period. One of the other problems that we have had in the war on illegal drugs is the failure of this administration to negotiate with Panama the location and continued operation of our anti-narcotics operations centers, which were located in Panama. These are known as FOLs, forward operating locations. In order to conduct a war on illegal narcotics, we need information and surveillance from the area where illegal drugs are produced and also shipped out of that particular setting. In May of 1999, of course, the United States was forced to stop all flights. The administration bungled the negotiations with Panama. We encouraged them to at least negotiate an arrangement where we could continue our narcotics tracking flights out of that area. Since May of 1999, we have seen, not a total shutdown, but a dramatic increase, again, as documented by this GAO report. Our illegal narcotics, heroin, cocaine are coming in from Colombia in unprecedented volumes. It is absolutely mind boggling the sheer amount of heroin and cocaine that is coming in. But one sees that we do not have the locations. Now, this chart shows coverage with potential FOLs, and this chart was given to me as showing the Congress and our committee what would be done to relocate those operations for surveillance and important interdiction information. One of the locations proposed was in Manta, Ecuador. The other was in Curacao and Aruba. Unfortunately, the Manta location in Ecuador and also the location in Aruba Dutch Antilles took longer than anticipated to negotiate final agreements. The cost, by the time we are through with relocating here, will be $128 million since the Manta air strip is not adequate to land the heavy planes and equipment that we have. Aruba will have to build additional facilities. But we have dramatically cut the number of flights, the number of surveillance missions because we do not have these two locations in operation. It may be 2002 before actually both of these are up and running at full capacity. That is why we have the report of incredible amounts of heroin and still cocaine coming into the United States. We have nothing in place to stop it. Today I met with the representatives of the Department of Defense and various agencies involved in trying to put together a program to put Humpty Dumpty back together again to try to get us back to the 1992 levels in this fight. We now have recently signed, but not fully approved by the El Salvador legislature, a third location. This will cost us another $10 million or $15 million in addition to losing the Panama location and $5 billion worth of assets there. We will now pay to relocate these operations. But nothing will stop narcotics quicker than either eradicating them at their source or getting them as they come from their source. It is proven effective in Peru. It is proven effective in Bolivia. It will prove effective in Colombia and the surrounding areas and stop some of the incredible supply that is driving down the price and making more of the drugs available to our young people. Again, my colleagues saw the figures of a doubling in just several years of heroin abuse. But this is where it is coming from. Unfortunately, all of this will not be in place for several years to get us back to where we were in 1992 in our operations in the antinarcotics effort. What is sad, too, is that this administration continues to thwart the will and recommendations of Congress. We have attempted for some 4 or 5 years, I know since we took over the majority, in every fashion, including granting appropriations, to get resources to Colombia and to the area where illegal narcotics are coming from. But this GAO report also outlines that DoD is not providing assets that are requested. When we question the various agencies where these assets are, in fact, the assets are going to Bosnia, the assets are going to the Middle East, the assets are going to Kosovo, they are going to the record number of deployments under the Clinton-Gore administration. This is quite telling because SouthCom, which is the Southern U.S. Command in charge of basically our war on drugs and our antinarcotics effort, has been requesting assets. These are assets, DoD assets, towards the war on drugs. This is in the blue. The red shows what they got and what was provided as far as assets in this effort. We see that this is the request, and this is what they got. In 1999, this is the request, and this is what they got. So if my colleagues are wondering why they have heroin on their streets, if they are wondering why they have record number of teenagers using heroin and illegal drugs, this is because, even though the Congress has appropriated funds and resources, we cannot get those resources into this program. I do not know if it is the Secretary of Defense, but I fear that it is even higher in the administration because, again, every effort to get resources to stop these drugs and the sheer incredible supply coming into our country every effort is thwarted. It has almost reached comical proportions as I cited, and it would be funny if there were not so many people dying as a result of this. The helicopters that we requested for the Colombia National Police for some 4 or 5 years now finally got there late this past fall. Unfortunately, as we now know, the ammunition for those helicopters was delivered to the back door of the State Department in a bungled operation rather than to Colombia. It would almost be humorous to find out that those helicopters were sent to Colombia and they were not properly armored so they could not be used in the antinarcotics effort. Finally, I believe we now have those resources in place. The administration did become aware of the destabilization of the area and what was going on in Columbia and finally asked for a supplemental package. Unfortunately, the President did not submit finally to Congress until the time of our budget, and that was several months ago, a request; and that, unfortunately, now is being handled through the regular funding process, although it is necessary to move that package forward to get these assets in place. One of the things that does disturb me is some of the liberalizers out there and those who would legalize and propose that the solution to all this is just legalize what are now illegal narcotics, and all of our problems will be solved. I think that an article that I read by a professor at Pepperdine University, James Q. Wilson, had some interesting information. I just wanted to cite him tonight. He said, Advocates of legalization think that both buyers and sellers would benefit by legalization. People who can buy drugs freely and at something like at free market prices would no longer have to steal to afford cocaine or heroin. Dealers would no longer have to use violence and corruption to maybe obtain their market share. Though drugs may harm people, reducing this harm would be a medical problem. And you always hear the legalizers say it is a medical problem, not a criminal justice one. Crime would drop sharply. But there is an error in this calculation. Again, this is what Professor Wilson is saying. Legalizing drugs means letting the price fall to its competitive rate plus taxes and advertising costs. That market price would probably be somewhere between one-third and one-twentieth of the illegal price, and more than the market price would fall. As Harvard's Mark Moore pointed out, The risk price, that is all the hazards associated with buying the drugs, from being arrested to being ripped off would also fall; and this decline might be more important than the lower purchase price. Under a legal regime, the consumption of low-priced low-risk drugs would increase dramatically. We do not know by how much. But the little evidence we have suggests a sharp rise. Until 1968, Britain allowed doctors to prescribe heroin. Some doctors cheated, and their medically unnecessary prescriptions helped increase the number of known heroin addicts by a factor of 40. As a result, the government abandoned the prescription policy in favor of administering heroin in clinics and later replacing heroin with methadone. When the Netherlands ceased enforcing laws against the purchase or possession of marijuana, the result was a sharp increase in its use. Cocaine and heroin create much greater dependency. So the increase in their use would probably be even greater. The average user would probably commit fewer crimes if these drugs were sold legally, but the total number of users would increase sharply. A large fraction of these new users would be unable to keep a steady job unless we were prepared to support them with welfare payments. Crime would be one of their major sources of income; that is, the number of drug-related crimes per user might fall even as the total number of drug-related crimes increased. Add to the list of harms more deaths from overdose, more babies born to addicted mothers, more accidents by drug- influenced automobile drivers, and fewer people able to hold jobs or act as competent parents. I think that this observation by professor Wilson is quite interesting. It is also borne by the facts where they have tried liberalized policy in the United States. I bring out the chart provided to me by DEA, our Drug Enforcement Agency, which shows that heroin addict population of Baltimore. Now, Baltimore, until just recently, had a very liberal mayor, Mayor Schmoke. He actually turned his back on enforcement of some of the illegal narcotics trafficking and use and abuse in his community. The results were incredible. The number of deaths in 1997, 1998 were 312; 1999, when we got these figures, the end of last year, were 308. It will probably reach 312 because people die as a result of some wound inflicted on them. But the deaths are pretty much stable. But what has happened in Baltimore with this liberal policy is absolutely astounding, and it is confirmed by what Professor Wilson had outlined in his statement of what happens. If we look at Baltimore, in the 1950s, it had almost a million population. In 1996, it was down to 675,000. We will know what the population is now, but we think it is down lower, around 600,000. In 1996, it had 38,985 heroin addicts. Again, this is during the period of the liberal attitude towards illegal narcotics. That estimate is now, 1999, somewhere in the neighborhood of one in eight citizens. This is not something I have made up, it is something a city council person has said, one in eight are now addicted in what is left of Baltimore. So exactly what the experience was in England, we see an increase, dramatic increase in the addiction population. If this was multiplied across the United States and we had one in eight people in the United States addicted to heroin or illegal narcotics, we would have a disaster on our hands. This is, again, the model of a liberal approach, a liberal approach that failed, both in deaths and addiction. I do not think one can have more horrible results. What is interesting and most people like to ignore, particularly the liberal crowd or those that want to gang up on Rudy Giuliani these days, is the tough enforcement, the zero tolerance policy. Does it work or does it not work? If my colleagues will look in the early 1990s when Rudy Giuliani took over as mayor, they see about 2,000 plus deaths from murders, the crime rate in New York City. The zero tolerance has brought that down to the mid 600 range, an absolutely dramatic decrease in murders in that city. What is amazing is not only the murders have decreased but in every other major crime area, crime is down by some 50 percent to 1999 during his tenure. And what is interesting is, I know that people pick on Mr. Giuliani and say that there is overenforcement, and our subcommittee did hearings and we updated that information. We did hearings a year ago when he was accused of some of his police force being overzealous in their enforcement and we found that there were in fact fewer incidences of police firing on individuals under Rudy Giuliani. We found there were fewer incidences of complaints against police. And, actually, that was while Mr. Giuliani had increased the police force by some 25 percent in numbers. So, actually, the number of police on duty had increased and there were far fewer complaints under Mr. Giuliani than there were under the former administrations of the city. Again, the figures for the New York City Police Department are absolutely incredible. Zero tolerance, tough enforcement, does work. In 1993, there were 429,000 major felony crimes committed. In 1998, we have 212. An incredible record. The liberals would have us believe that the legalization is the answer. In fact, the liberalization has almost devastated the city of Baltimore and other settings where they have attempted a liberal policy. The tough enforcement, the zero tolerance, in fact, does work and does result in dramatic decreases in crime across the board. I am very pleased that the Republican majority has increased the source country programs that are so effective in stopping illegal narcotics at their source. We are getting them back to the 1991-92 funding levels for the programs of interdiction, of stopping drugs cost effectively as they come from those source country areas where they are produced. The Republican majority has instituted and funded through appropriations a billion dollars a national drug education program, unprecedented in the history of this country, and we have, again, dramatically increased the amount of money for treatment and other programs. So I am proud of our record and will continue next week to cite the drug problem that we have facing this Nation. I have run out of time, so I will yield back, Mr. Speaker, first thanking those who are working tonight for their patience.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the City of Sanford, Florida and its citizens for their successful renovation and restoration of the former Ritz Theater, to be renamed the Helen Stairs Theater, which will celebrate its grand opening on Saturday, May 6, 2000. The theater, located in the historic district of Sanford, has celebrated a storied past, and its restoration promises the citizens of Sanford the opportunity to transform an icon of another age into a community facility with a bright new future. Originally known as the Milane Theater, the Helen Stairs Theater was first constructed in 1923 by the Milane Amusement Company as part of a broad expansion in downtown Sanford. The theater design is indicative of a building style that began appearing in the United States in the 1850s based on European models of opera houses. Motion picture expansion in the early twentieth century led to a boom in the construction of new theaters with over twenty-five thousand theaters located across the United States by 1916. The technical sophistication achieved in theater construction during this period remains unparalleled in the history of American architecture. The Helen Stairs Theater epitomizes the tremendous boom and amazing achievements made during this period and is a visual testimony to the rich history and beauty of Sanford, Florida. The Milane Amusement Company, led by President Frank Miller and Vice President Edward Lane, built the theater as a profit-enterprise. They had acquired the site from the former Star Theater, and movie house that had been abandoned for a number of years, with the intention of creating a new theater that would be capable of accommodating seven hundred patrons. Construction of the new theater began in November of 1922, and was completed in July of 1923 for a mere $80,000. Editors of the Sanford Daily Herald proclaimed the building as ``a much needed asset in the City Substantial,'' and claimed that ``this city now has a real theater and one of which the city can feel proud.'' The theater opened on August 2, 1923 to rave reviews. Over the next few years there were management changes, the sale of the theater to Frank and Stella Evans in 1933, and in 1936, the theater was renamed the Ritz Theater. The Ritz continued to thrive through the years featuring mostly picture shows, but also including some live performances, and became an integral part of the history of Sanford. During the 1960s, the theater attendance declined, and in 1978, the Ritz closed after failing to compete with the new multiplex theaters. The theater stood vacant until 1984 when it was reopened as the Showtime Cantina. Four years later the theater was again closed and remained vacant until the mid-1990s when it was acquired by the Ritz Community Theater Project, Inc., under the leadership of Helen Stairs. The group began renovating the theater in 1999, and it was renamed in honor of Helen Stairs whose determination and dedicated effort has resulted in its restoration. I congratulate and thank Helen Stairs, her husband Carl and family, and all of those who joined with her in the effort to restore this historic treasure. On behalf of the Central Florida U.S. Congressional Delegation, we salute the tremendous effort that made this community project a reality.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to come to the floor again tonight to talk about the subject I usually attempt to address on Tuesday night before the House when we have these Special Orders to call to attention to the House of Representatives, my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, and the American people, one of the most serious social problems we are facing as a Nation. That is the problem of illegal narcotics, their disastrous impact on the United States, our economy, on families across this Nation, the tremendous toll it takes on our judicial system, and the loss of lives. In fact, in the last recorded year, 1998, some 15,973 Americans lost their lives as a direct result of illegal narcotics. If we take in all of the other figures that are not reported, our national drug czar, the director of our Office of National Drug Control Policy, Barry McCaffrey, has testified before our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources that the toll exceeds some 50,000 each year in the United States. That is truly a devastating number when we consider that we have incarcerated nearly 2 million Americans, and that some 70 percent of them are there because of drug-related offenses or committing crimes, in most cases two and three felonies on their record, under the influence of illegal narcotics and substance abuse, and we know that something is seriously wrong and something needs our attention, not only as a Congress but as a people who care about people and should care about their fate. Unfortunately, the toll continues to mount, the tremendous impact illegal narcotics have had again on our Nation. Tonight I wanted to cite just some of the most recent statistics we have, and how some of the people who are most at risk in our national population are some of the highest victims as far as percentage, again in this terrible conflict with illegal narcotics. According to the 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, drug use increased from 5.8 percent in 1993 to 8.2 percent in 1998 among young African-Americans; again, the victims of illegal narcotics and drug use, in particular the minority population, and in this case not quite doubling but a dramatic increase for African-Americans. Also, according to this 1998 survey on drug abuse, drug use increased from 4.4 percent in 1993 to 6.1 percent in 1998 among young Hispanics. The Hispanic minority in this country, and particularly the youth, have been tremendously impacted by illegal narcotics. If we look at the population in our prisons, if we look at the population in our detention facilities and jails across this Nation, we would see a disproportionate number of minorities incarcerated in those facilities, and many of them there because of drug-related problems. We hear a great deal about legacies at this time of year, especially after a 7-year administration. I do not have blow-ups of these particular charts tonight, but certainly when history records the legacy of the Clinton administration, some of these charts must be included in the pages of that history. These were recently given to me by the director of our agency called SAMHA, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Agency, Dr. Chavez. Dr. Chavez presented me with these charts that show from 1992 problems relating to amphetamine and methamphetamine use, and these are admission rates for abuse treatment from 1992 to 1997. If we look at these charts we see dramatic increases, almost turning entirely dark on this chart here in the numbers that are now required for treatment and addiction to methamphetamine. This is particularly among our young people, but also among our adult population. In fact, we get to the Midwest and the West and we have methamphetamines in epidemic proportion and use. I am going to talk about methamphetamine in a hearing that I did in California just several weeks ago, and again, what has taken place in this particular area. If we look at heroin substance abuse treatment, again, this chart is not very big, but we can barely see some coloring here in 1992, up to some solid coloring in 1997. My own State of Florida is not darkened in, but in my area and Central Florida, heroin substance abuse and use of heroin has so dramatically increased that now last year the headlines blurted out in what is really tranquil Central Florida, the greater Orlando area, that heroin drug overdoses now exceed homicides; again, part of what has not been done to address a very serious problem and growing problem across our land. The marijuana chart is even more revealing. We barely see any severity in admission rates or high admission rates in 1992 for marijuana substance abuse and admissions, particularly young people addicted to the marijuana. And it is not the marijuana of the sixties and seventies, with the low purity and low toxicity level. We see now again areas almost totally darkened in from a policy of ``Just say maybe,'' or ``If I had it to do all over again, I would inhale.'' Certainly that type of policy, those statements, have an impact, particularly among our young people, a legacy for substance abuse that again I think is part of the failure of this administration to address this. In fact, with the President we can count on probably two hands the number of times that he has talked about drug abuse at any length. Even in his last speech before the State of the Union, and only less than a sentence, a passing note, did the President address this problem again that has incredible social impact across our land. The results are pretty dramatic. It may not be talked about. We did spend several days of debate just in the last 2 weeks here because of the crisis in Colombia, because of the sheer amount and volume of illegal narcotics now pouring into our country because some of the guards that we have traditionally had in place, such as Panama, which was a forward operating surveillance operation for all of our drug operations in the Caribbean and over South America, had been dismantled, again with the Clinton administration's failure to negotiate a treaty to allow even our drug surveillance operations to continue in Panama. With that closed down we have lost most of our surveillance capability, and now have cobbled together in Ecuador and the Dutch Antilles some minor coverage, but there is a huge gap that allows heroin or cocaine and other illegal narcotics to pour in almost unabated. It certainly must be one of the primary responsibilities of this Congress to see that illegal substances and substances that harm our population, and particularly when we have this number of people incarcerated, when we have somewhere in the area of a quarter of a trillion dollars of damages to our economy and to our country every year with illegal narcotics, and some close to 16,000 direct deaths in just one year, that is 1998, the last recorded, and some 50,000 total, certainly it is incumbent upon the representatives of this Nation to do something about that problem. The Federal portion of that problem certainly is to interdict and stop those illegal substances from coming onto our shores before they even reach our borders, but that, in fact, has not been the policy of this administration. It has been a policy of changing the emphasis on taking apart successful programs of the Reagan and Bush administrations, where we had drug abuse on a steady decline and drug use on a steady decline, and have it now skyrocketing as these charts so aptly describe. I spoke for a few minutes about methamphetamine and the national epidemic that we have. We have held several hearings on the subject of methamphetamine, both here in Washington and field hearings. I was shocked to find the incredible impact that methamphetamines have had in the West, also, of course, in the Midwest, rural areas like Iowa, other tranquil areas like Minnesota, where we heard testimony at our hearings here in Washington of incredible amounts of Mexican methamphetamine coming in to those areas, and the action of the individuals who consume methamphetamine is as bizarre, as strange and damaging as anything we had in the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, in fact probably even more of a detrimental impact on families and individuals. One hearing that I conducted at the request of the gentleman from California (Mr. Ose) was in his district, which encompasses part of the capital city of California, which is Sacramento. Testimony that we had in Sacramento by one caregiver there was particularly revealing, something that even shocked me and I have heard testimony from a number of witnesses that is quite moving, but this individual who testified put together a program in Butte County, and Butte County is a small county in California compared to others, I think it is in the 200,000 population range, and this witness testified that since 1993 they created a drug endangered children's program which was established and actually allowed the program to detain 601 children from drug houses. Now, again, we have to think of this as a small county, but 601 children were rescued from drug houses. One hundred sixty-two of those children were detained from methamphetamine labs so these children actually lived where their parents or guardians who were producing methamphetamine. This all came about as a result of an L.A. newspaper staff reporter, I believe his name was Don Winkle, who began writing a story after three children were left to burn to death by their mother when a methamphetamine lab exploded in Los Angeles. His story brought him to Butte County, and there this particular reporter reviewed the program that had been put in place. The testimony by this social worker was most revealing, and of course we hear on the news from time to time the very attention-getting child killing child with a gun case, and I have also cited both of the most recent cases where a 6-year-old child killed a 6-year-old child, brought in a gun and a horrible crime and everyone focused on the gun but very few in the media and others took time to reveal to the public or discuss that the child came, in fact, from a crack house, from a cocaine-infested home, if it could be called that. The father, I believe, was in jail and had been involved in illegal narcotics charges, but again the focus was on the gun but not on the setting. Many of the other children who I will talk about here have not been publicized. This one particular case, where 3 of these children died in Los Angeles, again illustrates some of the problems that we face from illegal narcotics; in this case, from methamphetamines. The 601 children that this care worker talked about, she went on to describe in her testimony to us and let me read a little bit of what she said. The 601 children's names and faces are different but each case and story is the same. One would think that 9 years later, with hundreds of suspects arrested, countless doors kicked in and the writing of thousands of reports that I would grow callous, but upon entering the bad guy's house again and seeing those small, round, innocent eyes looking up at me, finally someone came to save me, I turn a marshmallow. I do not have to make up stories or use the same photographs or tell the worst of the worst. They are all bad. Her testimony went on, and let me describe this, if I may, the yard is covered with garbage, old bicycles, toys and rusted car parts. Three or four dogs run under the house or aggressively approach. Inside the house it is dark with no electricity. The stench of rotten food, animal urine and feces and soiled diapers permeate the house. Chemical odors irritate my eyes and nose. We fumble down hallways into bedrooms stepping on filthy clothing and debris. The children are startled when a flashlight shines in their way. They are sleeping on soiled mattresses with no sheets or blankets. They sleep in clothes for the third day in a row. They have not had a bath in days and cannot remember when they last ate. They rarely attend school due to lice infestation and cockroaches have become their pets. The soiled food stored in an ice chest is moldy. There is no running water and the methamphetamine laboratory is all over the kitchen. The children draw pictures for me of mommy with a methamphetamine pipe and show me bruises where mom's boyfriend hit them. The oldest child comforts the younger sibling as obviously trying to parent. None of the kids cry or, for that matter, show any emotion at all. They all exhibit a classic attachment disorder. Domestic violence is obvious with the holes kicked in the doors and the walls. A loaded firearm is found next to the couch and another under the bed, both where children have access. Again she goes on, a description of what she sees in this house and it is unfortunately very typical. She told us that she saw these scenes over and over and over again. She said these children were lucky. We rescued them before they were injured, maimed or killed. The newspaper clippings I collected from all over the State and even a few other States tell more horrific stories. These are some of the clippings that she provided our subcommittee and stories: Fifteen month overdoses on methamphetamine; five month old tests positive for methamphetamine and succumbs to death with 12 rib fractures, a burned leg and scarred feet by a methamphetamine addict in Los Angeles; 13 month old dies of heart trauma, broken spine and neck by methamphetamine addict. She was also raped and sodomized. Twenty-five month old Oregon toddler overdoses on methamphetamine; a 2 year old dies with methamphetamine in the system, San Jose, California; a 2 year old eats methamphetamine from a baby food jar in Twenty-Nine Palms, California; a 14 month old drinks lye in water from a parent's methamphetamine laboratory, hospitalized permanently with severe organ damage; new baby dies from mother breast milk laced with methamphetamine in Orange County; 8 week old, 11 pound boy dies from methamphetamine poisoning found inside baby bottle in Orange County; an 8 year old watches and hears mom die in a methamphetamine laboratory in Oroville, California; a 6 month old overdoses semi-comatose seizuring, hospitalized, drank methamphetamine, also in Oroville, California; a 4 year old tests positive for methamphetamine, beaten and hair pulled out by mom and boyfriend, Chico, California; 8 children exposed to methamphetamine laboratory in day care center in southern California; and mom on methamphetamine and her addicted boyfriend drown a 2 year old in a bathtub in Sacramento. This is just a sampling of the death, destruction and mayhem that was provided to us by this one witness from one county in California. Most people do not know much about methamphetamines, and the addiction and epidemic is limited at this point to the Midwest and to the far West, but spreading across the country. We had Dr. Leshner, who is head of NIDA, National Institute of Drug Abuse, come and testify before our subcommittee and give us the latest information on what methamphetamines do to people. Most people who are involved in taking methamphetamine really do not know that they are setting themselves up for brain damage and destruction. We found also that the damage that is done to the brain causes such bizarre behavior that parents abandon their children. In California, we were told where they attempted to return 35 of these children to their parents, only 5 parents were capable or willing, after being on methamphetamines, to take their children back. We were told of one parent on methamphetamine who tortured their child and then finished the child off by boiling the child alive. This is the type of bizarre behavior that methamphetamine produces in the brain in individuals who take methamphetamine. This is the scientific data that Dr. Leshner provided our subcommittee. This first slice of brain and this view of the brain shows dopamine, with normal dopamine levels that are required for an active, healthy brain. The second and third illustration here is a gradual reduction in dopamine levels in the brain due to methamphetamine uses. The fourth illustration here that has been provided is a brain from an individual who suffers from Parkinson's disease, and we can see the deterioration of methamphetamine from a normal brain into various stages of methamphetamine, the most severe stage, this happens to be Parkinson's but also mirrors methamphetamine. So this is what this wonderful drug has done for one county in California, what it can do for an individual, and again the damage that can be imposed on individuals. It really is shocking and I do not think most people who get hooked on methamphetamines have any idea what they are doing to themselves or the potential damage they can do to their family or their children. The cases we have are just unbelievable. Again, I do not want to go into any more of them tonight, but I will be glad to provide Members upon request additional information on what our subcommittee has found relating to methamphetamine and its horrible impact. The other chart that I showed is heroin. I showed how heroin has now caused tremendous problems across the United States. We have a heroin epidemic in many regions of the country, including the area that I represent, which is central Florida. Heroin use and abuse is up dramatically. Heroin is not the heroin of the 1960s, 1970s, or even 1980s. The purity in those days was in the low percentile, single digits, a 9 percent pure. The heroin that we are getting in from South America and Mexico is now running 70, 80 percent pure. That is why we have an incredible death rate in Central Florida and around the country. Young people and others are taking heroin. They are mixing it with some other substance, alcohol or some other drug. Or even first-time users are hit with this high 70 percent pure heroin, go into convulsions, and die. Now, I think that many people would believe that heroin has been glorified by Hollywood, and heroin is the type of drug that the stars and others in important places use. Most people do not realize the severe consequence of heroin. Unfortunately, I am one Representative that has heard more about the tragedy of heroin than many of my colleagues. As I said, in Central Florida, our heroin overdose deaths, particularly among our young people, now exceed our rate of homicides. One of the parents provided me with the permission to show the effects of heroin. This is particularly a gruesome depiction of the end of the life of this constituent's death, a young man in Central Florida. This is how the coroner placed the body before the body was removed. Now, again, I know young people and many people across this land think that heroin use is somewhat glamorous. The picture I am about to show is her son as the coroner found him in Orlando, a rather gruesome picture. I show it only to show what the potential holds for using this high purity heroin. This young man died a horrible death. His mother told me. The autopsy would reveal that. This is not glamor. This is not celebrity status. This is death by heroin. The pure deadly heroin that suffocates one to death, causes one's blood vessels to burst. It causes one to go into uncontrollable seizures and then die one of the most horrible deaths imaginable. Time and time again, in Central Florida, this has happened and happened in record numbers again this last year. This is only one victim. But people must understand what is happening with heroin and what heroin, what methamphetamines, and some of these other narcotics can do to their lives and their bodies. One ends up being taken out by the coroner in this fashion. These pictures end up as the last reminder your parents have of you or your family has of you. Unfortunately, I have met many of the parents of young men and women in my district whose child has or loved one has ended up in that condition. That is one reason why I come to the floor every Tuesday night, why I continue to hammer away to get the attention of the House of Representatives, the Congress, and the American people on what is taking place with illegal narcotics. We should not have one more person fall victim as we have had in Central Florida. Some of the most disturbing news I received is during a recent recess when I was home and talking with our law enforcement officials. They told me that we have, in fact, more drug-related deaths in Central Florida, particularly heroin. Again, there is an unabated flow coming in from Colombia, from Central and South America. Tomorrow, we are going to focus a hearing on some of that trafficking pattern, particularly as it relates to Haiti. We have focused on the major source of production which is Colombia, which produced the heroin that killed the young man whose picture I showed just a few minutes ago. But what is particularly sad about all of this is that, in fact, we could prevent much more of this death and destruction. We could stop a great deal more of the hard narcotics coming into this country. Certainly we have a responsibility to stop illegal narcotics coming into this country. Unfortunately, the Clinton administration in 1993 dramatically changed the policy that kept some of these illegal narcotics from coming into our borders. In fact, we were making good progress. Heroin was dramatically down. Cocaine was dramatically down. As my colleagues saw from the charts I presented earlier, methamphetamines were not even on the charts in 1992. Unfortunately, this administration made a complete reversal in policy. They decided to put all of their eggs in the treatment basket. Since 1993, we have nearly doubled the amount of money in treatment. In fact, we have also, through Republican efforts, added another billion dollars in money for education. But it has been the focus, particularly treatment, treating the wounded in this battle, rather than conducting a war on drugs as we had in the 1980s under the Bush and the Reagan administration. The results are most telling. The Clinton administration slashed the international programs, the programs of stopping drugs at their source in the source countries by some 50 percent beginning in 1993 when they controlled the House, the White House, and the other body. Next they slashed the interdiction programs. Interdiction is also cost effective in that it stops illegal narcotics before they get to our borders. The most expensive way to go after illegal narcotics is once it gets into our streets and communities. It requires us to put massive police forces and massive resources in law enforcement to keep up with the sheer volume that spreads and is diffused among our communities and our streets and our schools throughout our society. But a very serious mistake was made in 1993 in cutting the source country programs and cutting the interdiction programs and use of the military for surveillance. The military never has and never will, because of our laws, become involved in enforcement. They merely provide intelligence and surveillance and information, particularly to source countries, so they could go after both the production of illegal narcotics, the trafficking of illegal narcotics, and the transit of illegal narcotics out of their country. A very effective strategy because, again, we had dramatic decreases in drug use and drug trafficking and the sheer availability of hard narcotics. The results again are devastating. We are seeing, particularly in the last few years, huge, huge volumes of heroin coming in. In 1993, there was almost zero, almost no heroin produced in Colombia. Almost none. Since 1993, again through a policy that really has been a policy of failure, the Clinton administration has managed to turn Colombia into the major source of heroin coming into the United States. This is hard to believe, but in 1993, there was almost no coca, no cocaine produced in Colombia. There was transit from Peru and Bolivia, and some processing and transshipment from Colombia, but it was not the source of growth of coca and production. Today, Colombia is now the source of some 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States. And, again, a much more deadly and purer form of cocaine that is reaching our shores and killing our population. It was not easy for the Clinton administration to make Colombia the largest producer and transiter in some 6 or 7 years, but they did manage to do it. And it has been in spite of protests by the Republican majority, in spite of direct legislative actions, in spite of appropriations trying to get resources to Colombia. The fiasco started in 1994, when the Clinton administration stopped information sharing to Colombia and stopped intelligence exchanges with that country and some of the other source countries. It took us several years to straighten out that fiasco. And, again, in the last 2 years, the Clinton administration is now repeating the fiasco. And we see where we have been able to decrease the production of cocaine in Peru by some 66 percent, in Bolivia by some 55 percent. For the first time in just the last few months some increase in production in Peru, again because the Clinton administration has shut down some of the exchange of intelligence. That is all documented in a report that was provided to me by GAO. I asked this independent agency to conduct a review of what is taking place. This report was produced by the General Accounting Office. It says Drug Control Assets DOD Contributes to Reducing the Illegal Drug Supply Have Declined. This is a documentation and information of what has taken place. In fact, even the President's own ambassador to Peru cautioned that the United States should not drop its surveillance information being provided to Peru because a successful program of the information sharing was reducing the production of illegal narcotics and transiting of illegal narcotics in that country. So we have even the representative of the President speaking out against the administration's change in policy, a second disastrous change after the 1994 fiasco. Then we have documentation here that, in fact, the DOD assets as far as flight times have dramatically decreased; that, in fact, flying hours dedicated to tracking suspect shipments in transit to the United States declined from 46,264 to 14,770, or a 68 percent decline in flight time. So, basically, when they closed down the war on drugs, they did a very effective job not only with flight surveillance but also with the maritime shipments. This report also indicates a 62 percent decrease in maritime tracking of illegal narcotics shipments. Again, documentation of a policy that has failed and steps, including the decertification of Colombia without a national interest waiver, which would have allowed resources to get to Colombia to fight illegal narcotics. So, basically, for the last number of years, they have allowed Colombia no assistance. Aid even appropriated and designated by this Congress has been denied to that country. And that is what has brought us to the situation we currently find ourselves in requesting the President coming forward, with a region in disarray, with 35,000 people being killed in Colombia, with complete disruption of that important and strategic region of our hemisphere, the President coming forward at the last minute with a request for a billion dollar-plus aid package. We have passed that in the House. We hope that the Senate will take action on that. That is a little bit of the history of where we are and how we have gotten ourselves into this situation with Colombia and also with the tide of illegal narcotics coming into the United States. We know the programs we have put in place, where we have been allowed to in Peru and Bolivia, will work if properly resourced, and with very little money, very few funds in comparison to a $17.8 billion drug budget having gone to the source country programs or to alternative crop substitution programs or stopping drugs at their source or before they get to our border. The other thing that I wanted to address tonight is the attack on some of the zero tolerance policies. We know that zero tolerance policies have worked very well across the landscape where they have been instituted. Probably the most successful example of a zero tolerance drug policy in the United States has been that of New York City and that devised by the current mayor, Rudy Giuliani. I know that Rudy Giuliani has been attacked recently for some of the problems that they have had with their enforcement of some of the laws in that community. And to watch television and to hear the liberal media, one would think that New York City police are out of control and that, in fact, a zero tolerance policy somehow is a policy of intolerance and a policy that would abuse the rights of individuals. A story by, and I guess an editorial piece by columnist Judy Mann in the Friday March 24 Washington Post really set me off, and I spoke before about this, but the title of her liberal piece was The War on Drugs Can't Help But Run Amuck. She's a very determined liberal and she has used the case of Patrick Dorismond, who was shot in New York City, as a case in point for a zero tolerance drug policy that has run amuck; a war on drugs that cannot work. She went on in her article saying that the attempted drug buy that led to Dorismond's death was part of Giuliani's latest scheme to reduce the rising homicide rate in the city. This liberal reporter would have you believe that murders and homicides are up under Mayor Giuliani. Our subcommittee called Mr. Giuliani in last January, we have updated some of this information. Before Mayor Giuliani came into office in New York, there were actually over 2,000 murders per year in New York City. In 1998, it was 629, and it rose slightly to about 670 in 1999, last year, which we do not have on the chart. Does this in any way show an increase in murder? In fact, if we had stayed at the same rate, we would be killing some 1,300 to 1,400 per year under this policy. Now, this liberal columnist would also have you believe, and she says so, civil liberties have been another casualty on the war on drugs. This is the type of liberal nonsense that she spews out. In fact, we looked at New York City from our subcommittee research, and we found the latest statistics revealed that crime is down 57.6 percent overall for major crimes. Murder is down 58.3 percent. Rape is down 31 percent under the Giuliani plan. Robbery is down some 62.1 percent. Felony assaults are down 35.4 percent. Burglary in New York City is down 61.7 percent. Grand larceny is down some 41.9 percent. Grand larceny auto is down some 68.8 percent. Now, Ms. Mann and the liberals on the other side of the aisle here would have you believe that the Giuliani policy is a failure. These happen to be the facts. Now, of course, the liberals do not like to deal with facts. The facts only confuse the situation. These are the facts about crime in New York City under a zero tolerance policy. Now, Ms. Mann and the liberals and the media out there would have you believe that there is some type of intolerance, their loss of civil liberties, or that the New York City Police department or Mayor Giuliani is in some way out of control, and that there are these rampant shootings by police officers and abuse by police officers. The facts are, and we checked this carefully, our subcommittee did, for example, the number of fatal shootings by police officers in 1999, 11 was the lowest any year since 1973. What is absolutely more amazing is Mayor Giuliani increased the police force by 25 percent. Now, that may sound like just a small figure, or a minor figure, but New York went from 30,000 to 40,000 police, a 25 percent, 10,000 increase in police officers, and the lowest number of fatal shootings by police officers since 1993. This zero tolerance policy that is so offensive to the liberal population, it has probably saved thousands and thousands of lives, people that would have been murdered. And we cannot even calculate the number of people that would have been raped, robbed, victims of felony assault, burglary, grand larceny or auto larceny. Now, they go on. They would have you believe that, in fact, this drug policy and zero tolerance policy enforcement would take its toll in some other way. I wonder where Ms. Mann and the liberals were when Mayor Giuliani was not in office back in 1990, under that administration in the city. In 1990, 41 police killings took place with a fewer number of police. Moreover, the number of rounds intentionally fired by police declined 50.6 percent since 1993. This is tough policy that is so impossible for the liberals to deal with, and the facts relating to what has taken place in New York City and the number of intentional shootings, incidents by police dropped 66.5 percent, while the number of officers actually increased during that period some 37.9 percent. In the last 5 years alone, there were 159 cases in which police were fired upon and did not return fire, 42 officers were wounded and 6 killed in those incidents. There is probably not a more restrained-on an incident basis or population basis, police or law enforcement agency in the United States of America. Now, where were the liberals when David Dinkins was in office? There were 62 percent more shootings by police officers per capita in the last year of David Dinkins' administration than last year under Mayor Giuliani. Specifically in 1993, there were 212 incidents involving police officers in intentional shootings; in 1994, there were 167; in 1998, under Mayor Giuliani, there were 111. It is terrible when the liberals have to deal with fact. Heaven forbid Ms. Mann should ever research fact. Heaven forbid she should ever look at the actual statistics relating to New York City and what Mayor Giuliani has done, but she can slam a zero tolerance enforcement policy, a zero tolerance on drug policy. She can slam and try to twist facts that murders have somehow increased. These listed are the seven major felony categories from 1993 to 1998 from 429,000 down to 212,000. I am not great at math, but I think that is about half, 50 percent reduction. Ms. Mann and the liberals would want you to be confused and make you think that zero tolerance and tough law enforcement is done in some harmful way. These, in fact, are the facts. These, in fact, are the statistics. I always liked to contrast them, and I will close tonight, contrast with the liberal policies, the hero of the liberal side, try those drugs, folks, they are fine for you. Go ahead, let your kids use them. God forbid we should have any enforcement. Baltimore, Maryland is the example. Thank heavens Mayor Schmoke is gone. Thank heavens we have a new mayor, Mayor O'Malley. We conducted a subcommittee hearing there a little over a week ago, the best thing that came from that hearing, I believe the mayor fired the police chief, and we have hired in Baltimore one of the prime developers of the New York City's zero enforcement policy, but this is the record of Baltimore, where Mayor Schmoke said we are not going to enforce. I was stunned at the hearing to find out that HIDTM, high intensity drug traffic money, made available by the Federal Government for tough enforcement in Baltimore, the police chief, who again was removed, told me that they did not use those funds to go after major open drug markets. These are the results, the deaths in 1998, 212; 1999, 300. In the last 8, 10 years under this policy, probably 3,000 young people in Baltimore were slaughtered. These are the constant kinds of numbers that we have seen in Baltimore. What was more stunning with this liberal policy that the other side embraces that Ms. Mann thinks is the way to go in Baltimore is now, from the chart that we have here that was provided by DEA, Baltimore has gone from some 39,000 drug addicts to somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 drug addicts in just the City of Baltimore. It is absolutely incredible, the damage that has been done to Baltimore through this liberal policy. In fact, one of the City Council Members, Councilwoman Ricki Spector, said it is more like 1 in 8 is now a drug addict in Baltimore. The former Mayor Schmoke's non-enforcement liberal policy provided these things for Baltimore. In 1996, Baltimore led the Nation in drug- related emergency admissions, 785 per 100,000 population. Of 20 cities analyzed by NITA, or the National Institute of Drug Abuse, Baltimore ranked second in heroin emergency admissions. Baltimore accounted for 63 percent of all of Maryland's drug overdoses. This is the policy that the other side is advocating, along with the liberal commentators. This is just a health problem. The tough enforcement will harm people, their civil rights will be violated, there will be shootings, that there will be some type of harmful enforcement. This is the harm, an addicted city population, dead in incredible numbers. Remember the numbers in New York City, which is 20 to 30 times the population of Baltimore, is just about double this figure, and that is a reduction of some 60 percent since Mayor Giuliani took office. So these are the facts, these are the options. Tomorrow our subcommittee will focus on the emerging drug threat from Haiti, part of the Clinton Administration's failed foreign policy no one likes to focus on, but a policy in which we spent nearly $4 billion in taxpayer money in nation building, primarily to support a law enforcement and judiciary which is now in charge of the biggest drug trafficking operation in the Caribbean and probably the source of more transit of illegal hard narcotics into the United States from across Haiti through the Dominican Republic up through Puerto Rico and the Caribbean into Florida and other parts of the United States, and then into our streets and schools, and their gift to our children, after spending so much of the money of American taxpayers in that nation in an effort to rebuild it. Tomorrow we will hear that failed story, and we will find out where the Clinton Administration intends to go from here, and, hopefully, we can develop a better policy, learn by the mistakes, learn by the failures of this administration, and not repeat them. To do otherwise would be an injustice to the American people and to the next generation. Mr. Speaker, I know my time is about to expire and I will not return until after the break for one of these, when we will provide another update, but I do appreciate your indulgence, Mr. Speaker, and the staff, who stayed to this late hour. But this is an important message. It needs to be repeated over and over again, until we have action by the Congress, until we have interest by the American people, and that we turn this deadly situation and plague on our population around.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come before the House on the floor tonight to talk once again in regard to what I consider the most serious and devastating social issue facing not only the Congress but our entire Nation and that is the problem of illegal narcotics and the heavy toll they have taken on our Nation, particularly our young people. Tonight, I am going to try to cover some material some may have covered before but I think in light of tomorrow's action on the proposal for an emergency supplemental in the House of Representatives, I will focus some on the story of how we got to an emergency situation, particularly as it involves narcotics and the primary source of those narcotics, Colombia, the country of Colombia, and the South American region where those illegal narcotics are coming from. Then I hope to also touch upon some of my committee work for the benefit of my colleagues and the American people as chair of the Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources Subcommittee. I know the hour is late. Many folks are tired. But I hope that they will listen tonight, because the message I have is an important one for the Congress and again for the American people. It will really detail some of what has taken place, how we got ourselves into a situation where tomorrow the House of Representatives must bring forward a record funding emergency proposal to deal with a problem that has been festering, and I submit caused by very specific actions and policies and directives of this administration and now the American taxpayer will pay the bill. It would not be bad enough if I just came here and talked about a price tag of $1.5, $1.6, $2 billion in emergency assistance that is going to go into an effort to stop the conflict, the trafficking, the production of most of the illegal hard narcotics coming into the United States. Talking about just that cost is bad enough. I have not translated that into the human toll in which we have in the last recorded year, 1998, I do not have the 1999 figures yet, 15,973 Americans dying as the direct result of illegal narcotics. The toll is heavy. We are probably reaching 100,000 since the beginning of this administration. And I submit our action tomorrow will be just as important in shoring up the defense of this Nation for the many deployments that have been ordered by the chief executive but also to stop the biggest threat coming into our country. No American was killed in Kosovo in fighting there. Fifteen to 16,000 were killed last year in the streets, communities and schools of our Nation. No one died in Kosovo as a result of action of this Congress. We tried our best to deal with this administration to stop death and destruction in that region of the world. It is in some of our national interest to do it, and if that is in our national interest to do it as far away as Kosovo where we have no direct American casualties and we did have disruption of that region and killing in that region, certainly an area to the south of us that produces the death and destruction of thousands and thousands of Americans annually, and the toll continues to rise. We have imprisoned close to 2 million Americans in our jails and prisons across the country, and 60 to 70 percent, I am told, in some areas I am told even higher, 80 percent of those individuals are incarcerated because of narcotics-related offenses and many of them there for many felonies committed and crimes committed not only while under the influence but also trafficking in illegal narcotics. So again we have an area that is of extreme importance, an issue that is of extreme importance and we must deal with that tomorrow. The record, as I said, is a rather sad action of this administration. I will detail some of the time it has taken to get the supplemental from this President. I was interviewed on an NPR radio program this afternoon and they had, I believe, a Time or Newsweek reporter also on the program. They were citing that this administration did not act until the information they had, because a poll was conducted and found that Americans are alarmed. Maybe my colleagues have read about that poll that was conducted. That poll said that the Democrats could be held accountable in the election and that this administration would pay the penalty for not attacking and taking action on the drug war. We finally had word that a proposal was coming back in the late fall last year and again, that was delayed; and finally, not until a few weeks ago did we receive the President's budget proposal for emergency assistance to Colombia. We will deal with that matter in just a second. Mr. Speaker, it is absolutely startling to me how the President of the United States can talk about everything except illegal narcotics and their impact on our young people. Most recently we had two incidents, and those incidents involved, first of all, a 6-year-old that killed a 6-year-old and took a gun to school; and the focus immediately was on legislation to impose trigger locks and a host of other peripheral laws to deal with the question of gun control. What the President failed to mention, and attention was not focused by the media on it, is this 6-year-old came from a crack house. The father was in jail. The gun was stolen. He lived in a pig sty. Now, this is the family setting that this child came from. We can put all the trigger locks in the world on, and we can pass all of the additional laws in other areas; but if we do not focus on the root of the problem, illegal narcotics, and I am certain that that is what destroyed that family. Illegal narcotics in that crack house sent that father, and drug dealing, sent that family into despair and disruption, and illegal narcotics provided a stolen weapon and access and a destroyed family for that child. Where is the thinking in the leadership of this Nation? Then, most recently, we had a 12-year-old who brought a gun into school. This was in an elementary school in Lisbon, Ohio, I believe was the town, and the child, a 12-year-old, brings a gun into the school. He brought it in school and immediately it was broadcast across the country that this child had brought that gun there and we must immediately do something about, again, gun control. Now granted, we may need to impose some additional laws and restrictions, but a simple look, even a simple examination of the situation, and let me read from the account: The boy said before that his biological mother was in jail and he wanted to visit her. Authorities did not release information on the mother's situation, but the Akron Beacon Journal said that the mother was in prison on a drug- related charge. Where is the media? Where is the leadership of this country in ignoring the illegal narcotics problem? A 12-year-old taking his father's weapon into school, and it had been stored, according to this report, on a dresser top with a fully-engaged trigger lock. It was absolutely incredible to hear the Vice President of the United States commenting on this situation and then asking for more gun control. Mr. Speaker, I have never in my life seen more diversionary tactics to get away from the root problem of 12-year-olds who have parents in jail, when they have their family disrupted, when the parent is in jail for drug trafficking, when there is no family structure to support them. When we have had a society that has become tolerant of illegal narcotics trafficking, we will have, no matter how many laws this Congress passes, these situations. I still cannot believe that the media will not focus on this, nor will the leadership of this Congress or this administration. Mr. Speaker, I really want to also focus tonight on a tale of two cities. I have had the opportunity to spend time since I took over chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice and Drug Policy a little over a year and several months ago now to look at again some of the problems we hear about in the media, and focus on what different communities are doing to deal with that problem. Once again, I was absolutely stunned by a recent article by a columnist, Judith Mann, and Judith Mann, who I believe is the columnist in the Washington Post. She did a column that absolutely caused me to come unglued last week attacking, in her liberal fashion, Mayor Rudy Guiliani, without a hint of facts, just dealing in fiction, to try to put forth liberal propaganda and unsubstantiated fiction about what Mayor Guiliani has done. Last year, after taking over this subcommittee, I called Mayor Guiliani in to testify. There had been comments and questions about what he had done in New York City and we held an entire hearing on what was happening there. At the time we had two cases, very controversial cases. I think it was the Diallo case and another case of police brutality that got tremendous national and international attention. We also were interested in what Mayor Guiliani had done, because his community had been successful in curtailing on an unprecedented basis the murders in New York City since taking office, in stemming crime in that community, and in developing innovative programs. The first part of Judith Mann's recent piece, which was entitled ``The War on Drugs Can't Help Run Amok,'' which criticized New York City's mayor and the police force on their program. Again, I believe this is an affront to facts. It is manufactured fiction. In this article, in this little editorial piece, she had the audacity to try to say that murders were up in New York City under Mayor Guiliani. What she tried to do was take one comparison of 2 years, the last 2 years, and blow that into something that the mayor's program had not worked on. In fact, this is the record of Mayor Guiliani as far as murders are concerned: just before he took office they were in the 2,000 range; right in the 2,000 range. He has brought murders down in New York City. In 1998 and 1999, between 629 and I think about 679 the last recorded year. She took the slight increase last year and tried to make it look like crime was out of control, like the police program that he instituted and zero tolerance program he instituted somehow failed. Now, where is the liberal mentality when Mayor Guiliani has saved, since just from coming into office in 1993, somewhere on average of 1,000 lives, every one of these years; if we average this out, how many thousands of lives he has saved with his policy. People who live in New York City can now live and work in that community and have one of the lowest crime rates in the entire Nation. What the mayor did in New York City has had so dramatic an impact, they also impact even the national statistics. The gall of the liberal media is absolutely astounding. The facts are, since Mayor Guiliani took office, and this is murder, listen to the rest of these in the seven major crime areas in New York City: crime overall is down 57.6 percent. I would match that among any community of any size in the Nation. Murder is down 58.3 percent. Judith Mann should get a life. Rape is down 31.4 percent. Robbery down 62.1 percent. Think of the thousands and thousands of New York City residents and tourists and other people who visit from around the country and around the world. Robbery down 62.1 percent. Felony assaults are down 35.4 percent. Burglaries are down 61.7 percent. These are the facts, Judith Mann, Miss Liberal. These are the facts the American people should be paying attention to, the people in New York State should be paying attention to. Grand larceny down is 41.9 percent. Grand larceny auto is down 68.8 percent. These are some of the most dramatic figures, and rather than applauding someone who has accomplished so much, we see the liberal diatribe on Mayor Guiliani and the police of New York. What is absolutely astounding is if there is any reason for a slight increase in murders last year, I can tie it directly to actions of this administration in failing to provide surveillance, failing to provide equipment, stopping the flow of assistance to Colombia in a repeated fashion, and helping to close down one of the most successful programs we have had in Peru, which has slashed 66 percent of the cocaine production in just a few years, and now is being sabotaged by withdrawal of U.S. surveillance information to Peruvians and a lack of equipment getting to Colombia. Even equipment we requested several years ago and appropriated several years ago still has not been adequately delivered to that country to combat the flow of illegal narcotics. I am surprised it is not up more in New York City. In my community it is up slightly, even in central Florida, as a result of, again, this administration letting down its guard in stopping illegal narcotics at their source or interdicting them before they come to our shores is certainly a Federal responsibility. Here is a local responsibility taken on in an unbelievable fashion. I hope every American, every Member of Congress can look at this chart and see how the policy of Mayor Guiliani, not just in this program, but in other innovative programs, has dramatically curtailed murders, robberies, rapes, every type of crime that I mentioned and the numbers that I mentioned. Mr. Speaker, I have to again just be amazed at the liberal media and the trash that they peddle to the American people. Again, Miss Mann talks about a policy that has run amok and the drug war cannot help but run amok. Now, the facts are for Miss Mann and other die-hard liberals. Let me read from the testimony of Mayor Guiliani and just see historically where Mayor Guiliani fits in in this question of police brutality and incidents involving force or, again, violence from police officers. This is the testimony from our hearing when the mayor appeared last year after the Diallo case. This is Mr. Giuliani speaking: ``First of all, I do not think you have ever listened to my voice.'' How prophetic for him to say that, and he could say it again. ``I have said over and over again, including that--'' he was responding to a question--``that was a long question. You've got to give me a chance to answer it, if you are being fair.'' This was a question about police brutality at that time in the city. Listen, again, to his testimony: ``The fact is that I have over and over again said that police officers have to be respectful. We have taken action against police officers who have acted improperly. One of the cases that you mention, it was my administration that fired the police officer in question, even though he had been kept on by prior administrations. We have worked very, very hard to make this police department more respectful and more restrained. In your selective use of statistics,'' and they did it to him last year, and people like Ms. Mann and others are doing it to him now, ``you leave out the fact that incidents such as the one you are talking about have occurred in New York City for the last 20 to 35 years.'' Again, with some 30,000 or 40,000 police officers historically, I just add that, those are not his words, you do have incidents of police misconduct. Back to Mayor Giuliani's statement: ``That police brutality and the issue of police brutality has not been an issue just exclusively of my administration, or while I have been mayor of New York City. You've got to start looking at, if you are interested in fairness rather than demagoguery, you have to look at the number of incidents. The number of incidents of police brutality, for example, are less in my administration,'' he is speaking about the Giuliani administration, ``than in the administration of Ed Koch or David Dinkins.'' Now, I am sure that Ms. Mann would not want to deal with the facts, and reveal to her reading public or the people out there that deserve the truth and the facts that the number of incidents of police brutality are less in the Giuliani administration than the Ed Koch or David Dinkins. She wants to say that Giuliani's war on drugs has failed. ``That is something you did not mention,'' again, I am quoting from the mayor, ``1993 was the last year of David Dinkins' administration. I just happen to have these statistics with me.'' He brought the statistics, and under oath to the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources of the House of Representatives, this is the testimony and the facts he submitted and we checked. ``There were 62 percent more shootings by police officers per capita in the last year of David Dinkins' administration than the last year, which was my administration.'' Why does she not print that, Ms. Mann and other diehard liberals? ``Where were they when there were 62 percent more shootings by police officers under David Dinkins' administration? In every year of my administration, something you left out of your statement, in every single year of my administration the police officers have grown more restrained in their use of firearms, even as we have added 10,000 police officers and given them automatic weapons.'' He increased by 10,000 the number of police officers, gave them automatic weapons, and the record is one of less incidents, more constraint. Again, these are the facts that liberal reporters do not want to deal with, or those inclined to bad-mouthing the mayor's efforts and those who support zero tolerance in these types of programs. These are the exact numbers. ``In 1993, there were 212 incidents involving police officers in intentional shootings. In 1994,'' the mayor's first year, ``there were 167.'' He testified, I believe, in early 1999. ``In 1998, it was down to 111, just about half the incidents from the Dinkins' administration. These are incidents involving police officers and intentional shootings. Members will not read this in Ms. Mann's liberal column or any of the other liberal trash that is pumped out by the other side. They will be telling us, well, we have to introduce more gun laws, we have to introduce more laws in the Congress, we have to put trigger locks on for kids, and this will solve the problem. We do not hear that with even a zero tolerance policy, that they were able to have less than half the number of incidents. Let me again continue with what Mayor Giuliani testified and the liberals will not listen to, or the media will not report. ``In 1993, David Dinkins' last year in office, there were 7.4 shooting incidents per officer.'' That is 62 percent less per capita with Giuliani. We have to take it on a per capita basis. Also, we have to remember, again, Rudy Giuliani increased the police by some 10,000, probably a 20 percent increase in police officers in that city. ``Yes, we do have difficulties. Yes, we do have lots of things that we have to work on. Yes, I have spoken about it a hundred times or a thousand times. I was at a police graduation last week. I said to the 800 police officers that what we expect of them is restraint, almost an inhuman ability to be restrained when they have to be.'' Can Members imagine the incidents, can Members imagine the pressure on police officers in New York City, one of the most densely populated, probably the most difficult area to govern, not only in the United States but the entire world? Here is a record, and I take great offense at the trash the media pumps out, particularly Ms. Mann, who knows that Mr. Giuliani and everyone who supports a zero tolerance in a tough enforcement policy that we know works beyond a reasonable doubt. The mayor not only had a zero tolerance policy that was successful and resulted in fewer murders, but let me just cite, and again this is part of the testimony that he submitted in February of 1999 to our subcommittee, facts that were submitted. ``In New York City in 1991, 1992, and 1993 when crime was at historic heights, narcotics arrests were at a 10-year low. In 1993, the city made just 65,043 narcotics arrests. Last year, with the city dramatically safer, that number had risen to 124,000, a 91 percent increase in arrests.'' Some people are confused by this statistical correlation. This is information that was given to me by the DEA former administrator Tom Constantine. It is an interesting chart because it shows narcotics arrests and the crime index comparison in New York City. In 1993, the figures I spoke to, 64,000, or 65,000, this is the number, I believe, and let us make sure we have this, all other commands and the narcotics division. The narcotics arrests here again are low. As Mayor Giuliani takes office and he gets up to this point that we talked about, we see the index of crime, and this is where the crimes were 432,000 crimes, almost 433,000 crimes, start to drop. If that does not show us a correlation, that as we increase narcotics arrests, the crime goes down, I am a monkey's uncle. It is absolutely unbelievable, again, that people do not look at what has been achieved by the most outstanding mayor this Nation has seen in this decade of death and destruction with illegal narcotics, and use this as a model. Drug confiscations increased 166 percent between 1993 and 1998, rising from 11,470 pounds to 30,510 pounds. Surprise, Mr. Speaker. We seize illegal narcotics, we seize hard drugs, and the crimes go down. It is not a magic formula, it is a simple formula. It is just beyond me how the liberals can twist and turn. They will tell us that the war on drugs is a failure. That is their next line. I tell the Members that the war on drugs was closed down by the Clinton administration in January of 1993, when they came into office. How can we fight a war on drugs when we first of all do not target the source or cut out the source programs, to stop drug production at their source? It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out where narcotics are coming from. Seventy-five percent of the cocaine and heroin, back in 1993 there was almost zero cocaine grown in Colombia, almost zero poppies which produce heroin in Colombia, and today it is up over the 70 percent range grown in Colombia. Again, it does not take a rocket scientist, it is coming out of Colombia. So where would we target? We would spend a few dollars in international programs to target Colombia. Let me take this chart first, which deals with, and again, we know where the drugs are coming from. It is not rocket science. That is why we are going to be here talking about Colombia, because the drugs are produced in Colombia. This is the record of the Clinton administration. They came in in 1992-1993 here, and we have to remember, we still had a Democrat- controlled Congress in this period. We did not take over until somewhere in 1995. In 1995, we have to get or we are already with the budget passed by a previous Congress. Look what they did. This chart is Federal drug spending for international programs. That is stopping drugs at their source, and the entire program is like $633 million back in 1999, $660 in 1992 under President Bush. Tomorrow we are going to be talking about two and three times that for just the mistake they made in closing down these programs in Colombia. They closed them down. They closed down the international programs, the most cost-effective. We were spending the smallest amount of money. Every time we get away from the field where that peasant is getting a couple of pesos or less than a few dollars for the coca, for the poppy, for the raw material or even processed material down there, they stop the programs. I have to bring this chart up. I wish I had an overlay. I need to get an overlay, because this chart shows, again under the Reagan administration, developing a war against drugs. They did a real war against drugs. They put resources in the source country, they started the Andean strategy. The Vice President's task force occurred. They went after drugs at their source, and they put some dollars behind the effort to eradicate crops there. Do Members see what took place? Every year, and this is the long-term trend in lifetime prevalence of drug use. This is so important, because this is the measure of long-term drug involvement with our population. We see this during the Bush administration, and we see a takeoff like a rocket with Clinton, here. If Members look back here, they will see the takeoff is a result of stopping the international programs. We have a flood, a supply. I asked the question to somebody today, do you have an HDTV? They said, no. Most Americans do not have an HDTV. Why? Because there is not a supply and the price is high. This is, again, simple economics. We have flooding into this country an unprecedented amount of cocaine, which is only grown three places in the world: Bolivia, Peru, Colombia. Only three places, and it cannot transfer to that many other areas. There are a few other Andean locations. In the bill tomorrow at the insistence of the Speaker of the House, who had that responsibility who started the successful programs in Peru and Bolivia, where we have had 55 to 66 percent reduction when we had a program in effect, until the administration also messed that program up in the last year or so, we had dramatic decreases of cocaine flowing into this country. This is an incredible record. But what should also be looked at is the interdiction. Stop drugs at their source and then stop them before they get to our borders. Is that or is that not a Federal responsibility? We see here again gutting of the figures for interdiction. Taking the military out. They have great offense to begin with for anything military in this administration, except to deploy them around when there is a lot deployment to demand it for some reason or another distraction. But we see here an incredible pattern of slicing the spending. This is the slowdown. This is the sabotaging. This is the destruction of the war on drugs. Again, we take this, invert it and see what has happened to our young people. Look back at this chart and we can see what this Republican Congress has done with this light blip downward in some of the programs that we have instituted, again, in Peru and Bolivia that have been so successful. I said I would tell the ``tale of two cities.'' We had heard the tale of New York City and we received the facts about New York City. I have talked quite a bit about the contrast in Baltimore and the liberal mayor that, thank God, they got rid of who is a disgrace to Baltimore, and what he did to Baltimore driving Baltimore into despair with his liberal policy. We saw the figures I showed for New York City with dramatic decreases. This is the liberal Judith Mann policy that drugs are okay, and this is a health problem. Do not pay any attention to it. The police are going to be brutal and it is going to be horrible, even though the actual facts show to the contrary. Mr. Speaker, these are the facts. These are the dead in Baltimore, 312, 1998. In 1999, it is also 310, 308 range. This is a record of a liberal policy in which they went for needle exchange. They went for all of these liberal programs. I heard the new police chief say they did not participate in the high-intensity drug trafficking area on a basis in which they had entered into an agreement on. So they basically had let up enforcement, adopted a liberal policy and the slaughter in Baltimore has been horrible. We heard from the new mayor, and thank God there is a new mayor, a new mayor that recognized that the liberal policy, and he testified to it, was a failure. That the lack of enforcement, he showed a playground with bullet holes in the door a few months before he took office and they have already started enforcement and starting to clean up 10 drug markets. Hopefully, they will even clean up additional open air markets. But this is the policy. The testimony is absolutely astounding on the liberal policy of what it created for this city. It created a population of addiction almost unparalleled in the history of the United States. The statistics we have are from 40,000 back here with this chart in 1996 to somewhere between 60 and 80,000 drug addicts today in Baltimore, Maryland. One of the most historic, beautiful cities. It decimated the population of that city. Who wants to live in Baltimore? A judge, Judge Noelle, testified before our subcommittee in Baltimore that in fact his best success in rehabilitating individuals that he got into court and were involved in drugs was to get them out of Baltimore, because there is no hope there. Who would invest? What individual, what businessperson would invest in Baltimore when we have murders and mayhem and disruption? The same thing is true in South America in Colombia. The peasants will never have jobs or opportunities and the right wing and the left wing will be killing each other down there. We have in Colombia, from that region, 20 percent of the oil supply that we have in the United States. We have 15,900-plus Americans who died from the drugs. If we just took 75 percent of the illegal narcotics which we can trace to the fields in Colombia, we, in fact, know that those drugs are coming from there, we could attribute 75 percent of the deaths in my community, 75 percent of the deaths in Baltimore, and 75 percent of the deaths to the failed policy of this administration, which to this day still cannot get the equipment that this Congress asked for several years ago to Colombia. This is an article, it would almost be a joke, ``The Delay of Copters Hobbles Colombia in Stopping Drugs.'' We acknowledge the drugs are coming from Colombia. It is not rocket science. We have the DEA Signature program which can identify the fields where the heroin is coming from. No heroin produced there in 1993; now coming in in droves. What do we need to stop it? Helicopters that can get in there and do eradication and assist both the national police and the military, which President Pastrana has radically reformed in going after the people who are financing the disruption of that Nation on both the right and the left by drug trafficking. Back in 1998, the helicopters that we requested and appropriated before still were not delivered. And it is almost farcical to announce to the Congress that after we did get a handful of these Blackhawk helicopters that can do the job, they were not provided with armor so they were not usable until just a few days ago. The ammunition was delivered to the back-door loading gate of the State Department during the holidays rather than to Colombia. Then we requested let us get our surplus material to Colombia if we are going to have a war on drugs, and the administration reacted by getting some of the equipment there and only a fraction of the equipment. Some back to 1998 still was not delivered. I held numerous behind-closed-door meetings so as not to embarrass the administration asking when is the stuff going to be there? This almost became a joke last December, Colombia turns down dilapidated U.S. trucks. They sent trucks that were being used in the Yukon Territory, not suitable to Colombia. So that is why we are here. That is why we are here tonight. That is why the Committee on Rules is meeting to develop a rule to bring forth a bill to be discussed on the floor of this House tomorrow about Colombia. That is the inheritance that this administration has provided this Congress, the American people. And it would not be so bad if they just learned by some of their mistakes. This is not only the gang that cannot shoot straight; this is the gang that could mess up a one-car funeral. We asked, in order again to fight a real war on drugs, one has to have intelligence. We stop drugs where they are grown, so we have to have overflights and surveillance information. Why does some reporter or liberal person like Judith Mann not say, ``Mr. Vice President, I understand you moved some of the AWACS out of that area to look for oil spills in Alaska''? Why does some reporter not ask the President of the United States, ``I understand you moved some of the surveillance capability over to your various deployments.'' The information so critical getting to Peru and Colombia and Bolivia to go after the production of that stuff at its source, that is the most cost effective. And we do not even have to do that. All we have to do is give them the information. Give the country the information and they will do it. Here is the latest. This is just March 23. I cannot believe this crowd. It says, it is a response from Claudio De La Puente, the Charge d'Affaires of the Embassy of Peru. It said, ``In the past 4 years, Peru has decreased area production of cocaine by 66 percent.'' Which I stated before. This was due to a strategy to strengthen borders against drug trafficking. The Peruvian Air Force intercepted 91 aircraft involving drug trafficking between 1992 and 1997. Key to these results was the provision of monitoring of U.S. intelligence information.'' Mr. Speaker, there was one period in here when Clinton came into office, they even stopped the surveillance stuff. We had to pass, Congress, and clarify the law to allow the information sharing, because some liberal attorney in one of the departments, Department of Defense or Department of Justice, had misinterpreted and said we cannot share that information. They might shoot somebody down. It was the intent of the Congress of the United States to shoot down people who were carrying death and destruction. When we gave that information to President Fujimora and to the Peruvian Air Force, they acted and shot down. That may be tough for some people to deal with, but these people had death and destruction on those planes. They were given every warning, but they never succeeded in bringing that death and destruction to our borders. What is absolutely stunning is that the United States, since 1998, it says, the Peruvian Air Force has not been able to continue its interdiction operations because of lack of monitoring formerly provided by the U.S. AWACS and other aircraft. We saw in Mr. Giuliani's and my community we are having more murders, a few more murders in the past year. Here is 1998 when they stopped providing that information. Here is a report that our subcommittee asked from GAO about what was going on with DOD assets. Is there a war on drugs? They replied to me, the flying hours had declined from 1992 to last year 68 percent. The maritime tracking had gone down some 62 percent. This is the report. I did not produce it. We had GAO produce it. So stopping drugs at their source is not a priority or interdicting drugs at their source and helping countries that are producing to deal with the problem. Here is the United States ambassador. Let me read from this report. The United States Ambassador to Peru warned in an October 1998 letter to the State Department that the reduction in air support would have a serious impact on the price of coca. And then we see here in news reports the price of coca has gone down. That is because the supply is up. Again, a no- brainer. And we see murders and crimes up even slightly in those areas that have tough enforcement policies. So this is a no-brainer. With 12 minutes left, I do want to try to cover a couple of the areas that I have not in the bill. Some people may say this is just a partisan Republican coming up and commenting tonight. And I will admit to being partisan. I do not think this drug issue is a partisan issue. I have tried to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I have tried my best, and heaven knows we have tried our best to work with this administration. Holding numerous closed door sessions so I would not embarrass them by revealing the bungling in this effort. But we are here now on a very serious matter. This stuff is coming in. They have diverted assets. I spent 6 hours in Puerto Rico and met with DEA and Customs and other officials and all of the band that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), the Speaker of the House, set up several years ago has been dispersed. Haiti, which we will be doing a hearing on in a few more weeks, has become the Atlanta for drug trafficking in the Caribbean. This is a country in which we spent billions and billions of taxpayers dollars building the police force and so-called ``nation building'' and judicial system and legislative building. The legislature does not even meet. We have replaced one dictator with another and turned Haiti, with all of this money, into one of the biggest trafficking points in the Caribbean. The situation in Puerto Rico is back to disaster level, and again heroin flooding in through Haiti, the Dominican Republic, over to Puerto Rico. Once it is in Puerto Rico, it is in the United States and it is flying to our airports. Again, a record which is just incredible, a record which defies logic, but a record we are going to have to pay for with a very big price tag tomorrow as the House of Representatives considers this monumental piece of legislation to fund these programs. Again, we know what it will take to stop illegal narcotics. We have asked GAO to look at what took place, and they tell us basically that the war on drugs is closed down. Here is the facts. Assets DoD contributes to reducing the illegal drug supply have declined. Pretty clear. What is sad is, even those who are charged with trying to stop drugs again at their source are coming into the United States, interdicting them. In this case, it is SouthCom, the Southern United States Military Command. Again, they are not firing at anyone. They are not going after drugs. They are providing surveillance and basic information which we share with those countries. We heard what is going on with the countries not getting the information. In the Clinton administration these past few years, we have seen the requests in this, I am a little color blind so it is either blue or purple here depending on one's ability to detect colors. But I definitely know this is red. The red is the assets provided by DoD declined. Requested and provided by DoD. So we know that the job has not been done. We know that the Congress must intercede at this important juncture; that we must pass this. We must not get into a debate about getting this equipment here. Unfortunately, the bill has been added to. We have had a series of natural disasters in North Carolina and other areas. We have had problems in agriculture. Certainly nothing has been more impacted than the military. The reason why DOD assets have declined is because we have got them off in some dozen deployments that the President has chosen as a priority. The priority, I submit, is not to Kosovo today. The priority is in our own backyard. It is in our neighborhoods. It is in our school. When I go to areas like Sacramento, where the gentleman from California (Mr. Ose) lives and his family resides, and hear the stories of illegal narcotics and how parents in a community of 200,000, 600 abandon their children, there is a program to restore their children back to their families. Less than 5 out of 35 take their children back because drugs have so destroyed their minds and their lives and their capability even to care for their offspring. There is something wrong. But we are going to take this message to the floor tomorrow. We are going to take this message to the American people during this campaign. I am going to conduct hearings across the country from now until the last day of my term in office this year. We will get some results. We will make a difference. If Rudy Giuliani can do it in New York, if one wants to say a tough town, New York is a tough town with tough people. We can have a mayor with the success that he has had. But how disappointing it must be, how deflating it must be to him, he who has worked so hard, had made so many tremendous improvements, when we went to Baltimore, what did we use as a drug treatment example? The people from Baltimore asked to hear what they were doing in New York City in drug treatments. So not only was there success in stopping the murders, but in treating the individuals and successful programs they developed. But it is not found on the liberal pages of the Washington Post and the other publications that want to demean the mayor of New York and others who are on the frontline who have successful programs. But they will not ask any questions to those who have left us behind and who have destroyed real war on drugs, who have dismantled any efforts to stop most cost effectively, before they ever get to the streets of our communities, illegal narcotics. Well, we can have a Baltimore or we can have a New York City. We can have a nation. If we had 80,000 drug addicts in Baltimore with 600,000, a declining population, we can certainly have one out of eight Americans. Certainly that has a tremendous toll. We can have people, like in California we heard in testimony at field hearings in the district of the gentleman from California (Mr. Ose), abandon their children. Is that what we want? Well, the choice will be ours tomorrow. The choice will be ours in the next few months. Some serious mistakes have been made. If we do not learn by those mistakes, they will be the cries of the families and mothers and sisters and brothers and relatives of more than the 15,973 that were lost in 1998. They will be the cries and sadness of a whole nation. We must move together on this. We must learn by the mistakes of the past. I know we can do a better job. Certainly that is our responsibility.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Shuster) for yielding me this time. Mr. Speaker, it is my understanding, and I would like to enter into a colloquy with the chairman, that section 132 of the conference report allows DOT to approve 20 innovative financing projects such as allowing AIP entitlement funds to service debt on an earlier terminal development project at a small or nonhub. Am I correct in understanding that the fourth provision in this section concerning the use of entitlement dollars for terminal debt was added to the final conference report to assist Daytona Beach International Airport in coping with its debt terminal service?

Mr. MICA. Then is it the chairman's belief that Daytona Beach International Airport is well positioned to be selected as an innovative financing project under this program?

Mr. MICA. I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I will try not to take that but as one can tell, I am just getting warmed up tonight. I do get excited about this issue, Mr. Speaker, because it has some incredible impact, not only six year olds killing six year olds but thousands and thousands of lives lost across this country and families destroyed by illegal narcotics. We know what works in this effort. We know what does not work. We know that, again, the Clinton administration blocked aid to Colombia and that is why we are here in the next few weeks and about to pass $1.7 billion, $1.5 billion, whatever we end up with, in aid to Colombia, because the situation this administration created by these specific actions has created such a disaster. This is not something that just jumped up on us. This is something that was predicted in hearings, and I participated in some of those hearings. I took out a quote not from me but a quote from the gentleman from California (Mr. Horn) and he says, ``As you recall, as of May 1, 1994, the Department of Defense decided unilaterally to stop sharing realtime intelligence regarding aerial traffic in drugs with Colombia and Peru. Now, as I understand it, that decision, which has not been completely resolved, has thrown diplomatic relations with the host countries into chaos.'' The gentleman from California (Mr. Horn) said this August 2, 1994, the beginning of the end of the situation in Colombia, the beginning of presenting this Congress and the American people with a bill for $1.7 billion, a direct action of this administration to close down sharing that information. Not only did they do this in 1994, they turned around and did it again, according to a GAO report that I asked be conducted of the current operations the last couple of years in that region. I received a report in December, just a few months ago, that the administration, despite the requests of their appointed ambassador in Peru to increase, again, the surveillance, who said that if you do not do this you will get more cocaine produced, even though the Congress and the Republican Congress put into effect a very effective eradication and crop substitution program, in spite of what we had done their own ambassador said, hey, do not do this again, or do not do this in fact; you will have problems. In fact, we have seen an increase in production because, again, they made the same mistake just in the last 24 months that they made in 1994. We saw this coming. We asked them not to do it. Let me also bring up another headline, 1994. How do we get ourselves into these incredible situations? This is Thursday, August 4, Washington Post, U.S. Refusal to Share Intelligence in Drug War Is Called Absurd. We did it in 1994, we cut off aid and assistance. Was this a partisan attack, something the Republicans did? I cited my colleague, the gentleman from California (Mr. Horn), a fellow Republican. These are the comments of Robert Torricelli who at that time was chairman of the Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs on the Western Hemisphere and the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), chairman of the Subcommittee on International Security, denounced as absurd the administration's argument that current law might expose U.S. officials to prosecution. They distorted the law with some liberal interpretations to close down information-sharing to stop going after drug traffickers, basically sharing information allowing the other countries to, if necessary, shoot down these planes. There is nothing more effective than shooting down drug traffickers to stop illegal narcotics. These are direct actions that got us into this situation today. These are the actions that require a 1.6, 1.7, who knows how many billion dollars, to get us out of this predicament. Colombia produces and that area around Colombia produces 20 percent of our oil supply, and if you have paid for gasoline lately you can see why the source of oil production is a strategic value to the United States. What is interesting is that, back to Mexico for a minute, I received these reports from DEA on heroin production and they can tell us where heroin is coming from on what is called a signature program. It is almost sort of like reading DNA from a blood test, and they can tell me almost the country and the field that heroin is grown from. You have to remember again that the policy of this administration allowed in 6 or 7 years a country which produced no heroin, they did not produce any heroin, any poppies at the beginning of the Clinton administration in Colombia, and this shows now South American production, by 1997 they got it up to 75 percent of the heroin seized in the United States came from Colombia. That is where it is coming from. Fourteen percent came from Mexico. This administration just certified in the last few weeks Mexico fully cooperating. That means they are helping reduce production and reduce trafficking. Two criteria, reduce production, reduce trafficking. I got the report from 1998. You have not read about this. No one will talk about this. Mexico is up to 17 percent. Now, simple mathematics will say that is a 20 percent increase in production. It shows a slight decrease in America but we are getting more from the country that the administration just certified, Mexico; in fact, a 20 percent increase in heroin production in one year. This, again, does not require a rocket scientist to know where the heroin is coming from. We know that it is coming from Colombia. We know it is coming from Mexico. We heard it in the hearings this past week in California, which is also seeing a recurrence and proliferation of extremely deadly and high purity heroin in addition to incredible volumes of methamphetamine. This is from the country the administration just certified, where corruption is so rampant, where the leading candidate says, ha, ha, we made a fool out of the United States in its own process that grants trade, finance, benefits to Mexico. These are the headlines that we see now with a country that the administration just certified: Drugs Flood in From Mexico. This is not necessarily a conservative publication the last time I checked, the Washington Post. ``Increase in traffic on land and sea alarms U.S. officials,'' and it should alarm U.S. officials because the U.S. officials are the ones that allowed it to get into that situation. Let me show this chart. This is part of a chart from a report that I also requested from GAO. This report, given to me just a few weeks ago, shows me that assets DOD contributes to reducing illegal drug supply have declined. If you look at the red here, these are provided by DOD, and these are requested by SOUTHCOM. SOUTHCOM is our Southern Command, which is asking for surveillance assistance, or to conduct surveillance, and equipment and resources to conduct surveillance. Requested by SOUTHCOM, requested by SOUTHCOM, 1997, 1998, 1999, requested by SOUTHCOM. This is what they got. This is a war on drugs by destroying any effort to have combat, and to have combat the first basic thing you need to do is stop the activity at its source. Then the next thing you would do is get surveillance and information. This report told me that the surveillance flights declined 68 percent from 1992 to 1999, 68 percent in surveillance, and this shows even less attention by this administration to stop drugs at their source or do anything about it, and a 62 percent reduction in maritime activity, anti-narcotic activity by the administration. So what you have had is a closing down of any semblance of a war on drugs, and this is in spite of the fact that this Republican Congress, which took over in 1995, has done some very positive things in trying to restart the war on drugs. In fact, we have been successful in that effort, which Mr. Zeliff and now the gentleman from Illinois (Speaker Hastert) went down personally and began the efforts to start the eradication of cocaine in Peru and Bolivia, and that program has shown some 60 to 65 percent reduction in just several years. Speaker Hastert and the Republican Congress led an effort for a supplemental appropriation that put $800 million into the anti-narcotics effort. That is where you saw that bump up. But even with the money there, the funds are diverted, the reported by DOD tells us, from the war on drugs. Even our vice president has taken some of the assets I have found for surveillance, our AWACS, and diverted them to check oil spills in Alaska. So the resources that the Congress appropriates and tries to get to Colombia, including $300 million of assistance which we appropriated a year before last October, those assets still have not gotten there. Most of the money was for Blackhawk helicopters which can be used for eradication or going after drug traffickers in the high altitudes. We know where the stuff is grown; we know who is trafficking. If you have the capability, and the Colombians have the capability, just like President Fujimora had the capability and went after drug traffickers, wiped them out, stopped the destabilization, the terror in that country, which was also financed and run by drug traffickers, the same thing can be done in Colombia, but we cannot get even the basic equipment we funded over a year ago there. Most of that, as I said, was in several of these helicopters we have tried to get to the national police force there, and this administration, in fact, is the gang that can't shoot straight. They cannot even get the helicopters there. In fact, the helicopters that were sent there sat on the tarmac and did not have the armoring that could be used. In one of the greatest fiascoes of this entire effort by this administration, they delivered the ammunition that should have gone 2 or 3 years ago to Colombia to the back door of the State Department loading dock during the holidays. This in fact is an effort that has been a disaster by this administration. Every time I think the administration cannot bungle anything else, I am shocked. I was shocked to have people come in from my locale today and show me their pre-census mailing that was sent out. This administration that runs our census, that is a scary thought right there, sent out 120 million mailings, and sent out the wrong Zip Code on all 120 million of them. One of my cities they sent out the wrong name to the entire city in Florida. When I think that they cannot possibly bungle it any further, I am always amazed. This is, again, a very sad story for the United States, because we have a good friend and a good neighbor in Mexico, wonderful people. They are tremendously gifted. They are hard-working, dedicated people, and their country has been taken over by drug traffickers, and those drug traffickers are so emboldened that now they are offering rewards and bounties on United States agents, $200,000 reward as reported by drug traffickers. This is how emboldened they have gotten. This is from the country that has been certified as cooperating in this war on drugs. Again we find this administration, the gang that can't shoot straight or get a war on drugs together, in The Washington Post, March 13, just a few days ago, U.S. officials cite trend in Colombia. Lack of air support hindering drug war. Well, my friends, there has been no drug war, as you can see, since 1993, with the exception of what the Republican majority has been able to get in dribbles and drabs and in spite of the bureaucrats who have fought us every inch of the way, in spite of the administration who has blocked aid, assistance, ammunition, anything that you could possibly use in a war on drugs from getting to the source. Finally, now the situation has deteriorated so that even this administration is coming forth with a very expensive plan, and it is an expensive plan because they made very costly mistakes. This is also a repetitive mistake, because of lack of air support and the surveillance that is so incredible for any type of mission, military or anti- narcotics mission. And our military does not fire or fight in this war on drugs or arrest people. They merely provide surveillance and information. In this case we are not asking for United States troops or anyone to go in there. We are only asking to get that information to countries that are beseeched by drug traffickers like Colombia, like Peru, and like Bolivia. It is a very difficult situation we have been put in. I know there are some Members who are concerned about expending those dollars in this effort. Some are concerned on the Republican side of the aisle because we have attempted to spend money on a real war on drugs, and every dollar we have spent has either been diverted or not gotten to the source, or handled in such an incompetent manner that nothing is accomplished. That does bring some criticism from the Republican side of the aisle. The other side of the aisle, we hear the human rights concerns. I share human rights concerns. Anyone who commits human rights abuses should be held accountable, and whether it is from paramilitary right- wing extremists, or from left-wing terrorists on the communist- socialist side, the murder they commit is not justified and should not be tolerated. But both of these activities I am told are financed in Colombia by narco-terrorists, people who are living and also promoting their criminal, murderous behavior with the proceeds and supported by the profits from illegal narcotics. That has destabilized Colombia. There have been 35,000 people killed in that war; there have been over 800,000 in just 2 years, displaced as many as Kosovo; and Kosovo I do not know has imported any drugs or produced any drugs that is killing 15,700 Americans in 1998 and destroying thousands and thousands of lives, so certainly this is in our national interest to proceed. So I appeal to my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. I am sorry that it is so difficult for this administration to learn lessons of what it takes. I am so sorry that they have also convinced the media that the war on drugs is a failure. We, in fact, have doubled the amount of money for treatment. We need even more treatment. But those liberal, the liberal programs, in fact, do not work. We know that tough enforcement programs, the Rudy Guiliani programs. Rudy Guiliani, just stop and think about this, took office and over 2,200 people died in murders in the years in which he assumed office. That figure was down in the 600 range. Tough enforcement works. Take another example, the liberal Mayor Schmoke who turned his back, instituted a needle exchange program, had liberal narcotics policies in Baltimore. Baltimore had 312 deaths, murders in Baltimore in 1997; they had 312 in 1998; and they had 60,000 heroin and drug addicts in Baltimore; 60,000, one in eight a city council member told the press, one in eight. Imagine, taking that model and imposing it on the rest of the United States. Think of one in eight Americans under a liberal policy for narcotics. We could do that and we would have one incredible society. We think it is expensive to support 2 million people in our prisons; imagine supporting somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million Americans as drug addicts. It is not a pleasant thought. So we know it works. We know we can stop drugs at their source. Richard Nixon did it; the Chinese have done it. We have done it in Peru and Bolivia; we can do it in Colombia. We can also cooperate with others, even the United Nations; and Pino Arlacchi who heads the United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy, the former Italian prosecutor who helped rub out organized crime, and who we have worked so effectively with the last couple of years since he took office in stopping the rest of the drugs at their source in Afghanistan and Burma, in Colombia and other countries where we do not have the best relations. But a simple plan; not a great deal of money needs to be expended. Because we could put 100,000 a year; we could put 500,000 more police on the streets, and we will not get it all, but we know we can stop it cost effectively at its source. If we do not have tough enforcement, it does not work. If we do not have tough prosecution, it does not work. It is unfortunate that we do have so many Americans hooked on illegal narcotics and so many have succumbed to the philosophy that if it feels good, do it; and they have become addicted and victims in this whole disaster that has rained terror on the United States and so many of our families. Mr. Speaker, the hour is late. I hope to come back and finish and also update the House on additional information we have received, our subcommittee has received. We look forward to working with Members on both sides of the aisle, both in passage of this Colombian effort, plan Colombia in our efforts to rid our Nation of illegal narcotics and also assist other countries in stopping the production and trafficking of hard drugs. We also look forward to enhancing our treatment programs and rewarding programs that do a good job and encouraging our young people not to take the path of illegal narcotics and the path of death and destruction of their lives.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor of the House again at this late hour to talk about an issue that I always try to address the House on Tuesday nights on, and that is the question or problem relating to illegal narcotics. It has been several weeks. We have had some intervening business and time away from the House of Representatives, but some things have happened, and I wanted to report on my activities as chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources. I also wanted to highlight some of the reports that have filtered through the media on this subject and bring my colleagues up to date on where we are and where we are going. Since I last addressed the House, there have been some serious incidents in our Nation. One that has sort of riveted and focused the attention of the Congress and the American people was a situation with a 6 year old killing a 6 year old. The method was by a gun, and all the attention has focused on the gun. But like many of the other stories about tragedy in our society today, they fail to focus on the real problem, the situation that led to that tragedy. In this instance, we had a 6 year old who, unfortunately, came from a crack house setting. The belief is that the father was in jail, a family without any normal nuclear bounds, and a situation where you had, I believe, a stolen weapon. No one focused that the root of the problem was, indeed, illegal narcotics, drug trafficking, drug addiction, crimes related to illegal narcotics. I had an opportunity to conduct, at the request of Members, a hearing this past week when the Congress was in recess, traveled to Sacramento, the capital of California, and also down to San Diego to visit our joint agency task force operations in Alameda, California to see how our war on drugs and our problems with illegal narcotics in that area of the country are progressing. The story I heard in hearings in California was as horrible as the death of this 6 year old, but magnified many, many times in stories of deaths of young people that I had never heard of and I am sure the American people had not heard of. We had testimony by a lady by the name of Susan Webber Brown on one of the occasions of hearing, and I believe this was the one in Sacramento. Susan Webber Brown, who is involved with a program out there to help drug-addicted families, gave us some incredible and powerful testimony. She talked about a 15 month old who overdosed on methamphetamine in Rancho Cordova. That is a 15 month old. A 5 month old tested positive for methamphetamine and succumbs to death with 12 rib fractures, a burned leg, and scarred feet by a methamphetamine addict in Los Angeles, California. Not killed with a gun, but murdered by illegal narcotics. She testified to a 13 month old who died of heart trauma, broken spine, and broken neck by a methamphetamine addict. She was also raped and sodomized. This was in the California high desert. Susan Webber Brown testified about a 25-month-old Oregon toddler who overdosed on methamphetamine. She testified to us about a 2 month old who dies on methamphetamine, who had methamphetamine in her system in San Jose, California. Another death that we did not read about or was not publicized was the 2 year old who ate methamphetamine from a baby food jar in Twentynine Palms, California; a 14 month old who drinks lye and water from a parent's methamphetamine laboratory, hospitalized permanently with severe organ damage in Fairfield, California; a new baby who died from mother's breast milk laced with methamphetamine in Orange County. An 8-week-old, 11-pound boy dies from methamphetamine poisoning found inside a baby bottle in Orange County. An 8 year old watches and hears mom die in a methamphetamine laboratory in Oroville, California. A 6 month old overdoses, semicomatose, seizing, and hospitalized who drank methamphetamine from a bottle. A 4 year old who tested positive for methamphetamine, beaten and hair pulled out by the mom's boyfriend in Chico, California. One of the worst stories that was told and video pictures presented at our hearing was of a young child, a young girl who was beaten and tortured by her parents who were both on methamphetamine. When they finished beating and torturing this child, Susan Webber Brown told a stunned audience that they basically scalded their daughter to death, high on methamphetamine. Now, we have heard about a 6 year old killing a 6 year old with a gun, but we have not heard these stories of babies even younger being victimized. Hidden behind the other stories are the facts that this 6 year old, again, came from a home setting, if one could call it a home, of illegal narcotics. I was absolutely shocked by the methamphetamine epidemic in California and the Midwest. I have held hearings in Washington, and we have talked about it. We have heard testimony here about it. But until one hears individuals, visits the locale, and sees firsthand the damage that has been done by methamphetamines, one cannot imagine the damage that has been done. It is amazing that the President of the United States, it is amazing that the leadership of this country, it is amazing that the media of this country can focus on a tragedy like a 6 year old shooting a 6 year old, not focus on the root causes of that death and the deaths I have cited here. In fact, we are now up to 15,973 drug-related deaths in this country. That is the 1998 count, and the count continues to skyrocket. Many of these are silent deaths, not making the front page, not being discussed in the talk shows or the subject of the root causes of the death and the tragedy, not coming forward or part of the discussion. But I intend to make it part of the discussion. Methamphetamine production, trafficking, and use has increased in our rural communities and midsize cities, according to a published paper that came out January 26 this year. The report stated that lab seizures, the drug labs that were seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, have increased sixfold in the past 5 years, from 263 seizures in 1994 to 1,627 labs in 1998. We heard testimony, not only in Sacramento, but also down in San Diego about methamphetamine. We had law enforcement officials who brought methamphetamine to Sacramento and showed us that methamphetamine. They know where most of it is coming from or at least part of the main ingredients of methamphetamine, and that is Mexico. We know that the largest amount of methamphetamine reaching our country is coming through Mexico. Unfortunately, we have not had a national strategy in place to deal with the problem of methamphetamine or other narcotics now coming through Mexico. In fact, in the last several weeks, this administration has, again, certified Mexico. Mexico is now the source of nearly 70 percent of the illegal narcotics entering the United States. Now, it is a fact that 70 to 75 percent of the heroin and cocaine is produced now in Colombia, but some 70 percent-plus of the hard narcotics coming into the United States, the vast majority of illegal marijuana, is coming through Mexico. The United States Government and the administration is required under our Federal law to certify whether or not a country is participating and cooperating with doing two things: stopping the production and also stopping the traffic of illegal narcotics. This administration says that Mexico is cooperating on both accounts. I tend to believe that that is not the case. I believe the administration acted in both conflict with the facts and also contrary to the intent of the law that was passed that requires an assessment of cooperation and then gives the countries who do cooperate trade, finance, and other aid benefits from the United States. So I think, in fact, this administration has misused the certification process, particularly with a country like Mexico that is failing to even meet minimal requests of the United States for cooperation in combating the production and trafficking of illegal narcotics. In last week's Washington Times there is an article: ``Mexican Ruling Party Soft on Drugs, Foe Said.'' There are two major candidates for the Presidency of Mexico and one is a gentleman by the name of Vincente Fox. He is a Conservative National Action Party member. He said that, in fact, the current administration in Mexico is in league with the drug bosses, to use his quote. They have been part of the problem. They have negotiated with the narcos. And many PRI members have been jailed for being narcos. He went on to say that, in fact, Mexico and this ruling party have made a joke out of the certification law. He said that this entire process has been made a charade by Mexican officials. Let me quote him. He said, ``The government's attitude was making a mockery of the annual assessment by Washington of efforts by Mexico and other countries to combat drug trafficking, a ritual known as certification, which is widely resented in Mexico. This is just making a fool of the United States, and this certification business is no use at all.'' He went on to say, ``Each time certification comes around, the Mexican government arrests two or three drug bosses, puts them in jail, and acts as if it is getting very serious with drug trafficking,'' he said. ``Then certification is awarded and the Mexican government forgets about the whole business and does not think about it again until the following year.'' This is the comment of a gentleman who may very well become the next president of Mexico and one of the leading officials there, attesting publicly as to how Mexico and the current government makes it a joke and makes a fool of the United States in this process. I was so pleased, in fact I sent a personal note to our United States ambassador, Jeffrey Davidow, who just previous to Mr. Fox's pronouncement, the candidate for the Mexican presidency, had the courage to finally be one of the first few Clinton administration officials to tell it like it is. He said, ``The fact is that the headquarters of drug trafficking is in Mexico, just like the headquarters of the mafia is in Sicily.'' Ambassador Davidow was speaking in Spanish before a group of alumni of Southern California in Mexico City. He was very frank. This made all the papers down in Mexico. But even the Mexicans are shocked by recent events, which we also looked at in our hearing in San Diego, where just across the border, in Tijuana, just a few days before we arrived there, the chief of police, and this was actually the second chief of police, was slaughtered in an assassination. A brutal assassination. And again, the second police chief so assassinated by drug lords and drug gangs in that city. In fact, Tijuana, which is located in the Baja Peninsula, has been the scene of not only corruption but now extreme violence, with hundreds and hundreds of drug-related murders. And Tijuana has one of the highest murder rates of any city in the Western Hemisphere. And almost all of these slaughters are done by drug traffickers. Yet this administration has certified Mexico as fully cooperating. I have been a critic and, based on the hearings that we have conducted, have said that in Mexico, I believe from the office of the president, the current president, there is no doubt about the past president, in fact the past president's family, Salinas, was involved in narcotics trafficking and profits from narcotics up to their eyeballs and packed away hundreds of millions of dollars in accounts around the world; but even within the current president's office we have had evidence, both public accusations and also behind closed doors, and information about the level of corruption all the way to that office. I had said also to the attorney general's office, and I am not saying that the attorney general or the President of Mexico personally are now involved, but within those offices, the highest offices of Mexico have in fact been corrupted. I had repeated that not knowing that in fact the headlines would be just a few days ago that in a box rented to a senior official at the Federal attorney general's office a public servant with a modest salary had sitting $700,000 in cash. That official committed suicide some few days ago. Yet another example of tremendous amounts of money involved in corruption at the highest level of Mexican officials' offices. I just read in the last 2 days that a legal adviser to the Mexico City attorney general's office had been found strangled in his home, along with his two elderly sisters. They said that Salvador Cordero, 64, had apparently been tortured before he was killed in his home some 30 miles west of the Mexican capital. Again, the rampant violence in Mexico, that corruption is now leading to incredible acts of violence, this has raised the concern of both of the Mexican candidates for president. And we heard the comments of one Mexican high official, again a leading candidate, and the joke they have made out of the process of certification that the United States relies on to try to enlist cooperation from Mexico. Now, we have not asked a lot from Mexico. We have asked that our DEA agents be armed and adequately protect themselves, the limited number that Mexico allows. That still has not been granted. We have asked for a sign and an executed maritime agreement. That still has not been granted. We have asked for the extradition of one major drug lord from Mexico. To date there has not been one Mexican national drug kingpin extradited to the United States. So the corruption, the killing goes on. The amounts of money in this corrupt process are absolutely astounding. Again, we held a hearing that documented from a former United States Customs official that one Mexican general had attempted in a sting operation to place $1.1 billion in drug profits in American financial institutions. So the corruption is in the military, it is in the President's office, the Attorney General and cabinet members' office, in the police, in the States. We saw in the Yucatan Peninsula, Quintana Roo, which is the Yucatan Province, we saw the governor there who we knew was involved heavily in drug trafficking and immune from prosecution because of his status that he holds in Mexico. They do not go after sitting officials. And a few days before he was to leave office, he fled the country and has not been located. But we know that the entire Yucatan Peninsula and the government there is run and directed by narco-traffickers; and again this all has implications in the United States, the methamphetamine coming in in unbelievable quantity. We had testimony from officials in Wisconsin and Iowa, in addition to the hearing that I held in California, talking about Mexican drug cartels operating in the Midwest bringing this death and deadly destruction. The effects of methamphetamine I had no idea could destroy people in such a fashion or cause such incredibly savage behavior as we have heard in these hearings. Now, this is not a rocket scientist. We know where illegal narcotics are coming from. As I said, we have Colombia, which is the source now of over 70 percent of the heroin and 70 percent of the cocaine. It is interesting to note that Colombia did not produce at the beginning of the Clinton administration almost any heroin. There was none produced in Colombia. There was almost no coca produced in Colombia at the beginning of the Clinton administration. But I will be darned if this administration, through one bungling act after another, could not make Colombia into the largest source of illegal narcotics. Now, we are talking about producing. We know that a hundred percent of all the cocaine in the world comes from Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Through a program instituted by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), Mr. Zeliff, some of the others here who worked on it in reinstituting source country programs, we have been able to cut production of cocaine and coca in both Peru and Bolivia by some 60 percent. In Colombia, this administration has done everything possible to bungle and thwart and stop assistance for international programs to aid Colombia in dealing with illegal narcotics production and trafficking. They have done everything imaginable. And I will detail those in just a minute. But those illegal narcotics are coming up in trafficking and now they form cartels with Mexican traffickers and they are coming up through the United States. We know how this traffic pattern has emerged. We also know what works and what does not work. I cannot believe the media and the garbage that they continue to publish and the misstatement that the war on drugs has been a failure. And it is repeated over and over. The war on drugs existed in the Reagan and the Bush administration. The war on drugs was closed down by the Clinton administration in some very specific acts. This chart, let us take just a minute and look at the war on drugs. This was the trend with Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and we saw the long-term trend in lifetime prevalence of drugs. This is percentage of 12th graders, a pretty good indication of where we are going on the narcotics issue and use of illegal narcotics, going down, down, down. This is the beginning of the Andean strategy. This is the beginning of the war on drugs bringing the military in, the Vice President's task force. And look at what happened to the use of illegal narcotics. Then we have the election of Mr. Clinton. Let me, if I can, quote some facts on what took place with the election of Mr. Clinton. First of all, we have a question of international programs to stop illegal drugs at their source. That would be source country programs. Look at this here. Source country programs, international programs under Mr. Bush and previously Mr. Reagan. We had increases in 1993, 1994, 1995. And it does take a little while to get a budget in place for a new administration and a new Congress. We are a little bit ahead of the curve. But Federal drug spending on international programs was cut 50 percent during the Democrat controlled Congress from 1992 to 1994. Fifty percent of that means to stop drugs at their source. What we had been successful in stopping drugs at their source, they cut 50 percent. On interdiction, which is the next most cost-effective way to stop illegal narcotics is to get the drugs not only where they are produced at their source, because that farmer is getting a few dollars or a few pesos, and the most effective thing is to stop the illegal narcotics at the next level and that is to interdict them. You can interdict them through intelligence and provide that intelligence to another country, which was part of the strategy that we had with the Bush and Reagan administration, very cost effective. And then that country goes after the plane or the trafficker, whatever, and stops it. Federal drug spending on interdiction was cut 33 percent during the Democrat controlled Congress from 1992 to 1994. Again, part of the strategy to close down the war on drugs. And when you close down the war on drugs, and you see the chart here, let us look at this chart here for a moment, because you see us getting back up to in 1999, basically, if you look at dollars and use 1991 or 1992 dollars to 1999, we are back where we were at the end of the Bush and Reagan administration and their anti-narcotics programs. So basically some of the comments and one of them that really irritated me is a column by Marjorie Williams. I do not know who she is but she put it in the Washington Post Friday, March 10, and she said, despite two decades of proof that interdiction and tough law enforcement will do nothing to stop the sale or use of drugs, this is the type of trash that the media puts out and convinces people that the war on drugs is a failure. In fact, the war on drugs was specifically closed down. Let us go back up to this chart here. Go back to this chart here. The Clinton administration, go back to 1992, 1993, they slashed, first of all, the drug czar's staff from 112 to 27. They cut the source country programs, which I just cited. If you put another one of these dots where they appointed Jocelyn Elders as Surgeon General you can see another little surge in use. In 1994 and 1995, they stopped U.S. intelligence information-sharing with Colombia and Peru and slashed the U.S. military and Coast Guard anti-narcotics program. Is this showing that that is a war on drugs? In fact, they dismantled the war on drugs. In 1996 and 1997, they blocked the antidrug assistance to Colombia. They also distorted the program that we have to certify countries as cooperating, decertified Colombia without a national interest waiver and blocked and stopped the equipment getting to Colombia. Announcement by the Speaker Pro Tempore

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 27, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yes.''

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come before the House again on a Tuesday night to talk about the subject of illegal narcotics and how it affects our Nation. Today we conducted an almost 6-hour hearing on the administration's proposal to expend more than a billion dollars in taxpayer funds in an effort to bring the situation in Colombia under control; and tonight I would like to speak part of my special order pointed toward that hearing and some commentary on that hearing. I would also like to review some of the things that have taken place in the last week both in my State of Florida with a Florida drug summit and also here in Washington with an international drug summit, which I was one of the cohosts, along with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), the Speaker of the House, and with the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), chairman of the Committee on International Relations, and also with the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton), full chairman of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. As my colleagues may know, I chair the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform. And, of course, the responsibility for national drug policy in trying to make some sense out of what we have been doing in our anti- narcotics effort really rests with that subcommittee. So today we had a hearing, last week a summit at the national level, and a continuation of efforts at the local level. Let me just mention, if I may, the international drug summit, which was held for 2 days last week here in the Nation's capital. If you look at the war on drugs, and the international problems relating to narcotics, you see that you cannot win an effort by yourself. The United States cannot stand alone and combat illegal narcotics trafficking, illegal narcotics production, illegal narcotics interdiction and enforcement and eradication. It is really a simple thing to determine to look at the pattern of production of hard narcotics, illegal narcotics, to look at the path of illegal narcotics, and then the problems that we all have when they reach their source, the various countries. Quickly you realize that the United States, even the powerful United States Congress, cannot legislate or dictate solutions to this international problem. But the problem is not that complicated, and I wanted to show something that was brought before our international drug summit last week. In that summit, we brought together probably the largest gathering of parliament members from various congresses and parliaments around the world to Washington. We had law enforcement leaders, including individuals from Scotland Yard, Interpol, Europol, DEA, other major drug enforcement agencies. In addition, we had some of the leaders in treatment. Dr. Leshner, the head of NIDA, National Institute on Drug Abuse, came, along with others who were involved in successful treatment and prevention programs. General McCaffrey addressed the group. The Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert who is intimately knowledgeable about this whole problem, chaired the subcommittee responsibility antinarcotics efforts in the House before he became Speaker, and a whole array of others who were involved in antinarcotics efforts. This was not my idea; it was something that I agreed to cohost along with the others I have mentioned, and it was a follow-up to real efforts that were undertaken by one of the United Kingdom members of the European parliament, and that was Sir Jack Stewart-Clark who initiated the first international meeting some 3 years ago. The second international meeting was held last year just outside of Vienna. I had an opportunity to attend, with the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman) and others, and participate behind closed doors in a meeting to discuss an international narcotics strategy. So we agreed to cohost with the United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy and its director, a wonderful gentleman, very talented, Pino Arlacchi, who again heads that office in the U.N. This third summit, bringing together everybody who deals with this problem and look at how we could cooperatively tackle this and get a global approach and solution. We can look at the globe, and this happens to be a cocaine trafficking route, we see the problems created by cocaine. Now, cocaine, one does not have to be a rocket scientist or study the problem of cocaine trafficking very long, because there are only three countries that produce coca and cocaine. They are Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia. One hundred percent of the world's supply of cocaine comes from that area, but it trafficks throughout the world. So all of the nations have an interest in that particular drug trafficking. Cocaine now has really surged in production the last year or two, and particularly in Colombia where the United States let down its guard some years ago. And as a result of an effort really that was instituted by the Speaker of the House, Mr. Hastert, and his predecessor, Mr. Zeliff, myself, and others who, when we assumed responsibility for the House of Representatives leading the majority, the new majority in 1995, went down to those source countries to look at firsthand what had taken place. Most of our antinarcotics programs from 1993 to 1995 were slashed by the Clinton administration. They were cut out in many instances or, in most cases, halved. We went into the jungles and saw that in fact the resources were not there to stop the production of coca. We worked with two countries in particular, Peru and Bolivia, and their leaders, in Bolivia Hugo Banzer and a dynamic Vice President Jorge Guerra and others from that country who were willing to step forward and take a stand against cocaine trafficking and coca production. There has been a dramatic decrease, some 55 percent decrease in some 3 years in Bolivia in coca production. We went on to Peru and met with President Fujimori and have worked with him over the past couple of years. President Fujimori inherited a country that was fraught with turmoil, with Marxist and terrorist operations throughout the country that destabilized Peru just some 9 or 10 years ago. It was an intolerable situation. He brought that country under control. Meeting with us and working through programs he established in Peru, he has been able to cut coca production by 60 percent. Now, this is the good news. I do not want to say the United States or Mr. Hastert, myself, and others should take credit for that but it was not done all by the United States. It was also supported by the international community through the United Nations Office of Drug Control Policy and also under the leadership of Pino Arlacchi. I might just as an aside tell the Members about Pino Arlacchi. Pino Arlacchi is the Italian prosecutor who helped take down the Mafia and organized crime in Italy. He came on board and almost single-handedly led the effort to destroy the entrenched mob in Italy and did an outstanding job. He made Italy a country that is really free of the organized crime and corruption and did it single-handedly and then was chosen to lead the U.N. Office of Drug Control Policy. I might also say that as a conservative Republican, it is sort of an odd fellow combination, myself and the head of the U.N. Office of Drug Control Policy. Although I have been a critic of the U.N. and some of the bureaucracy it has built up and some of its ineffectiveness, I do realize that we need international cooperative efforts, and I think that drug control and a global drug strategy working together is very important. Also it is important to know that the United Nations effort, while it does work with the United States and Peru and also in Bolivia, there are countries that we have no relations with that are major producers. In fact, if we could look at heroin production, 75 percent of the heroin in the world is produced in Afghanistan. The United States has no relations really and at best very strained relations with Afghanistan. But yet 75 percent of the entire world production of heroin comes from Afghanistan. It is in our interest to see that that activity is curtailed. So through the United Nations and through a program that Pino Arlacchi has championed and successfully put together, even talking with the Taliban and other groups in Afghanistan, again with which we have no communications, he is doing an effective effort, and the few dollars, the limited dollars, I believe it is around the $50 million mark over the last couple of years, that we have put into that effort and the few dollars he spends are very effectively spent. They are spent in the Golden Triangle, some in Cambodia and Burma and Laos and other areas in which we do not have influence. He has had a successful program for the most part in stopping illegal narcotics, particularly heroin, where we cannot stop it, and working with us in South America to complement our efforts. We see that successful effort. It does work. This is not rocket science. It works. We have stopped it. He has found, and gave a great presentation to our gathering, that alternative crops and crop substitution programs do work. But they must be combined with tough enforcement. I think Bolivia had tried programs with just the carrot, and he has said in his remarks to us that the carrot alone does not work. You must have the carrot and the stick to enforce that. Both Peru and Bolivia are successful examples. Colombia is a disaster. We know 75 percent of the heroin that is produced in the world comes from Afghanistan. One of the things that came out of this besides 2 days of discussion is really an effort to see if we could put a belt around Afghanistan, and also introduce and support programs that would stop production in Afghanistan of heroin, and then around the belt countries. There was substantial progress made in that regard. Also, again rather than talking but acting on the issue of coca production and cocaine. The vice president of Bolivia has offered to host the fourth international summit gathering sometime next year, in 2001, and hopefully at that time we can celebrate the demise in 2001 of coca production in Bolivia, which once accounted for nearly 50 percent of the production. Peru was the biggest producer, and now down by some 65 percent. The bad news is the United States curtailed some of the surveillance operations and information sharing to President Fujimori and we have seen a slight increase in coca production. The good news, I guess, is that coca is not coming into the United States; but the bad news is that it is going into Europe where it can get a higher price. These programs are very cost effective, the crop eradication and substitution. In one year, we put in some $60 million in South America in the three countries that produce 70 percent of the heroin, 70 percent now of the cocaine, we put a few dollars, $60 million out of a $17.8 billion project and expenditure that the Congress undertook last year and will even be exceeded this year, more than $18 billion this year for the various drug programs that we support. So a few million dollars can provide an alternative to these countries. It has proven to be, in fact, very successful. Next year, we hope to meet in Bolivia, celebrate that country's eradication of coca and hopefully the beginning and continuation of a successful crop substitution program which makes a better life for their people and certainly one for the people of the United States when we do not have cocaine and crack on our streets and our young people dying from drug abuse. The international summit was successful, and I think again, everyone who came away is convinced that it can only be through a cooperative effort that we make progress. Now, one of the areas that has not been as successful is Colombia. Colombia is the focus of the national news tonight. It was the focus of a hearing that we spent 6 hours on in our Criminal Justice, Drug Policy subcommittee. Almost all of the heroin that is consumed in the United States is produced in Colombia. DEA through its signature analysis program, which analyzes really almost the DNA in the heroin, DEA can tell you through this analysis that the particular heroin that is seized in the United States comes from Colombia, practically from the field it comes from. So 75 percent of the heroin coming into the United States comes from Colombia. Now, I talked about our strategy, and we have a strategy beyond the administration, because the administration's strategy is not going to work by itself. You push this down in one area, it is like Jello, it pops up in another. That is why the Afghan's international global strategy is so important. Again, just a few dollars of our contributions in this effort will do an incredible amount to stop that supply. The same thing can happen in Colombia, although the situation there has spiraled out of control. In addition to heroin production, Colombia in 5 or 6 years is now the major coca-producing country in the world. Some of the production has shifted from Peru and Bolivia to Colombia. We know that what we did in Peru and Bolivia will work in Colombia; there is no question about that. The problem is, every effort that the new majority has tried, and I tried to make these efforts in a bipartisan fashion the last 4 or 5 years since we took over, every effort has been thwarted by the administration to get resources to Colombia. So where you do not have ammunition, where you do not have supplies, where you do not have a riverine strategy in place, where you do not have information-sharing that allows a shootdown of drug traffickers, when all of these things are taken out or blocked by the administration, which they have repeatedly done, you have a very difficult situation. Then you see Mexico on this chart. Mexico, it is not a big producer of illegal narcotics. It does produce a great deal of marijuana and about 14 percent of the heroin, and that is up; but that is because we have this open border. But most of the heroin that is produced and enters the United States is produced in Colombia. So that is where we need to concentrate some of our resources. It will not even reach Mexico to get into the United States. In addition to these two charts, I wanted to trace the history of how we got ourselves in this $1 billion-plus Colombia mess. This did not happen by accident. As I said, the administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress from 1993 to 1995 cut the interdiction, the source programs, the eradication programs, cut the Coast Guard and began taking the military out of the war on drugs. Basically, the war on drugs was closed down in 1993 by the Clinton administration, slashing the drug czar's office from 100-some staff to 20-some staff. You cannot fight a war unless all these things are in place. The media is unbelievable in this. They say the war on drugs is a failure, there has not been a war on drugs since January of 1993. What we have tried to do in 1995 and 1996 is restart the war on drugs, target it to where the drugs are coming from. Now, just let me read from 1994, my colleague Steve Horn in a hearing, his comments. He said, ``As you recall, as of May 1, 1994, the Department of Defense decided unilaterally to stop sharing realtime intelligence regarding aerial traffic in drugs with Colombia and Peru. Now, as I understand it, that decision, which has not been completely resolved, has thrown diplomatic relations with the host countries into chaos.'' Now, here is sort of the genesis of how we get ourselves into that $1 billion fix. Back then the administration made a decision to stop information sharing. Now, how can anyone fight a war on drugs without information to conduct combat? The United States was the source of that intelligence, with overflights, with forward operating intelligence, with all the information needed to go after drug traffickers. So the first thing we did, Steve Horn complained about it back in August 2, 1994, and he was not the only one. Even the Democrats complained about it in the House of Representatives. In fact, this is a Washington Post story a couple days later, August 1994. ``Chairmen of two House subcommittees blasted the Clinton Administration,'' not Republicans, mind you, ``for its continuing refusal to resume sharing intelligence data with Colombia and Peru that would enable the Andean nations to shoot down aircraft carrying narcotics into the United States.'' So here is the beginning of a multi-billion dollar spiral out of control, the drug czar called it a ``flipping nightmare,'' to use his term, before the press. This is the genesis of it; and you see that, again, that both Republicans and Democrats, their leaders, were absolutely appalled by what was taking place. That is how you turn a minor producer, and you have to remember, Colombia produced almost no coca, there was almost no coca grown in Colombia, almost 100 percent was grown in Peru and Bolivia at the beginning of this administration, almost no heroin. In fact, today I said the only poppies that were grown could barely fill a flower arrangement, grown in Colombia in 1993. Now this Nation is the leader in growing and producing both coca, poppy, heroin and cocaine. Here is the genesis of this. Now, it would not be bad if this was the only misstep, but the missteps just continued and continued. The next thing the administration did was adopt a policy to decertify Colombia as being eligible to receive United States assistance. Now, I helped develop a law back when I worked in the Senate that allows for decertification of countries that are not cooperating in either stopping the production or trafficking of illegal narcotics. It is a good law. It ties aid and financial assistance and other benefits to their cooperation. It is one of the few handles we have. As you will notice, we are getting closer to certification, which is required by law March 1st. Mexico extradited someone the other day, and these countries start behaving and cooperating in the anti-narcotics effort when it is time for certification. But you could not believe that an administration could possibly mess up a law the way the Clinton administration messed up the certification law. We allowed under the law to decertify a country and not let them get benefits for trade and assistance and foreign aid, but we put in the law a little provision that said the President could grant a national-interest waiver in our interest, the United States' national interest, because we knew when we wrote the law we wanted to be able to get aid to a country that was having a problem to deal with the problem, to make efforts to eradicate the problem, drugs at their source, to stop trafficking, et cetera, and get them the resources they needed to conduct that activity. You could not believe that they could mess this up, but they did; and the President decertified Colombia without a national-interest waiver. Not for Colombia, but national-interest waiver for the United States. Repeatedly we asked for, of course, hearings during the Clinton administration when they controlled the House of Representatives. I had 132 Members sign a letter requesting hearings over 2 years when they controlled the House, the Senate and the White House. One hearing was held, and it was a very brief hearing. Since we took over, we have had at least 20 hearings on the narcotics issue in trying to get this effort that was started back so successfully under Reagan and Bush restarted in 1995-1996. The next thing we knew as a Congress, and anyone who looked at the situation, is that it was worsening in Colombia. This is back in 1995- 1996 as a result of the 1994 policies that were ill-advised in decertifying Colombia. The next thing that we asked for was to get to the police in Colombia equipment that could go to high altitude and go after narcotics traffickers and also do eradication of the beginning of the poppy fields that were growing there that we saw that were reported, at the beginning of the coca production that we saw that was started there. I cannot tell you how many letters, how many communications, how many requests were made of this administration. It was countless, asking the Secretary of State, asking the President, asking the Secretary of Defense, everyone in the administration, to get resources to Colombia because the situation was worsening. Now, this is an interesting headline. It says ``Delay of copters hobbles Colombia in stopping drugs.'' I do not know if you can see this. I would like to blow this up and just put it on the screen here so every colleague could read this. This is February 12, 1998, just after 1997. This is an unbelievable sequence of events. Again, first dismantling the entire command structure of our war on drugs; gutting the drug czar's office; next, doing away with the shootdown policy; next, doing away with the information-sharing policy; and then, next, decertifying the country without granting a national U.S.-interest waiver to allow the equipment to get there. We knew the equipment needed to get there, we knew what was happening, we knew that only copters and equipment in the anti-narcotics effort could eliminate that. But this is how you turn a minor problem into destabilizing a whole region, failed policies of an administration. This is not partisan, this is fact, and it is very well documented. It should be documented for history, and also for what we are doing, that these kinds of mistakes are not made in the future. And you cannot win this by yourself; it is going to take a cooperative effort; and you are not going to be sending United States troops in. That would never happen. But you can provide a little bit of assistance to countries that are trying to stop narco-terrorism within their borders. So here you see in 1997-1998, asking for the resources denied by the administration, not only denied, but blocked by the administration, and that helps you get into a multi-billion dollar pickle that we are now in. Then we have been asking not only could we appropriate a few dollars, and under the leadership of Mr. Hastert, now Speaker of the House, who had this responsibility, he framed together in 1998 a bill for a supplemental in the war on drugs to restart the source-country programs, restart eradication, alternative crop programs, to restart interdiction of drugs, trying to get information and sources down there. We not only wanted to put a few more dollars in that that could effectively cure the problem that was erupting and we saw back from 1994, but we thought it would be wise to also take surplus United States equipment and get it to Colombia, so we asked the President to do that. Now, until a few weeks ago, equipment requested in 1997 still had not been delivered, surplus equipment, delivered there. This stuff sits rusting in fields or warehouses or in lots, and there is no reason why it cannot get to Colombia. Then almost a slap in the face. Last year when we began asking why is the equipment not requested, and even that the President said he would send as surplus in 1997-1998, getting there? This is another headline that just shows that ``the gang that couldn't shoot straight'' was in charge. ``Colombia turns down dilapidated U.S. trucks.'' We sent dilapidated trucks, I think they were trucks used primarily in the tundra or the cold climate, down to Colombia. So when we do finally get some equipment there, it is equipment that is not usable in the war on narcotics. It is a pretty sad story. It would almost be humorous if it did not have consequences. Now, I know people think that this is probably something that the Republicans made in a partisan fashion, but in fact this chart was produced by the Monitoring of the Future Study by the University of Michigan. Let us just look at it for a minute, because it shows from 1980 the problem with cocaine and drug use at that time, it was predominantly cocaine that we were having the big problem with. This chart shows a long-term trend in lifetime prevalence of drug use. This shows the Reagan campaign, the Just Say No, the Andean strategy, the Vice President's task force. This was reducing drug use among our youth, among our population, in very good fashion. It was put together, all of these initiatives, the certification law, and it worked. It was working. This is nothing that we made up, it is not a partisan poster. Then we had President Bush, and he continued the same policies through to the end of his term. We saw continued dramatic declines in prevalence of drug use, period. This formula works. A balanced formula of eradication, crop alternative at the source, interdiction as the drugs are coming up, give the information, surveillance, get them as the drugs leave their source country, and then involving the military or whoever to protect our borders as it gets closer to the borders; the Coast Guard, which also was dramatically cut. In 1992 and 1993, we see the beginning of the end of the war on drugs. Again, this is fact. It is just fact, pure and simple. The media probably would never print this chart. One would never see this on the evening news. Tonight I saw the evening news and they showed a little bit about how Peru and Bolivia went down in production. Of course, they did not say who did that or what policies instituted that change. They do not give us the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey says. One has to listen to myself and my colleagues tonight to hear that on the floor. Drug use just climbed, climbed, climbed with the Clinton administration. One could almost trace the gutting of the Drug Czar's office. We have the documentation. The slash of the Drug Czar's office was from 112 to 27. Now, how could one fight the war on drugs when we slash the command staff. I will say the Republicans have given Barry McCaffrey I believe 150 positions, he is fully staffed, but it has taken us a good period of time to get us back into the war on drugs. Mr. Speaker, 112 to 27. They cut source country and interdiction funding by 50 percent. We can almost see the actions here. Mr. Speaker, in 1993, appoint Jocelyn Elders Surgeon General who said to our children in the next generation, ``just say maybe'' instead of ``just say no.'' There are consequences from those actions. The next consequence is the information-sharing, the commentary from Torricelli, the Democrats who mention here, do not stop that. Look at how we see the increase there. In 1996 and 1997, blocking the aid to Colombia. Finally we see the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), first Mr. Zeliff and then our Speaker of the House taking over this responsibility and again, turning that ship around. We are just starting to see a slight downturn in these figures. That is with a $1 billion national education program. The President wanted to pay for all of those ads. I introduced legislation that said that they must donate them. We ended up with a compromise. The compromise does give us a $2 billion effort, $1 billion in public money, $1 billion in donated money. The success of that I do not know, and I cannot tell my colleagues today. We did preliminary hearings on the expenditures of one-third of $1 billion, and quite frankly, I am not pleased with everything I have seen. It is somewhat of an effort. But I will tell my colleagues one thing. When we go after production in the source country, we begin to stem some of the, not supply but glut; and that is what has happened with cocaine. Now we need to do the same thing with heroin and continue with the cocaine and hopefully, we will learn by the mistakes that were made in the past. Mr. Speaker, this is the history. It is pretty dramatic. The Republicans, I might say, what have they done? Well, we have restored the source country programs equivalent right now to 1992 dollars the cost-effective stop-drugs-at-their-source. If we know 100 percent of the cocaine is produced in coca in those three countries and it really cannot be produced in too many other areas, that makes a lot of sense to go after that. We know what we have done works because we have seen it work in Peru and Bolivia. I will say in Peru, President Fujimori was able to create stability in that Nation and then put these programs in place. The same thing President Pastrana in Colombia is going to do. That is why we are going to have to support that effort. I do not like that effort, I do not like spending taxpayer money there. But in comparison, a few billion dollars there; think of what this administration has squandered in deployments in forays around the world. In Somalia, which President Bush started as a humanitarian mission he escalated into the loss of, I believe, some 30 American lives; a $3 billion enterprise, a failure in Nation-building and putting our people in there. The Haiti experiment, which is an absolute disaster, it is a national and international disgrace that he would impose sanctions on the poorest of the nations in the entire hemisphere, spend billions of dollars to put more corrupt people in place, and now Haiti is one of the major drug trafficking areas in the entire Caribbean, not to mention that much of the billions of dollars went to institution- building that failed. Then, to send our troops to Bosnia, to send our troops to Kosovo. Great international humanitarian missions, probably $10 billion apiece. But there were very few civilian Americans killed in any of those incursions. Mr. Speaker, in 1997, 15,973 Americans died because of direct drug- related deaths. Mr. McCaffrey, our director of the Office of Drug Control Policy, said today that if we take the total figure in the last year, it is about 52,000. Speaker Hastert, who spoke to our international drug summit for dinner the other evening when we convened that meeting and he spoke, he said that if we had 15,000 troops in any conflict anywhere who were killed in one year, that people would demand action. Unfortunately, these are silent deaths. Unfortunately, these are young people in our community. What is interesting, it has not stopped. It used to be just the urban centers, the ghetto. These were sort of the community rejects and they were injecting heroin or doing crack or cocaine, and it was not really covered; nobody really cared. They just sort of looked the other way. They were drug addicts; they were bad. Then it spread to our suburban communities and now it has awakened part of America. The most recent statistics are, and should be, alarming to every Member of Congress and every American. It has not only spread from the urban setting and the core of our cities to the suburbs, but the latest statistics just released in the past few weeks this year indicate that our rural areas are now plagued by the worst narcotics epidemic they have ever seen. So we have managed in 7 years to see the problem of narcotics spread to every element of our society. Those 15,700 from 1997, and I am sure were in the 16 thousands in the past year, are all sort of nameless, but they are someone's child; they are someone's loved one, and they are human beings who it is our responsibility to protect. Now, if we cannot expend this money and get the funds to fight this war on drugs, a few dollars towards the international effort in Southeast Asia where we know those drugs are produced and do it cooperatively with the United Nations where we do not have relations with those countries, a few dollars in South America, the alternative is really the most expensive solution which the administration has gone for. That is treatment of the wounded in battle. Now, one would think that hearing tonight, and I saw the national news, that Republicans did not spend more money on treatment, the entire strategy of this administration has been to put the money on treatment. Could we imagine dismantling the command center in a war, stopping the information in war, not going after the targets in a war, not providing resources to fight a war, cutting back any of the aid and ammunition in a war, and just treating the wounded in a battle. That is exactly the philosophy, it is exactly the strategy, and it has been a failed strategy in communities like Baltimore. Baltimore had a liberal mayor up until just recently who said, just do it; we will have needle exchange; we will have all of these liberal programs. Baltimore went from almost no heroin addicts or drug addicts and a large population, the population was approaching 1 million, it is now down to about 600,000. One in 10 people, a city council member has recently been quoted in Baltimore saying 1 in 8 individual citizens of Baltimore, Maryland is a drug addict. Now, that is the liberal approach. The liberal mayor with his liberal policies just left. If we look at other cities, but let us go back to Baltimore for a second. Most major cities that have adopted zero tolerance like New York and Los Angeles, even Richmond, who have adopted tough prosecution, tough enforcement policies, zero tolerance, have dramatic reductions in deaths. The statistics we have seen from Baltimore were 312 in one year, I think in 1997, and 312 in 1998. I do not have 1999 figures, but I guarantee they have not gone down. The rest of the Nation is where we have zero tolerance. So we have 60,000, one in eight. Imagine the United States of America adopting this liberal policy that Baltimore did. One in eight Americans as a drug addict. Could we imagine the societal costs, the cost to families, the cost to the economy of the Nation. It would be astronomical. Now, that is one model we can look at. The New York model, zero tolerance, tough prosecution. I went up during recent months to visit a program that Mayor Giuliani put into place, DTAP, a prosecution program, tough prosecution program that tied in with an effective treatment program, one of the most effective I have seen anywhere in the Nation. Here is a mayor, an elected executive who inherited one of the most crime-ridden towns in America where most people would not walk on the streets with over 2,200 deaths when he took office, the year he took office, and through a zero tolerance, through a tough prosecution program, 600 deaths in New York City. This is a successful program. This is an area where they have successful treatment. I sat with addicts, and one of the addicts was 38 years old and had spent half of his lifetime in prison. Had no hope before the program instituted by the mayor and the prosecutors in that area. No hope. Another individual, I talked to his wife, had died of a heroin overdose. He was a heroin addict, and the story went on and on. No successful programs. No tough enforcement. This does work. Richmond, people talk about gun violence, and I was glad that the President came just behind us and talked about gun violence. Now, I believe very strongly in Second Amendment rights, and I heard the President talk about tough prosecution. We have asked for tough enforcement of gun laws. We have countless gun laws. Washington, D.C. has the toughest gun laws. Guns are banned in Washington, D.C. Today, this community buried a young couple the day after Valentine's Day who were massacred, slaughtered on the streets, I think they were 17 year- old sweethearts in this community, a community with every restriction one could possibly have. But we know that tough enforcement works. We know that Project Exile, which they adopted in Richmond, which was plagued by record numbers of deaths, but tough prosecution of existing gun laws worked, and we cut the murders dramatically in Richmond, where people could not walk in their neighborhood, in the street. We know the Giuliani method is successful, and that tough prosecution does work. Our hearing today, in addition to the drug czar, had as a witness an individual who has done an outstanding job, General Wilhelm, who is in charge of the Southern Command. He has done a great job, in spite of an administration that is not interested in having the military work in any way on the war on drugs, and has had to be drug, really, into this new restarted national strategy. General Wilhelm has done an outstanding job in piecing together our Southern Command. Our Southern Command has been in charge of the surveillance information. Our military does not go after, in a law enforcement manner, drug traffickers. What they do is provide surveillance intelligence information, and that is passed on to our allies, who are really the best suited to go after drug traffickers in their own communities and states and nations, and drugs, at their source most cost-effectively. Again, this administration could not have bungled things more. We were basically removed from Panama, and we knew we had to be out of Panama. We were unsuccessful, the administration was, in negotiating, keeping our drug surveillance operations at Howard Air Force Base, so last May all flights stopped out of there. One of the problems we have had is we have had an absolute wide open corridor for narcotics traffickers to come in through this drug- producing region. Again, the most cost-effective way, stop drugs at their source, where they are grown, eradicate them; next, interdict them as they come out. The glut we are seeing is because Howard Air Force Base was closed down May 1. We turned over those assets to the Panamanians. We have had to relocate in Ecuador, and it will cost us probably $100 million before we are through. We finally signed a permanent agreement, I think a 10-year lease on that airport there. Right now the airfield is in such bad shape that the equipment cannot take off and land that we need. Aruba is another location we have had to look at moving those assets to. In the meantime, today we are probably only flying 35, 40 percent of the strategic missions to detect and monitor drug trafficking. In a report which I requested from GAO, and we held a hearing just a week or two ago, it was ``Assets DOD Contributes to Reducing Illegal Drug Supplies Have Declined.'' This is a real indictment of the administration in dramatically decreasing the flights. From 1992 to 1995, the drug surveillance flights were reduced, according to this report, by 68 percent. The maritime efforts, anti-narcotics efforts, were reduced some 62 percent. What is even scarier is, according to General Wilhelm, in this report, and he did testify today, the Southern Command Commander, they can only detect 60 percent of the key routes in the drug trafficking area about 15 percent of the time. Mr. Speaker, if Members want to be even more concerned, the over-the- horizon radar that was supposed to be in place next month to supplant some of this lost capability is further delayed for installations. The good news is some of the drug-tethered balloons, air balloons that we have in surveillance around our coasts, I understand we have at least a commitment from the Air Force and from the Assistant Secretary of Defense where they will stay in place, although they were going to remove them. Again, it does not take much to figure out a good strategy in the war on drugs. We stop it at the source, eradicate it. Even President Nixon eradicated heroin. They have had various programs. They were reviewed at the International Drug Control Summit last week, and some were very successful, and China and Turkey and other countries. They have been able to eradicate them. We are not on a mission that will not succeed, but we must get the resources there. We must get the equipment there. We must aid our allies, who are willing to be partners in this effort, especially in Colombia, where we have a great leader in President Pastrana, who is trying to get his Nation back together. I submit, and it was confirmed by witnesses at our hearing today, the only reason the rebels are now in Sweden and in Europe and talking about serious peace settlement in Colombia is because the threat of the resources finally reaching there. It is sad that even until a few weeks ago, the three Black Hawk helicopters that we had requested, and again, Members saw the documents here back some 4 years, 5 years ago, that finally arrived the end of last year, and it is unbelievable, they arrived without proper armor. Today we were told that the armor that was sent does not fit on all of the helicopters, so some of these are sent in nonstrategic but support missions. Some are up and flying, but not in the proper fashion that Congress had intended. In addition, the ammunition and mini-guns and other resources to get to the national police, who are anti-narcotics officers in Colombia, still have not all arrived. It is unbelievable, but I believe confirmed that half the ammunition was inadvertently delivered during the Christmas holidays to the loading dock at our State Department; again, the gang that cannot seem to shoot straight in getting this drug situation under control. Again, it is not rocket science. Almost all of it is coming from Colombia. Seventy-five percent of the heroin coming into the United States, over 75 percent of the cocaine is now sourced there. Some of it does transit through Mexico, but if we stop it at its source cost- effectively, we do not have to have 10,000 Border Patrol people there. Even today I see they are becoming threatened with bounties put on their heads by these reckless drug traffickers. Again, we can win this. We can win it cost-effectively. We have to learn by our mistakes. It must be an international effort, a little bit of dollars, with the help of our friends, the European communities willing to put in more resources, because they also are becoming more victimized, just like the United States; with a little help to Colombia and with a little help from both sides of the aisle, not making the mistakes, joining in and saying, we are going to get those resources there, we are not going to wait. If this was Kosovo and we could not get the helicopters to Kosovo, it would be a disaster. If we could not have gotten the ammunition and the resources to our troops, and these are not our troops we are trying to supply, in the Gulf War, we would have had a disaster there. So we can start a real war against narcotics. We have thousands of lives at stake. Out there tonight in our districts are young people who are overdosing. Three or four times those who are killed in Columbine will die tomorrow as a result of drug overdoses in our community, and hundreds more, as the drug czar said today, will die from the scourge each day across our Nation. So we have a great responsibility to get our act together, make certain this administration fulfills the will of Congress, and that we get resources to those who can help us bring this situation under control.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.