John Mica

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to return to the floor in really the second half of this session of Congress to renew my continued efforts to bring to the attention of the Members of this body and the American people the problem that we as a Nation face in our tremendous problem of illegal narcotics and drug abuse that have ravished our land. Tonight I will probably begin my 20-something special order of the 106th Congress by first of all reviewing a little bit of what has taken place in some of the omissions of the President in his State of the Union Address, particularly in regard to the threat we face as a Nation from illegal narcotics. Then I would like to focus a bit on a General Accounting Office report that I requested last year which is on drug control. It was released a few weeks ago, the end of the last year, in December. It is entitled ``Assets That DOD Contributes to Reducing the Illegal Drug Supply Have Declined.'' I will speak about that particular report that I requested, along with one of my colleagues from the other body. Tonight again I think it is important that I cover and the Congress pay attention to items relating to illegal narcotics and drug abuse that were not mentioned by the President of the United States, and as this problem affects our state of the Union. Just a few days ago, last week, the President took the podium behind me and he gave only glancing lines, one or two lines, a sentence or two, in a very lengthy presentation to the Congress and the American people on the State of the Union, and in particular, with regard to illegal narcotics and drug abuse. I will try to fill in some of the gaps in what really is probably the most serious problem facing us as a Nation, the most difficult social and judicial problem that we face, and one that I have a small responsibility in trying to develop a policy for in the Congress, particularly in the House of Representatives, as chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources. I think that anyone who just takes a few minutes to look at social problems facing us has to be struck by the sheer magnitude of the illegal narcotics problem. Since President Clinton took office in 1993, and he did not mention these figures, nearly 100,000 Americans have lost their lives as a direct result of illegal narcotics, overdoses and activities related to illegal narcotics and drug abuse. That is only the tip of the iceberg because there are many, many tens of thousands of other deaths related to illegal narcotics that are not even reported in statistics and in the numbers that I have cited. Just in the most recent reporting period, over 15,900 Americans lost their lives as a result of narcotics in our land. The problem is not diminishing, the problem is in fact growing. That is confirmed by just about every statistical report our subcommittee has received, and also by the sheer facts that we see in picking up our daily newspapers, whether it is in our Nation's Capital, Washington, D.C., or throughout this land. This problem we did not hear the President talk about has resulted in the incarceration of an unprecedented number of Americans, with over 1.9 million Americans in jail today. It is estimated 60 to 70 percent of those individuals behind bars are there because of drug-related offenses. The toll goes on and on. The most recent statistic cited in this GAO report has identified $110 billion in costs to our economy. And if all the costs related with this social problem are added up, it could be as much as $250 billion a year. So the cost is dramatic. The cost in dollars is dramatic, but the cost in destroyed lives across this land is absolutely incredible. Mr. Speaker, it is something to talk to parents who have lost a young life and drugs, illegal narcotics particularly, impact our youth population. But to try to understand the agony of people that must deal with addiction, the agony of people that have young or adult individuals in their family hooked on illegal narcotics, the ravages that this has done to our economy and what could otherwise be productive lives is just untold. So we have a problem that has been swept under the table. It was not mentioned by the President in his address, but again except a glancing and I think talking briefly about aid to Colombia, and I will talk about that very shortly. But we got into this particular situation not by accident, I believe, because in the 1980s under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan and President George Bush, we began a decline. At that point we had a cocaine epidemic and drug epidemic in the early 1980s that we were beginning to get under control. If we look at the statistics, we see clear evidence that, in fact, drug use and prevalence of drugs, particularly among our young people was on the decline. That there was, in fact, a war on drugs in the 1980s and the beginning of 1989. Mr. Speaker, that multifaceted and comprehensive program was, in fact, dismantled beginning in 1993 with the Clinton administration taking office. Very purposefully, the President began dismantling that effort. Some of that dismantling is detailed in this report that I requested. And, again, not my statistics, but actual statistics compiled by and information compiled independently by the General Accounting Office we will go over a bit tonight. But the first thing that was done was the dismantling of the drug czar's office which was slashed from 120 staffers to 20 staffers. I ask, how can we conduct a war or a concentrated effort against narcotics, against the scourge of drugs by slashing the command structure? I say that is impossible, but that was the very first step in this process. The next step, and I brought these charts up before, but let me just bring them out again, was dramatic declines starting in 1992-93, here we see dramatic declines in drug spending for international programs. Now, many people might wonder what international programs are. International programs would be stopping drugs at their source. So this war on drugs or fighting a war on drugs is not really rocket science. It does not take somebody years and years to develop a strategy, because we know that 100 percent of the cocaine that is produced, I will say 99.5 percent of it that is produced, there might be a little bit somewhere else, but we know that it is produced in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia. Again, not rocket science. We know that it is very cost-effective for a source country eradication program to deal with the problem. We tried it and if we eliminate drugs where they are grown, coca that produces cocaine in a limited area of the world where it can be grown, we do not have a lot of cocaine production. Simple. We also know that today some 65 to 70 percent of the heroin produced in the world that is on our streets, and we know factually that it is on our streets from the fields of Colombia, comes from, in fact, Colombia. We know where the heroin comes from that is spilling over in unbelievable quantities on our streets and throughout our communities. The reason that we have incredible supply of drugs in this country is basically because in 1993-1994, during the Clinton administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress, they made a very direct decision to cut these cost-effective eradication crop alternative and drug programs in source countries. Actually, this chart shows the 1995-96, the period the new majority and Republicans took over, that we have begun to restore funds. If we use 1992 dollars in 1999, we are just about back to the 1995 levels. The same thing happened in interdiction. Let me put this chart up if I may. Again, we are going to stop and think about this. It is a common sense approach. If they cannot produce drugs and we stop them at their source, we have stopped some of the supply. Now, the next most cost- effective way to stop illegal narcotics and a huge supply from reaching our streets is simple. It is to stop it as it is leaving the source where it is produced. That can be very cost-effectively done, as the Reagan administration demonstrated and the Bush administration, with interdiction programs. We brought the military into the process in the 1980's, not for our military to be law enforcement officers, not for them to conduct combat against illegal narcotics traffickers, but to provide surveillance intelligence information. Now, first of all we have to realize that our military is conducting this around the world all the time. I must admit some of our resources have been strained to the limit because this President has deployed more forces in various deployments throughout the world than probably any President in the history of the Nation. But in any event, we have in this arena for the most part military, and we have resources in this area. So what they have been supplying is intelligence, surveillance, and information. That is the interdiction program heart and soul. Now, again, using the military in this fashion, again, 1993, we see a dramatic reduction. In fact, a 50 percent slash. This GAO report which I will cite tonight details even more what took place. It is pretty startling what took place about taking the military and our assets out of this effort. Again, if we look back here in the Republican administration actually, the Republican control of the House of Representatives and the other body in 1995-96, we began to restore the funds. And, again, because of 1992 dollars versus 1999 dollars, we are just about back at those levels. But, in fact, it has been very difficult to put together those resources. Again, in interdiction programs also with a Department of Defense, which this report outlines that has not really been willing to cooperate, and an administration, starting with the Commander in Chief who has not wanted to conduct a real cost-effective and targeted war on illegal narcotics. So, again, stopping drugs at the source is most cost-effective, and then the second most cost-effective thing is getting the drugs as they are coming from the source. What is interesting too is that practice, and what I am talking about in interdiction really does not require forces of the United States to go after these. These would be primarily giving intelligence and working in a cooperative international effort with countries like Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia where the heroin and cocaine is produced. We then allow them, and they have, except where the administration has blocked the information and the intelligence, gone after the drug traffickers, in some cases shot them down or had the information and the surveillance fed to them so that they could cost effectively go after drugs as they came from the source but before they reached our border. Now, this administration has picked the least cost-effective way of going after the war on drugs in my opinion. In 1992 or 1993, they began an effort to, in fact, put most of our war on drugs in the treatment category. Most of the expenditures from the Congress were dedicated or redirected towards treatment. Now, treatment by itself is very necessary, but alone it will not solve the problem. And it is very costly and sometimes fairly ineffective, particularly public sponsored treatment programs which have a 60 to 70 percent failure rate. I compare this a little bit, if one is going to conduct a war, they target the source, which was not done by the Clinton administration. Then one tries to get at the target as the destruction comes from the source, which is interdiction. This method of the Clinton administration has been pretty much just treating the wounded in the battle, and that is those who were afflicted by illegal narcotics. In fact, we have almost doubled since 1993 the amount of money for treatment. Now, the President also came up with his 100,000 cops on the street and put the Congress in a bind to fund those. We have funded those. I submit tonight that that is probably one of the most costly approaches to fighting this war on drugs. And we can continue to put cops on the street, it can be effective. Tough enforcement can be very effective. But it is a costly way of doing it, as opposed to putting a few dollars at the source country to stop drugs before they ever get to the street. The difficulty is once they reach our borders, illegal narcotics, it is almost impossible for all the law enforcement agencies at every level, whether it is local, State or national, to get all the drugs; particularly in the huge quantities that are coming across our borders, again, because the drugs have not been stopped at their source. So there has been, in my estimation, a major flaw in the whole strategy of the Clinton administration and really a misappropriation of resources in this effort. The results are pretty dramatic. In fact, let me leave this interdiction chart up here. Let me show here the long- term trend and lifetime prevalence of heroin use. As we see in the Reagan and Bush administration, there is some activity here and a decline, activity, and a decline. With the institution of the Clinton- Gore policy in 1992-93 here, this is where it would take effect, we see a dramatic rise in the prevalence of heroin use. It is amazing how this chart, if we took it and had an overlay of the previous two charts, would show, again, the failure of the current drug policy of this administration. That is probably why President Clinton did not want to talk about it the other night when he came before the Congress. We see here a slight decline, and that is with the advent of a Republican-controlled policy and the beginning of our trying to get resources back in place. One of the problems we have here is the Clinton administration blocking assistance to Colombia. It was their policy that got us into a situation where the President next week is going to make a request to the Congress for $1.5 or $1.6 billion. Now, he sort of mumbled over the situation in Colombia, but Colombia, in his term of office, has become the major producer of cocaine and heroin. Again, in 1992-1993, there was almost no coca production in Colombia. Almost no heroin production. Almost zip in Colombia. And what the President did through very direct actions, and I will be glad to detail them for the House of Representatives, he actually began the increase of heroin and cocaine production in Colombia. The first step was in 1994. And having served in the House of Representatives during the 1993-1994 period, let me detail what took place. I served on the committee that oversaw drug policy. I was in the minority at that time. I personally requested and had 130-plus Members, Republicans and Democrats, request a hearing on this change that the Clinton administration had made, on the Clinton's so-called drug policy, the changes that were made. Because I saw then the beginning of a disaster. That request was ignored. One hearing was held. One hearing specifically on the drug policy. There were cursory hearings on the budget items. In contrast, when the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, we held dozens and dozens of hearings, both under Mr. Zeliff, who chaired the subcommittee with drug policy responsibility, and then under the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who is now the Speaker of the House and former chairman who was involved in restarting most of the anti-narcotics effort in the Congress, and particularly in the House of Representatives as chair of that subcommittee. But the first step in this disaster and how we were going to end up, the taxpayers of this country, with a $15.5, $1.6 billion next week, is that on May 1, 1994, the sharing of drug trafficking intelligence and information with the governments of Peru and Colombia ceased. This was a, and I am sorry to put this into the Record, but a cockamamie plan and decision by the administration and out of the Department of Defense under the Clinton administration, that we would cease sharing intelligence information with Colombia. Actually, this raised the ire on both sides of the aisle. And I remember meeting the President at the Hemispheric Conference in Miami. He was inundated by protest from Members on both sides of the aisle, and in a closed-door meeting he said he did not know that this had taken place. In fact, the administration fought us in trying to restart this effort, claiming they needed additional legislative authority. And I might say that the House of Representatives and the Congress did act. And a GAO report in May of 1994 said the decision of the administration to not share this information with Colombia made life easier for drug traffickers. But Congress did step in, passed a law that would require the administration to provide intelligence and information. And even then, after that took place and the damage that was done from that, the administration continued to block aid and assistance to Colombia. Incidentally, in January of 1995, under heavy pressure from both Democrats and Republicans, the intelligence sharing was resumed. The problem was again in actions by the administration, this administration, to cut off assistance to Colombia so it could effectively bring a halt to narcotics trafficking and narcoterrorism in its country. In 1995 to 1996, I remember writing a request to the administration and to others to try to get aid to that country. In 1997, critically needed law enforcement assistance, such as helicopters, to replace those shot down; defensive ammunition and ballistic protective equipment was delayed by the Department of Defense. I also brought, and was able to find, a letter dated August 25, 1994, asking the then drug czar to respond to Mr. Clinger about information, intelligence sharing, with the governments of Colombia. And this was in response to protests from Congress about the policy that the administration had adopted dealing with providing that needed intelligence information to Colombia. I just thought it was interesting that we have good documentation of showing exactly how this administration and various agencies thwarted every attempt of the Congress and request of the Congress to get needed critical equipment to Colombia. Unfortunately, the policy of decertifying Colombia as not participating in the war on drugs was inappropriately handled by the administration. Having dealt in the development of that law in the 1980s, there is a provision in decertification law to allow the President, when they consider whether a country should be eligible for aid and assistance, to grant a national interest waiver so that assistance, such as counternarcotics aid, can get to that country. The administration failed to implement the waiver and kept any type of assistance in the war on drugs from reaching Colombia during a critical period. So first we take away information sharing up to 1995, and then from 1995 into 1998 we decertify Colombia and not make it eligible in a manner that could be done with a waiver to get aid and assistance so they could find narcoterrorism and drug production and trafficking in that country. The results are absolutely incredible. As I said, now we have 65 to 75 percent of the heroin that enters the United States coming from Colombia. We have a majority of the cocaine produced in Colombia today. And again, some 6 or 7 years ago Colombia was not even in the production business of either of these hard narcotics. Tonight I wanted to focus on a report that I requested, and requested it last year with the Senate caucus chairman on International Narcotics Control, the Honorable Charles Grassley. This report, prepared by the GAO, details exactly what we suspected about this administration's policy. The GAO report is entitled ``Assets DOD Contributes to Reducing the Illegal Drug Supply Have Declined.'' The report details some of that decline, and again the Clinton administration's dismantling of anything that could be termed even close to a war on drugs. The report states, in fact on page 4, the number of flight hours dedicated to detecting and monitoring illicit drug shipments declined from approximately 46,000 to 15,000, or a 68 percent decline from 1992 through 1999. Likewise, the GAO report says that the number of shipped days declined from about 4,800 to 1,800, or 62 percent over the same period. Again, this report details a dismantling of any type of an effort that might even be termed close to a war on drugs. The decline in DOD assets that DOD uses to carry out its counter-drug responsibility is, according to this report, due to a lower priority assigned to the counter-drug mission and, secondly, they say, to reduction in defense budgets and force levels. Now, I might say that most of the reductions, and we looked at the interdiction, most of the reductions to the war on drug effort were instituted in 1993-1994 by a Democrat-controlled Congress. Only in the last several years have we been able to up the spending in the defense category. And even some of the money that we have appropriated for anti-narcotics efforts has been diverted, according to this report. And even some of the assets have been diverted to other deployments, according to this report, such as Kosovo, Haiti, and other activities directed by the President. The GAO report also is very critical of DOD's really basic activities or commitments in the war on drugs. It says that DOD has failed to develop measures to assess the effectiveness of its counter-drug activities and recommends that such a system of measuring the effectiveness of its counter-drug activities be instituted. DOD officials noted that the level of counter-drug assets will continue to be restrained by DOD's requirement to satisfy other priorities. So basically, drugs have not become a priority. It is also interesting to see the results of the change in policy by the administration. And again I just want to show what has taken place since 1980 with Ronald Reagan and the long-term trend in lifetime prevalence of drug use. In the 1980s we see the beginning of a decline down through the end of President Reagan's term, and on down to a bottom when President Bush left office. The policy adopted by this administration, back again in 1993, with the election of President Clinton and Vice President Gore, shows a steep return to the prevalence of drug use. And this is lifetime drug use. If we took this chart and just showed our youth, the statistics are even more dramatic. Now, this report that again I bring before the House tonight, the GAO report on the decline of our military assets in the war on drugs, has some startling information and comments. I want to take them right out of the report. According to General Wilhelm, and General Wilhelm is the general in charge of SOUTHCOM, SOUTHCOM is the Southern Command, which is in charge really of this surveillance operation, the detection and interdiction effort. According to General Wilhelm, the Southern Command commander, the Command can only detect and monitor 15 percent of key routes in the overall drug trafficking area about 15 percent of the time. And this is in the report, and I met with General Wilhelm during the recess and he confirmed this statement. What is even of greater concern and should be a concern to every Member of Congress and every American citizen is not only have they closed down any semblance of the war on drugs and cost-effectively dismantled interdiction and we are down to this capability, but even as this report was written, we had the further damage done to this whole effort by the United States last May being dislodged from Howard Air Force base in Panama. Almost all of the operations for forward surveillance and forward operating locations in the war on drugs is located at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. All flights ceased last May 1. So we have had an incredible gap left wide. That is why we continue to see incredible amounts of heroin. And this is not the heroin of the 1980s that was 10 percent pure. This is the heroin of the 1990s that is now 70 and 80 percent pure. That is why we continue to see the death and destruction that we see. I come from an area that has had heroin overdose deaths, particularly among its young people, that now exceed the homicides in Central Florida. And I represent one of the most prosperous, well-educated districts in the Nation. So we have seen an incredible number of deaths. I met with local law enforcement officials and particularly the High Intensity Drug Traffic Area Group that I helped establish to deal with this problem of, again, drugs coming into our region in Central Florida. I met with them during the recess, and I was stunned to hear their commentary that the deaths have basically leveled out. We have still a record number of deaths but they have leveled out some. But the overdoses continue to explode. The only reason that the deaths are not greater in my area and other areas is that medical emergency treatment has become better in helping save young lives and people who suffer from drug overdose. That is sort of a sad commentary that we have even more overdoses, and the only way that we are really making any slight progress is through additional and swifter and better medical treatment for overdose folks. But if my colleagues want to know where the illegal narcotics are coming from, this basically says that the war on drugs was closed down in 1993 by the Clinton administration. It does not paint a very pretty picture and I know that people are not happy to see this by the commander of our Southern Command who is in charge of that effort, but that basically is what has taken place. The report is even more disturbing in that in this chart we conducted a hearing the morning of the President's State of the Union address on January 27 and had DOD, the Coast Guard, and U.S. Customs come in, whose activities are also detailed in this record, but we use this chart and it is taken right from the report again and it shows that in the blue here it shows the requested assets of the Department of Defense by SOUTHCOM. So our commander who is in charge of the interdiction, the important part of keeping drugs from our shores, requested, and these are his requests in blue and part of the graph here in red is what asset he received from DOD. So we see the requests here again in blue and the red is actually what he got. This is even more disheartening because Congress has put more money into defense and defense in this administration are providing fewer and fewer assets in the war on drugs. Now, I take great exception to anyone who tells me that the war on drugs is a failure. Because the war on drugs, and I can bring back the chart of the Clinton administration and the Bush-Reagan administration, here, my colleagues, is the failure. It is very evident. This details exactly what took place. That is the failure. And how in heaven's name can Congress appropriate additional money to DOD, and we have appropriated some of the first increases since again the fall of communism and the Berlin Wall to defense. Now, I know a lot of that has been diverted to Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia, but even in this scenario it is just unbelievable that very few assets and the policy of this administration has diverted assets again from this effort. Now they are coming forward with an emergency appropriation for Colombia. The situation in Colombia, as I said, was really generated by direct policy decisions of this administration, and we are now going to pay for them in a very big way with a very big tab. But this shows again the lack of putting any real cost-effective method of fighting illegal narcotics. This chart, and I will hold it up for just a minute, shows the decline in the assets that DOD contributes to reducing illegal drugs. And in this chart, this center red here shows DOD decline. A little bit of the slack has been taken up since 1995 by the Coast Guard, which is in this line, I believe it is green, you are dealing with a color blind Member of Congress; and this blue line here is the total assets contributed. So some of the slack has been taken up by the Coast Guard and also by U.S. Customs. That is the only reason things are not even worse today even with the commitment that the new majority has made since 1995 in the war on drugs. And again this is the result of what we see today. And these are the latest statistics on heroin. This is provided to me by DEA, our Drug Enforcement Agency, and they can tell us because of scientific analysis, just like DNA analysis, where heroin is coming from. We know South America, and this is all Colombia, 65 to 70 percent is coming from there. What is scary here is the chart I got from 1997 shows Mexico, which again in the early 1990s was a very very small producer of heroin, is now a 17-percent producer. And that is also I think directly as a result of this administration's policy of give Mexico every possible trade benefit, give Mexico every possible financial benefit, give Mexico access to our financial and international assistance programs, and get nothing in return. And what we have gotten in return is an increase in heroin produced in that country. And then southeast Asia produces about 14 percent. But the bulk of the heroin that we have seen that is flooding into our streets and our communities, and we have to remember that this red portion would not even have appeared in the early 1990s has been as a direct result of not targeting, going after, the source of illegal narcotics and again in a very cost effective way. Now, you may say can that be effective. Let me say, since 1995 when we took over, I went with Mr. Zeliff and then also with the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) who chaired this subcommittee into Peru and Bolivia. We met with President Fujimori, we met with Hugo Banzer Suarez and other leaders of those countries and asked what will it take to reduce cocaine production. And we got small amounts of money, it is almost insignificant in the amounts of money that we are spending and the impact on our economy, but somewhere between $20 million or $40 million out of $178 billion to those countries. In 2 years of work and 2 years of planning, we have been able to reduce the cocaine production in Bolivia by 53 percent and by almost 60 percent in Peru, which is absolutely remarkable. So very little money has helped curtail that. Now, there is one problem that we have seen, and in fact that is production of cocaine, and this is from one of the newspapers just a few days ago, January 19 in an Associated Press, ``Cocaine Production Surges in Colombia.'' Why is it surging in Colombia? Because the resources that Colombia has requested still have not gotten to Colombia, the resources that this Congress appropriated to Colombia. We appropriated $300 million to Colombia in the last fiscal year, which ended in December. We are into October in a new fiscal year. To date, this administration has continued to block or bungle getting aid to Colombia. The record is just unbelievable. Now, my colleagues may have heard that Colombia is now the third largest recipient of United States foreign assistance. Well, that would be all well and great and factual if they got that money. But, in fact, the record of this administration in blocking and thwarting and bungling getting aid to Colombia is just unbelievable. Our hearing helped detail some of that. Our closed-door meetings with the Department of Defense, Department of State and other agencies indicated a horrible job and failure in getting assistance there. Let us take a minute and look at what has happened with the $300 million that Congress appropriated in the past fiscal year. Where is that money? Less than $100 million, a third of that, is actually in Colombia today. Most of $100 million, or one-third of that, is in the form of three Blackhawk helicopters. It is absolutely unbelievable. It is mind boggling. Every Member of Congress should be contacting the Department of State tomorrow and asking why those helicopters that we have given to and asked for for 3 or 4 years and finally gotten down to Colombia late last fall are still not flying because they do not have protective armor, they do not have ammunition to even conduct combat or participate in the war on drugs. What an incredible bungling. We did not hear anything about that from the President when he spoke at the podium last week. We will not hear about that next week when the President asks for $1.5 or $1.6 billion of hard-earned taxpayer money. We will not also hear the incredible story, I do not have this totally documented but I am told by staff that during the holidays when everyone was concerned about the terrorist threat and everything, that the ammunition that was to be delivered years ago and requested and appropriated partly through the $300 million and even promised before that as surplus material for the war on drugs to Colombia, the ammunition was delivered to the back door loading dock of the State Department. This in fact is not only the administration that closed down the war on drugs, this is the administration that bungled the war on drugs. I do not mind putting whatever resource we can cost effectively into these countries to combat illegal narcotics. But what an incredible fiasco to find out that the helicopters that we paid for still are not conducting a war on drugs, to find out they are not armed, to find out they are idled, to find out that the ammunition we have requested time and time again cannot even be delivered to the country in an orderly and timely fashion. And what do we see? Cocaine production surges in Colombia. Now, I wonder why. This report also details an incredible story about a request from the United States Ambassador to Peru. Now, that would be a Clinton appointee. The U.S. Ambassador to Peru on page 17 and 18 of this report warned in an October 1998 letter to the State Department that the reduction in air support could have a serious impact on the price of coca and coca production in Peru. Here we put in place a very cost- effective and effective program and we have gotten a 60 percent reduction in cocaine and coca production in Peru. The Ambassador asked for assistance and warned that the reduction that is detailed here, the reduction that this administration has directed basically taking us out of this effort is going to result in additional coca production. I was stunned to learn by information provided to me at the Southcom briefing in Miami by our leaders down there that for the first time they are now seeing an increase in production of cocaine and coca in Peru again. It is incredible that we cannot get minimal resources and cost-effective resources to the source countries to stop illegal narcotics production and then get the drugs before they get to our shores, interdict them and at least provide the intelligence and surveillance information to countries that have the will like President Fujimora who instituted a shootdown policy. The drug dealers go up and they shot them down. Some people did not want us to provide that information to the government of Peru. Some people said that was cruel and unusual punishment on those drug dealers. I would like to take those who believe that and let them talk to the mothers and fathers in my district that have lost a young person to drug overdose. I would like to take them to the 15,900 Americans who just in 1 year to their families, the survivors who have lost a loved one and see what they think about this failed policy. I think it is also important to see what this policy has wrought on this Nation of late. Just during the recess in the last few days, there was a report, and actually this is from last week, this is January 27, ironically the same day the President stood a few feet from where I am now standing and talked to us about the State of the Union. He did not talk about the State of the Union in this headline: Drug Use Explodes in Rural America. Not only have our urban centers been decimated by illegal narcotics, not only has now our suburban area, the other parts of the country, and I represent a suburban area that had really not been victim here, but now, thanks to this great policy and this great failure, we have managed to make our rural areas a killing fields. The statistics are unbelievable. The percent of eighth graders who said they used a drug at least once, the highest percentage of this use in marijuana, cocaine, crack, heroin and amphetamines is now in our rural areas. We did not hear the President talk about that. Nor did we hear him talk about this failed policy. And now we know why, because the legacy of this administration to address the most serious social problem we face in our Nation, that is again destroying countless lives, that again is impacting our youth in every part of our country, metropolitan, suburban and now rural, we see why we have gotten ourselves into this situation by again failed policies. It is nice to talk about who failed, and I do not want to be partisan in that, but I think people must be held accountable. I should also report that the Republican majority has begun to put this effort back together. We have begun to restore the cost-effective programs, the one I described in stopping cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia. We would like to restart it in Colombia, but we need an administration that is capable of at least delivering the resources to our allies in this effort and restarting a real war on drugs where the drugs are produced, where the drugs are coming from. Additionally, we have brought the Coast Guard back and United States customs and provided additional funding and resources. We are back up to the 1992-1993 funding levels for that. Now, we know that just restarting interdiction and source country programs is not the answer. I had proposed legislation that would require our media and particularly those broadcast media, because I know television, radio impact our lives and particularly our young people, influence their opinion more than just about anything today. But I had proposed that they devote more of their time. In fact, we mandate that that time, public airtime be given to drug messages and not just at odd hours but throughout prime time. The President, of course, has had a different approach, which was spending, and he proposed expenditure and purchase of those. The compromise, and, of course, we must deal in a compromise situation to get anything done here because we have a great diversity and a very narrow majority, the compromise was a plan that combined my plan with the President's plan, and we have $1 billion appropriated for 3 years for drug education, we are 1 year into it, and the other part of the compromise was to have at least a match in donated time. We are 1 year into it. I am not real pleased with the beginning. I thought it was not a good start. Hopefully we will have even more effective drug and antinarcotics ads, education ads for our young people and adults, because it is important that education along with eradication, interdiction, enforcement and also treatment be part of a multifaceted approach. I look forward to working with my colleagues and bringing that multifaceted approach. I am pleased to report again on this issue to the Congress and the American people.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to come before the House. Although the hour is late, I think the subject is extremely important, and some of it will continue upon a dialogue that was begun in the last hour by the gentleman from California and the gentlewoman from Wisconsin on the subject of Colombia. I do chair in the House of Representatives the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, and have attempted this year, almost on a weekly basis, to come to the floor of the House and spend part of a Tuesday evening, when we have the extensive time granted to Members to discuss issues up until the magic hour of midnight. I have used that time to speak on what I consider the biggest social and criminal justice and health policy facing our Nation, and that is the problem of illegal narcotics and drug abuse. Just as a wrap-up tonight, discussing some of the activities of our subcommittee, and I think it has had a very effective and also full schedule during 1999, we have held almost 30 hearings, and almost 20 of them on the topic of drug policy. I remember coming to Congress in 1993. From 1993 to 1995, when the other side controlled the House of Representatives, the White House, and the other body, during that period of time only one hearing was held in an oversight capacity on the topic of our national drug policy, and that is part of how we got ourselves into the situation we are in today with the dramatic increases in drug-induced deaths resulting from illegal narcotics and also from the incredible numbers we have in prison and also the societal problems and costs that we see that are incurred not only by Congress but to American families and parents throughout our land. So we have had, as I said, a full list of hearings. We have tried to cover a number of topics starting last January in my own district to assess the problem in central Florida and the area that I serve. I have repeatedly mentioned that central Florida is a very prosperous area of our Nation and it has been ravaged by illegal narcotics. Their headlines have blurted out this past year that drug deaths now exceed homicides. And the situation continues to be critical in spite of some of the solutions that we have put in place and steps that we have taken. It is a very difficult problem to solve. We have seen that. We do know that in some jurisdictions through some efforts there have been successes; and, in others, there have been failures. In February of this year, we asked one of those success stories to be heard before our subcommittee and we conducted a hearing that featured New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. And certainly of all the examples of successes in this country, no one has been more successful or more effective in curtailing illegal narcotics, crime, and certainly bringing the murder rate under control than Rudy Giuliani. In fact, when he became Mayor of New York some years ago, the average annual murders were around the 2,000 mark, in fact, in excess of 2,000. A 70 percent decline in the murder rate there has been achieved through a zero-tolerance and tough enforcement policy that has worked. Hopefully, the success story that we heard about there is being replicated. And we know that it is being replicated in other communities; and where it is, we have seen also some dramatic decreases in crime, violence, and narcotics use. Also important to our subcommittee and in developing the House's strategy for dealing with the problem of illegal narcotics, narcotics trafficking, is looking at the areas that bring drugs forth into our country into our borders; and we have spent several hearings back in February looking at the situation as far as Mexico. Seventy percent of the illegal narcotics coming into the United States transit through Mexico. We conducted a rather thorough review and oversight of our policy toward Mexico in advance of the President's requirement under law to certify Mexico as cooperating under again a Federal law that requires that certification that Mexico is cooperating with the United States to stop both the production and trafficking of illegal narcotics. In return for that certification and cooperation, a country under that law, whether it is Mexico or other countries, is eligible to receive benefits of the United States, either foreign assistance, financial assistance, financial support, votes in international organizations, and also they receive certain benefits as far as trade from the United States. That is once they are certified as fully cooperating. We did review the previous year's experience with Mexico and found some of their efforts lacking, in fact, reductions in seizures of both heroin and cocaine, and not really addressing some of the requests that the Congress had made some 2 years ago, including extraditing major drug kingpin traffickers; signing a maritime agreement, which they still have not done; allowing our DEA agents to protect themselves in their country, and that was based on the experience we had with one DEA agent murdered some years ago; and also enforcement of Mexican drug laws that were passed and money laundering laws that were passed that were, unfortunately, passed but not fully executed. We looked at all of the range of requests that this Congress had made 2 years ago to see if Mexico, in fact, had complied; and we found, in fact, their cooperation lacking. In fact, one of the most disturbing reports that we had from that hearing was, in fact, that Mexico, according to our United States Department of State, continues to be the primary haven for money laundering in Latin America. One of the things that was most disturbing about the actions of Mexico was that, while we had asked them to execute and enforce the laws that they had passed dealing with money laundering, we found instead hostility towards an investigation that the United States began in that country. That investigation was probably the largest money laundering investigation in the history of the United States Customs and certainly on the international scene and involved hundreds of millions of dollars that we know came from drug money laundering. This undercover operation was the largest money laundering sting in the history of the United States. As it ended up, 40 Mexicans and Venezuelan bankers, businessmen, and suspected drug cartel members were arrested and 70 others indicted as fugitives. The United States officials at the time of our preliminary work on this investigation and during the investigation, did not fully inform Mexican counterparts of the operation because they feared Mexican corrupt officials might endanger our agents' lives. However, they were kept abreast generally of the operation. Three of Mexico's most prominent banks, Bancomer, Banc Serfin, and Banc Confia, were implicated in this investigation. This investigation also revealed some startling facts about what is going on in Mexico. One of our senior United States Customs agents who led the Casa Blanca probe declared that corruption had reached the highest levels of the Zedillo government, the current government, when he implicated the Minister of Defense of Mexico, Enrique Cervantes. In June of 1998, the Mexican Government advised the United States it would prosecute United States Customs agents and informers who took part in Operation Casa Blanca. So rather than cooperate with the United States, Mexico threatened to indict and arrest the United States officials involved in that operation. In February of this year, 1999, a Mexican judge denied the extradition of five Mexican bankers that the United States had requested for their role in operation Casa Blanca. In fact, extradition continues to be a very sore point in relations between the United States and Mexico. Last week, I reported that we met with the attorney general and the foreign minister of Mexico here in Washington in what was, I believe, the seventh high level working group that included our drug czar, other high level officials in our administration, the secretary, under secretary for international narcotics matters, and officials from various United States agencies and numerous Members of both the House and the other body. At the top of our request list again to Mexico was a question of extradition, not only in the Casa Blanca case, but to date United States officials have 275 pending requests for extradition with Mexico. To date, Mexico has not extradited a single kingpin drug or illegal narcotics trafficker despite requests. Mexico has only approved 42 extradition requests since 1996. Of 20 of the extradition requests that Mexico has approved, there has only been one of those who has been a Mexican citizen. No major drug kingpin from Mexico who is a Mexican national again has been indicted to date. In June of this past year, our subcommittee did hold another hearing on Mexico's cooperation on the question of extradition. The title of that hearing is, Is Mexico a Safe Haven for Murderers and Drug Traffickers? Particularly we looked into the case brought to the attention of the subcommittee and the Congress of a suspected murderer, Mr. Del Toro, who was suspected of murder, very heavily implicated in the death of a Sarasota, Florida, woman, a terrible death in which this woman was murdered and the body was left with her two young children. That individual, even though his name is Del Toro, was a U.S. citizen, fled to Mexico and was granted temporary refuge there. I am pleased that after our June 23 hearing, that Mexico did extradite Mr. Del Toro and he is now sitting in jail in Florida awaiting justice in our system. We have made some progress, but again to date not one single major drug kingpin who is a Mexican national has been extradited. This is all in spite of the fact that on November 13, 1997, the United States and Mexico signed a protocol to the current extradition treaty. Now, this protocol, basically the outline and agreement for extradition, has been ratified by the United States Senate but is currently still being delayed by the Mexican Senate. They have failed to act on that and, as I said, they also have failed to act on the signing or reaching a maritime agreement of cooperation. I am pleased that this year we have some indication of increased seizures of cocaine and heroin by Mexican officials, in cooperation with the United States officials. That is some good news. Some bad news is that we have just received additional information on the signature heroin program. I have had before this chart that showed, and I think we can see it here, 14 percent of the heroin coming into the United States, was coming, in 1997, from Mexico. We know this is pretty accurate, because these tests that are done by DEA are almost a DNA sampling and can almost trace this heroin to the fields from which the heroin originates. Unfortunately, I just received this chart last week of the 1998 seizures of heroin in the United States. This shows that Mexico has jumped from 14 to 17 percent of the heroin entering the United States, comes from Mexico. That does not sound like much, 14 to 17 percent, but it is about a 20 percent increase. What is startling, too, is in the early 1990's, we were in the single digits in production, primarily black tar heroin from Mexico. The other scary thing, of all the heroin that is coming into the United States is the purity levels that were in the low teens, as far as the purity of heroin is now coming in from both Mexico, South America and other sources is a very high purity level, sometimes 80, 90 percent. So what we have is more production from Mexico, more production from South America, in particular Colombia, and more production of a very deadly heroin, and that is one reason why we have the epidemic of heroin deaths both in my district and throughout the United States. We do have some serious problems with Mexico. We will continue from our subcommittee to monitor their cooperation. We have that responsibility. Our primary responsibility, of course, is stopping drugs at their source, interdicting drugs before they come into the United States. That really is something that we have tried to closely examine, how effective that has worked. In the past, and I have held up some of these charts before, particularly in the Reagan administration and the Bush administration, the United States Federal Government, as we can see by this chart, up to 1993 with the Clinton administration, had continually addressed proper funding and spending for international programs. International programs are stopping drugs at their source. Basically what happened is the War on Drugs was closed down in 1993 when the other side took over the House, the Senate and the White House, and Clinton policy really gutted all of these programs. That meant crop alternative programs, stopping drugs at their source, anything that dealt on the international level which again is a primary responsibility of the Federal Government was either slashed dramatically or these programs eliminated. Only now, in 1995, with the advent of the new majority have we really gotten ourselves back to the Reagan-Bush dollar levels of funding for the international programs. We can see some immediate success in several areas, particularly Peru and Bolivia where they have cut production of cocaine in Peru by some 60 percent, in Bolivia by over 50 percent just in several years. The one area where we have not had a reduction in narcotics trafficking and production, of course, is Colombia. The previous speakers, the gentleman from California, the gentlewoman from Wisconsin, talked about Colombia, and I think in somewhat nostalgic terms. I believe at least one of the speakers had participated in our Peace Corps and both are familiar with Colombia. We have a very serious problem with Colombia today. That problem did not happen overnight. That problem is a direct result of a policy, I believe, and we held a number of hearings in our subcommittee on the subject, and in the Congress there have been some 16 hearings on that subject that I am aware of, both in our subcommittee and other committees, including International Relations, on the problems relating to Colombia. Colombia is another example of the United States changing policy with the Clinton administration, ending the War on Drugs. They stopped the international programs, they stopped the interdiction programs, and this would be stopping drugs from the source to the United States borders. Again, we do not see a change in this policy getting us back to the level of funding that we had under the Reagan and Bush administration until up to the new majority taking control. Otherwise, we see a complete slash in stopping drugs at their source. And also interdicting drugs as they came from their source. In fact, one of the first actions of the Clinton administration was to cease providing intelligence information to Colombia on May 1, 1994. That was the beginning of our problems with Colombia, and from the time of this bad policy adoption, things have gone dramatically downhill in Colombia. That policy change created a gap that allowed drug flights and transit areas that were once denied to drug traffickers to open wide open. Only after the United States Congress intervened and identified this misstep did the Clinton administration, after some very harmful delays, resume intelligence-sharing. What is interesting, the next step was removal of some of the overflight and surveillance information, and I believe the Vice President was involved in some of those decisions to take some of our AWACs planes and other information, surveillance aircraft, and move them to different locations. Some, of course, went to other deployments of the Clinton administration. It is my understanding one AWACs was sent by the Vice President over Alaska to check for oil spills, as opposed to taking care of providing information to go after drug traffickers. In addition to going after drug traffickers, the other important thing has been to stem some of the violence, the narco-terrorist violence in Colombia. It is important that we pay attention to human rights, and that human rights violations do not go unpunished. President Pastrano, the new president of Colombia, has made incredible progress. Very few human rights violations by the military have been reported. The United States is also providing training to their military so that they are aware of human rights violations, and that they do conduct themselves as far as their military activities in compliance with international standards and basic human rights. However, the human rights of 30,000 Colombians were ignored in this period of time. That is how many Colombians have met their fate and their death as a result of narco-terrorism in their country, so tens of thousands have died. Over 4,000 police, public officials, and everyone from Members of their Congress to their Supreme Court, have been slaughtered, murdered, in what has taken place as lawlessness, and this terrorist insurgency has taken hold. What is even sadder is that 80 percent of all cocaine and 75 percent of all the heroin in the United States today comes from Colombia. If we looked at a chart back in 1992, 1991, we would see very little cocaine produced in Colombia. This administration, through its policy, again, of stopping information, of stopping resources getting to Colombia, and of denying assistance to Colombia to combat illegal narcotics, has allowed in some 6 or 7 years for Colombia to now become the largest cocaine producer in the world. It also went from almost a zero production of heroin or poppies to now providing, and I think the charts show, some 60 percent to 70 percent of all of the heroin coming into the United States we can very definitely identify as coming from Colombia. All this took place under the Clinton administration, and in spite of repeated pleas from both the minority, when we were in the minority, and since we have taken over, the majority to make certain that resources and assistance got to Colombia. What is absolutely incredible, as I stand before the House tonight, we still find ourselves faced with aid that we requested some years ago, with assistance that we appropriated in the previous fiscal year, still not getting to Colombia. If I have heard one thing once, I have heard it a thousand times. I have heard that the country of Colombia is the third largest recipient of the United States foreign aid. That is based on a supplemental that was provided last year by the Republican majority, initiated by, in fact, the former chair of this subcommittee, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who is now Speaker of the House. I worked diligently to make sure Colombia had the resources, and we passed, under our watch, a supplemental to make certain that the resources got to the source, the primary source, of illegal hard drugs, cocaine and heroin, coming into the United States. It is absolutely incredible, again, to report that the House, the findings from closed-door sessions we held for the last 2 weeks, we find that in fact it was not $300 million in total that went to Colombia. That got whittled away. So $42 million ended up actually, of $230 million, $42 million went to Peru and Bolivia. Additionally, we have been requested or we were requesting since 1995 that helicopters which have been requested by Colombia be sent to Colombia to deal with eradication and to deal also with the insurgency that was financed in cooperating with narcotics, illegal narcotics in that country. What is again absolutely incredible is that to date, we have in Colombia six of nine Huey helicopters that are operating. We expended $40 million on that, so two-thirds of what we requested as far as Huey helicopters are operating, so that is six total Hueys at a cost of $40 million. One of the other helicopters that has been requested was Black Hawk helicopters, which have both combat capability and also high altitude capability, which we need, and flexibility for Colombia, which has mountainous ranges where coke and poppy are grown and also trafficked. What is absolutely incredible is that out of the three or out of six that we funded for Colombia, only three have been delivered. Of the three that have been delivered, in fact, none of them are operational at this point because all three of them lack proper floor armoring, and additionally, they do not have ammunition. Now the ammunition we requested, and I know I have been involved in that for several years, and mini-guns to go to Colombia, we had testimony, again behind closed doors, that in fact, as of November 1, that ammunition and those mini-guns had been shipped, but we did not have confirmation as of last week whether or not they had been delivered. So we have actually only six operating Huey helicopters out of nine and six would be 15 requested, and three of the Black Hawks are not operational. Now, if we also look at the dollars involved, we take out $42 million for Peru and Bolivia and we are down to $190 million, and we find that the Black Hawk helicopters really accounted for a great deal of the balance of the residual funds, the super Hueys and several other activities. What in fact we find out is that of the $232 million above, there was $176 million in fact set aside for Colombia, but only one-half of this has actually been delivered or is operational. What is even more startling is the administration announced with great fanfare that the President was going to take surplus equipment, again in the previous fiscal year, in 1999, and we are now in 1999- 2000, but this is called 506 A drawdown. It is off-the-shelf equipment. To date, not one single piece of equipment or assistance has been provided to Colombia at this juncture. However, the administration admits now that we have an emergency situation. General Barry McCaffrey, who is head of our antidrug effort and our national drug czar, described Colombia as, and I will quote him, as an ``emergency situation'' at a hearing before our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources on August 6 of 1999. Now, I believe that the administration is somewhat embarrassed to come to the Congress in these final days as we debate the 1999-2000 normal budget and request additional funds. Anyone who looks at this, and details the amount of money appropriated by Congress initiated in the House of Representatives for Colombia and then sees what has actually been delivered would be shocked and I think somewhat embarrassed to come here and start asking for a billion to $2 billion. And I might say that we are not opposed to additional funds on our side of the aisle for Colombia. We have a situation out of control. We have a region that is in danger. We have a neighbor that is just a few hours away from Miami. We have an instability that is being created now all the way up to the Panama Canal over into the Caribbean and through Central and South America by this situation that has grown out of control. General McCaffrey also went on to state, ``The United States has paid inadequate attention to a serious and growing emergency.'' That probably will go down in history as one of the understatements, particularly given the latest information that we have and, again, the disruption to the whole region that we see. Mr. Speaker, it is interesting to note too that General Serrano, who is the Chief of the Colombian National Police, he stated to our subcommittee that 90 percent of the anti-drug missions the Colombian National Police must conduct are required to be conducted by helicopter, again, given the terrain of the country. I know it is nice to think that just good things will happen if we wish and hope, and I respect the opinion of the other Members who spoke in here before on the floor. But I think we know that some tough measures are needed and that this insurgency must be brought under control by President Pastrana, or there never will be peace in Colombia or there never will be peace in this region. The latest information that we have just a few months ago is that the FARC, which is the guerrilla forces financed by illegal narcotics activities, earn up to $600 million per year in profits from the drug trade. United States officials believe that the area under drug cultivation in Colombia has spiralled from some 196,000 acres last year from 79,000 acres, and this, again, is a problem I think created by inattention by this administration by stopping the resources, by decertifying Colombia in the improper manner in which it was decertified without a national interest waiver to make certain that these long-sought-after pieces of equipment and in some cases ammunition, helicopters, arrived there to help in bringing this pattern of devastation and left-wing guerrilla activity under control. A recent United States-based General Accounting report said cocaine production in Colombia has increased by 50 percent just since 1996, making it again the number one cocaine producer in the world. It is interesting to note that the year before the administration began its efforts to make certain that none of the equipment and resources that the Congress was trying to provide got to Colombia. So, again, the history of Colombia is interesting. Even this past week and, in fact, in the newspaper, we have a report of the Colombian rebels making certain demands to the current government. And this story is dateline Bogota, Colombia. The country's largest guerrilla group said it would reject a year-end truce offer unless the government stopped extraditing drug suspects to the United States. That is one of the major conditions they put forth. And I will say that last week Colombia, as opposed to Mexico where we have had inaction, did vote for the extradition of major drug traffickers. Now we have the Marxist guerrilla group financed by drug traffickers threatening to hold the peace process in abeyance if Colombian officials go forward with the extradition of the major drug kingpin traffickers. We will be back, I am sure, next year to the topic of Colombia, even though we wind up in the next few days here our budget in Washington. Mr. Speaker, let me turn a moment to the situation in Washington. As most people who observe the Congress know, we are in the process of winding up our year-end responsibilities and that is funding all of the activities of the Federal Government. That process takes place through the adoption of 13 bills, each of which funds our Federal Government. Today, we have passed about eight of those and we have about five in contention. One of those in contention is the District of Columbia. The President has vetoed the appropriations measure for the District of Columbia. What is really interesting at this juncture, we have passed a balanced budget. The new majority brought the country's finances into order. We have a basic agreement. We set up terms of that agreement so that we must stick to the budget agreement in terms. We are doing pretty much that, even within the District budget. Mr. Speaker, we have to remember the District budget, when we took over control of the House of Representatives after 40 years of control by the other party, the District of Columbia was in shambles. The year we took over, they were short in debt just for one year about three- quarters of a billion dollars. That means the taxpayers from across the country were underwriting the largesse and wild spending not only of the Federal Government and its agencies but also the District of Columbia. That situation has been brought under control by the new majority, just as we brought into balance the Federal budget. We did that by eliminating some of the employees. They had the largest number of employees of any governmental body probably outside the former Soviet Union. They had 48,000 employees, which meant that about one out of 10 in the District of Columbia worked for the District of Columbia, not mentioning the contracts that were let. We got that down I believe to around 33,000. The issue is not about spending this year, because we have brought into control the operations of the District. We brought in new management. Fortunately, one of those individuals is now the Mayor. And the District, just like our national budget, on an annualized basis, of course we have debt, but on an annualized basis is in fairly good order. The reason the President has vetoed the bill is not dealing with dollars and cents, it is dealing with policy. The Clinton administration has championed a needle exchange program for the District of Columbia. That has been one of the bones of contention. The other, of course, is a liberalized drug policy with regard to referendum to legalize certain drugs in the District of Columbia. So part of the fight on the floor of the House has been about policy and liberalization of drug policy. I have shown many times this chart of Baltimore where Baltimore went in 1996 from 38,000, almost 39,000 heroin addicts to today above 60,000 heroin addicts. That is just in this period. That is through adoption of a liberal policy, a needle exchange policy and liberalized drug policy. Deaths also remain constant in Baltimore, 312 murders in 1997 and 312 in 1998. A liberal policy of failure. I have said, if we have to have this bill vetoed, the District bill, with liberal provisions on drug policy 10 more times, so let it be. But that is part of what the debate is about here. That is in spite of people like General Barry McCaffrey who is our national Drug Czar appointed by the President, he said ``By handing out needles, we encourage drug use. Such a message would be inconsistent with the tenure of our national youth oriented anti-drug campaign.'' So the Drug Czar himself has said that we should not liberalize the policy in the District. He does not support this move. We have others who have attempted a needle exchange and found that they did just the opposite of what they intended to do. A Montreal study showed that IV addicts who use needle exchange programs were more than twice likely to become infected with HIV as IV addicts who did not use needle exchange programs. Another study in 1997 in Vancouver reported that, when their needle exchange programs started in 1988, HIV prevalence in IV drug addicts was only 1 to 2 percent, and now it is 23 percent. Again, we believe, at least on our side of the aisle that these issues, these policies are worth fighting for. It is unfortunate that the Congress just a few days before the Thanksgiving holiday is here. But, in fact, it is important that we are here. It is important that we do not allow our Nation's capital, which should be the shining example, to return to its former state or to adopt a failed policy of liberalization. If the Nation's capital does not set the example, then who does? We have taken the District a long way in 4-plus short years. It was not a shining example when we took over. It was a great example of big government going bad. That is the same problem we have with many of the other programs. Public education. There has been a tremendous amount of discussion about improving education across our land. The Federal Government today only provides 5 cents of every dollar towards education. Most of it is provided by local real estate, property, and State taxes, about 95 percent from local and State sources, 5 percent by the Federal Government. There has been a debate in the Congress here and one of the reasons we are here is how additional money would go to education. Should it be through more Federal programs? We had 760. We have gotten that down to 700 since we do not want to spend money on administration. We want to spend it on the classroom. The question of spending it in the classroom, 80 to 90 percent of the money under the Democrat regime went for everything except basics, except for the classrooms. We have tried to turn that around and say that we want at least 90 percent of that money in the classrooms. The biggest problem we have in addition to liberal policies being promoted in the Washington arena with drugs is just the same problem we face in education where they want the control, they want the ability to dictate, they want the ability to administer and maintain control in Washington. That policy has just about been the ruination of public education and also made it most difficult for the teacher to teach in the classroom, to have control over the classroom, to have some say over the classroom and over the students. So with 5 percent of the money, the Federal Government has given us 80 percent of the regulations and 90 percent of the headaches. Again, we do not want that policy adopted either in education programs that come from Washington or in programs that dictate how the District of Columbia will operate in the future. As I close tonight, I think that it is important that we realize, and this may be the last special order on the drug issue, but we realize again the impact of illegal narcotics on our society, not only the 15,700 who meet their untimely death by drug-induced deaths, and that is the latest statistic, in the last, 6, 7 years since I have been in Congress, there have been 80,000 and 90,000 people that meet their death and final fate through drug-induced deaths, a startling figure, almost as many in any recent war of this Nation's history. The statistics go on to relate the problems that we have. I share with my colleagues some of them as I close, and these are from our National Drug Control Policy Office. According to that office, each day, 8,000 young people will try an illegal drug for the first time. For many of them, it will be the last time. Because of those 15,700 deaths, many, many of them are young people, even teenagers today who fall victim to these high purity hard narcotics and unfortunately do not survive. According to the Office of National Drug Policy Control, 352 people start using heroin each day across the United States. Today, we have seen also, according to the same office, a record number of heroin deaths, not only in central Florida, but throughout this land, and again, particularly among our young people. So we face a great social problem, a great challenge. I am pleased that we have been able to conduct during the past year a number of hearings. We are up to some 18 hearings on the narcotics issue and some 30 hearings we will complete by the first week in December with our subcommittee. I appreciate the fine work of staff and Members. Tomorrow, our subcommittee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. on the subject of Cuba and its involvement in illegal narcotics trafficking. The administration this past week and the President did not include Cuba in the list of major drug traffickers in spite of some evidence to the contrary. We will hear both the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton), chairman of the Committee on Government Reform and the gentleman from New York (Mr. Gilman), chairman of the Committee on International Relations on investigations they have conducted by their respective committee staffs on the question of Cuba's involvement and complicity in international drug trafficking, and also the designation by the White House of those countries who have been designated as major drug traffickers, again with the exception of Cuba and with specifically excluding Cuba from that list. So that will be our responsibility. Then next year, we will continue on our quest to find some answers to very serious problems that the American people and certainly the Congress of the United States face.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, first of all, I would like to thank and express my appreciation to the gentleman from New York (Chairman Gilman) for both his expeditious consideration and handling of this resolution today and also for his personal support of Slovakia as it moves forward to take its place among the universe of free, independent, and democratic nations. It is my honor, as an American of Slovak heritage, to speak in support of and also to help author House Concurrent Resolution 165. I also want to pay tribute to the gentleman from California (Mr. Lantos), serving as the ranking member of the Committee on International Relations, and thank him for his kind words in support of this resolution and also in support of the great progress the Slovak Republic and Slovak people have made in the last few years. There are a few people on the Committee on International Relations or in the Congress who are more familiar with this area than the gentleman from California, so his words are particularly well taken today. Mr. Speaker, neither fate nor history could provide a better time than today, November 16, for consideration of this resolution by the United States Congress. It was exactly 10 years ago today that Slovak students took to the streets of their capital, the city of Bratislava, to demonstrate against Communist domination and plead for freedom and self-rule. This month in the Slovak and also in the Czech capitals, the two presidents of those nations, their citizens, world leaders, and even our United States Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, will gather to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution. And just in Washington during the past few weeks, we have been celebrating from the White House to the Congress to Embassy Row that special revolution that took place in the Czech and Slovak Republic. That occasion and this resolution by Congress are special for every one of the millions of Slovak Americans and also for the people of the Slovak Republic. This resolution properly recognizes the accomplishments of Slovakia's government during the past year. What many fail to comprehend or understand is the centuries of domination and difficulty that have been endured by the Slovak people to reach this day of recognition. After a millennium of domination from Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow and Berlin, the sovereign Slovak Republic now stands as an independent, free, and democratic nation. Despite incredible attempts over those centuries to destroy the culture, heritage, and language of the Slovak people, their spirit has somehow miraculously survived. Since January 1, 1993, its first day of independence, Slovakia has worked to align itself with free markets and with Western security arrangements. With the great progress that we recognize in this resolution, it is my hope and the prayer of many that Slovakia will take its rightful place among the most respected nations of the world. Last week, the Slovak Republic's prime minister, Mikulas Dzurinda, placed the first bust of a patriot and freedom fighter in the Ronald Reagan Building's Woodrow Wilson Center. Thirty-one years ago, that Slovak freedom fighter, Alexander Dubcek, held the 1968 rebellion against Communism that was crushed by Soviet tanks. Today, we in Congress hope to remove some of those last shackles that have held back the Slovak people. It is my hope that this resolution will honor them as they march forward to meet their rightful destiny. I would like to at this time also pay some very special recognition to the first popularly elected Slovak president, Rudolph Schuster. As my colleagues heard, they elected their first independent president by popular election this spring. I would also like to recognize the accomplishments of Prime Minister Dzurinda, the former United States ambassador Ralph Johnson, the former Slovak ambassador Lichardus, and current Ambassador Butora and all of the Slovak parliamentarians from each of their parties who helped make this progress possible. Finally, the location of Slovakia in Europe is critical to the future of NATO and our Western security alliances. Please note, and I brought this along because many people do not know where Slovakia is, but it was part of the Czech Republic. It is located between Poland, Hungary, and Austria. Its capital, Bratislava, is less than 40 miles from Vienna. And we can see with that strategic location that it is so important that the Czech Republic, that Poland and Hungary, which are now part of NATO, have also included the Slovak Republic, which is in this island in between. For the future security of both Slovakia and this region, it is indeed important that we support Slovakia as it seeks to join Western security and international free markets in the West.

Mr. MICA

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

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor again tonight to talk about a subject that I have talked about many times on the floor of the House of Representatives, even last night until almost midnight, back here again tonight. But it is a topic of great personal concern to me and also one of my obligations as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the House of Representatives. That is the problem of illegal narcotics and drug trafficking in the United States. I left off last night talking a bit about the problem that we are facing with illegal narcotics. If I may tonight continue a bit of that discussion, and then for my colleagues I would also like to spend about half of the time that is devoted to me tonight to talking about another project that I have been involved in and that is the United States Capitol Visitors' Center, a little bit different topic. But first I would like to complete some of the information that I dealt with last night. That is again a continuation of my report on the status of both our efforts to curtail drugs coming into the United States and eradicate drugs at their source. I have cited many times the scope of the problem that we face. It is monumental indeed for the Congress. The cost is a quarter of a trillion dollars a year to our economy. We have 1.8 million Americans behind bars and 70 percent of them are there because of drug-related offenses. What is sad about the situation that we have, not only the tragedy and deaths, and I have reported the most recent statistics are that 15,973 deaths were reported from drug-induced causes in 1997, and that is compared to 11,703 in 1992. We have seen a dramatic increase in deaths due to illegal narcotics in our country. And, unfortunately, a lot of those statistics, the death statistics are disproportionate among our young people. In my area in central Florida, we have a wonderful area, very prosperous. I represent the area from Orlando to Daytona Beach in central Florida. In Orlando, we have now had some 60 heroin overdose deaths in a little more than a year. Many of those, again, among young people. Taking the best of our young citizens and destroying their lives. It is a very tragic situation. Headlines in our local newspaper recently blurted out that heroin overdose and drug deaths now exceed homicides in central Florida, a very sad commentary, and one unfortunately that is being repeated across the United States. One of those, and I will cite the impact of illegal narcotics, but actually one of the groups in our society that suffers most are minorities. They bear an incredible brunt of terror that is rained by drug abuse on them. And I have some recent statistics that just came out from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Drug use increased 5.8 percent in 1993 to 8.2 percent in 1998 among young African-Americans. So if we want to talk about the impact of illegal narcotics, the death and destruction I will describe, it starts, unfortunately, among some of those who can least afford that impact. And here with the African-American youth, drug abuse use has dramatically increased. The 1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse also indicated drug use increased from 4.4 percent in 1993 to 6.1 percent in 1998 among young Hispanics. I also read some recent statistics about the dropout rates and those who drop out the highest from our schools, the recent information we have received show, of course, minorities, particularly black and Hispanics. Then if we look at their history of drug use, whether it is marijuana, cocaine, or other drugs, they have unusually high percentages of drug use. So we see double tragedy. What is also interesting is, not only the use, but also the arrests of traffickers. I have a recent report just out last week, and this is in the Dallas Morning News. It says, arrests of traffickers under age 18 are expected to climb to 512 this year, up 58 percent since 1997, according to the United States Customs Service. So, not only do we have increased use, not only do we have increased deaths, but our traffickers now under the age of 18, this is a shocking statistic, are up 58 percent in 1 year, according to the United States Customs. Now, one of the things that I have tried to do in helping to coordinate our national drug policy is to look at where illegal narcotics are coming from and then to see if we can stop those illegal narcotics from coming into the United States. I have cited before that the war on drugs basically closed down in 1993 with the taking of office of President Clinton. He focused most of his efforts and resources on treatment, treatment expenditure, and dollars increased almost 40 percent from 1993 to current levels. Even in the new majority, we have increased treatment during the past several years of our majority. But what happened again in 1993 is the Drug Czar's office was slashed from 120 to some 20 individuals working there. We now have that back up. It is probably in the 150 range. I might say, one of the better things the President has done and probably the major accomplishment that he has achieved, and I will give him credit for that, is the appointment of General Barry McCaffrey, who has done an excellent job in restarting our war on drugs. But basically, when one cuts interdiction, use of the military, use of the Coast Guard by some 50 percent in just a few years, which the Democrat majority did, when one cuts the source country programs that effectively stop the production and growth of drugs in their source, one has a serious problem when one sends the wrong message by appointing a national health officer like Joycelyn Elders, and one can almost trace the increase in drug use among our youth from those appointments and from those bad decisions. Last night, I went through the history of some of the problems that we have had. I have done that before. I have also used this chart before. This chart shows, again, if one just wants to look at it, where illegal narcotics are coming from. They start in Colombia. Some 60 to 70 percent of the heroin and cocaine is now produced in Colombia. If one looked at 1992, 1993, most of the cocaine was produced in Peru and Bolivia. It is now coming from Colombia. It is actually being produced there. In fact, the programs that have been initiated and the new majority has undertaken in Peru and Bolivia show about 60 percent decrease in coca production, cocaine production in Peru, and about 50 percent in Bolivia, and both of them making great strides to eradicate. But the problem we have had is the policy of stopping information flowing to Colombia, stopping arms and assistance to the national police, who have undertaken the war on drugs there, stopping all U.S. aid for a period of time has left the production fields wide open. Now since 1993, the country of Colombia has the distinction of, not only being the largest cocaine producer, and it was not on the charts some 6 or 7 years ago, hardly any opium was grown there, poppies grown there or opium produced, and now is producing some 65 to 70 percent of the heroin coming into the United States. We know that for a fact because we can trace it just almost as accurately as DNA practically to the fields where it is grown. So this is the traffic pattern. Heroin and cocaine are being produced now in Colombia, coming through Mexico. In fact, the cartels, many cartels, not the same cartels, Medellin and others that we had in the past, are now operating with Mexican officials. I will talk a little bit about the high level contact group that we had this morning, a meeting in Washington with officials, high officials of Mexico. I think this was the seventh meeting. We had the Attorney General of Mexico and the foreign minister of Mexico and other high ranking officials of Mexico meet with Members of Congress. I will get into that. But this is basically our trafficking pattern. So we know that the two biggest sources of hard illegal narcotics, and I have talked about heroin and cocaine, are Colombia, Mexico. Mexico also has the distinction of giving us another gift which is an incredible amount of methamphetamine. We have conducted hearings, and I cited this this morning to the visiting ministers that, indeed, showed that methamphetamine is coming from Mexico and entering our heartland. We have had sheriffs and local law enforcement officials from Minnesota, Iowa, California, other areas that they could trace the methamphetamine which is now epidemic in some of those areas right back to Mexican dealers. But this is the traffic pattern. This is what we have to deal with. First, let me talk a little bit, and I have touched briefly on this yesterday, about Colombia. I want to make certain that people know exactly what has gone on with Colombia. I cited some general figures last night that were the result of a closed door meeting, the second one we have held in 2 weeks with officials of the United States Department of State, the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Matters, and also with the Department of Defense, both charged with executing the policy that the Congress has adopted and dealing with the appropriations and programs that we have authorized to deal with both Colombia and the trafficking situation of these hard narcotics coming into the United States. Well, yesterday, I spoke in general terms, and we have now been able to look specifically at the money that has already been appropriated, both in the fiscal year from 1998, October 1, through September of this year, 1999. For that year, Colombia was appropriated $321 million. Many Members of Congress and the media have all cited Colombia as being now one of the top, after I think Israel and Egypt, maybe the third highest recipient of United States foreign assistance. That is the total figure that is bantered about. But, actually, it is $321 million. Part of our subcommittee's responsibility and Members of Congress' responsibility is to see if that money has been properly expended, if the money is expended, or obligated, and where the money was utilized. My particular role as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources is to review the progress that has been made. Now, there are some myths about the $321 million. First of all, $30 million was in a regular appropriations for that year. The Congress knew that there were problems cropping up. This is, in fact, nothing new. If I may, let me bring to the floor here just a sampling of some of the hearings that we have conducted. When I say we, the new majority which took over in 1995 on the international narcotics problems. We have conducted some 16 hearings. These are some of the transcripts of the hearings. We knew there was a problem in Colombia. We knew the administration had a policy and a program that really would create difficulty for the United States, and we pay for those policy mistakes in the end. Four of these hearings specifically have dealt, since 1996, with Colombia. So we have carefully monitored this situation. We provided some $321 million for Colombia to try to stop the disaster we saw looming there. I might say that, when I came into office in 1993, from 1993 to 1995, there was one hearing done on national drug policy, one hearing in the first 2 years of the Clinton administration when the other side controlled the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, exactly one hearing. That was only conducted after I circulated a letter and I believe we had 130 Members of the House, Republicans and Democrats, requesting that we review the drug policy. The drug policy at that time, as I said, was a disaster as adopted by the Congress again controlled by the other side, and was a disaster as far as the execution by the administration which cut off assistance, resources going to Colombia, which has now turned into our major big problem. But I do not want the American people or the Congress to think the new majority has not had their hand on the ball or been working on the issue. Here is part of the evidence. In addition to hearings, we did put our money where our mouth is. I said this $321 million. Thirty million dollars was a regular appropriation that we would have given in that regular fiscal year. Additionally, there was a supplemental of $232 million. I want these figures that we have reached, for the Record, stated properly, $232 million in a supplemental appropriation. We knew the problem was coming. We were trying to stop it and cut it off at the pass. We also knew that aid had been kept by the administration from Colombia, and the problem was festering. Of the $232 million, in our closed door hearings, we found that we have, in fact, expended some $40 million of those dollars, $42 million to be exact, to Peru and Bolivia. If one subtracts $42 million from $232 million, we are down to $190 million. Now, again, this is from a $321 million appropriation. Of the $190 million that was to go to Colombia, our closed door meeting with the State Department and Department of Defense revealed that less than half of the money has actually gotten equipment or resources to Columbia. So we are down to $190 million. We may be somewhere in the range of $90 million to $95 million in equipment that actually got to Colombia. Now, for years, we have known that Colombia was becoming a producer of heroin, a producer of cocaine. They were actually growing it. It was not just a transit country where this stuff was produced somewhere else. And we know that the most effective way to get the coca, which grows in higher altitudes, and poppies, was with helicopters and to spray that or to go after the narcotraffickers who circle and protect in Colombia the growth of these illegal crops. It is unbelievable, but to date we still do not have in Colombia but three of the Blackhawk helicopters of the six that Congress authorized. And the funding for those helicopters, and these helicopters are about $16 million apiece, assumed most of the $90-some million, the three of six that were delivered. Now, this is unbelievable, but they confirmed to us yesterday that the three helicopters, the Blackhawks that have been delivered, basically cannot be used. They are not equipped with armor, and they do not have ammunition. Of course, part of the $90 million, and we are down from $300 million that was supposed to get to Colombia, part of that was for ammunition. Helicopters are needed to fight and to eradicate; and these helicopters, of course, need ammunition. We have been begging, we have pleaded, we have sent letters, we have tried to get ammunition to the Colombian National Police who are engaged in fighting the narcotraffickers and going after these illegal narcotics producers. It is absolutely unbelievable to report to the House of Representatives and the Congress and the American people that the ammunition and the many guns that we requested years ago, I am told, were delivered November 1. Today is November 10. Yesterday morning no one could confirm either from the State Department or the Department of Defense if the ammunition had arrived. So we have, again, less than half of this smaller amount being made available to Colombia. In addition, we have other obligations, where we have requested helping in the rebuilding of narco bases, narcotrafficker bases, where we launch operations from, or the Colombians, rather, launch operations from. We still do not have contracts complete for construction of some of these bases, money that has been appropriated now for well over a year, money in the budget. In fact, from 1998, we went back to see if equipment which had been promised to the Colombians out of our surplus accounts had been delivered. In 1998, about 90 percent has gotten to Colombia, 10 percent had not. In 1999, the President made a commitment to provide what is called Section 506, I believe it is, which is surplus equipment to Colombia. And we found that, with great fanfare, the administration was giving millions in surplus goods to Colombia to fight the war on drugs; yet to date, nothing has been delivered. And that is as of the end of the fiscal year which ended the end of September. We are now into the fiscal year 1999-2000. This is a remarkable record of nonaccomplishment. I know now why the administration has not formally brought a $1.5 billion, somewhere between a $1 billion and $2 billion package to the Congress. First, I am sure they did not want to be embarrassed with this information being made public; that indeed they have missed the opportunity to get this situation under control with the resources that have already been allocated. So we have millions of dollars that have not been expended, and we have money that has been expended down there with equipment that is not capable of being utilized. It is a very sad situation, a sad commentary on the ability of bureaucracy to move. I do not think it is purposeful at this point. I know it was purposeful in the past to block equipment and resources to Colombia, but the results are incredible. Over a million people have been displaced, 300,000 have been displaced, more than in Kosovo and more than in Bosnia. Three hundred thousand in one year, a million there, over 30,000 dead, over 4,000 Colombian police, members of congress, members of their supreme court, and officials that have been slaughtered in the meantime. And the equipment still is not there. It is a very sad commentary. The money that Congress appropriated and the House asked for these programs, again without direct involvement of U.S. military other than training, we have not provided what we said we were going to provide. And the situation continues to mushroom out of control, with this entire region being destabilized now, with incursions up into Panama. And, as I said before, this region of South America produces approximately 20 percent of our daily oil supplies. When the administration wants to get our military equipment somewhere and they make their minds up to do it, it does not take them long. According to the Department of Defense, it took the Clinton administration 45 days to move 24 helicopters to Albania for an undeclared war. According to the Department of Defense, also, it has taken the Clinton administration over 3 years to get three Blackhawk helicopters to Colombia in a war we have all declared on drugs. And what is incredible is those three helicopters, which consumed most of the money that we have given to Colombia, those three helicopters are basically inoperable. They do not have protective armor, and they do not have the ammunition to engage in any type of counternarcotics activity, and they cannot confirm when that ammunition will arrive. The Blackhawk helicopters were promised to the Colombian National Police in 1996, and they finally arrived in Colombia November of 1999. It is sort of a sad commentary, and this has had a dramatic impact on our society. Remember the 15,700 deaths in 1 year which are drug related, and there are thousands of others, tens of thousands of others, but those are the hard deaths we can attribute. From 1992 to 1999 we have lost between 80 and 100,000 Americans in an undeclared war on our people with narcotics coming from this region. So that is a little bit of an update on the Colombian situation. There is a brighter figure just released yesterday, and I must applaud President Pastrana, because even though he has had a very difficult time in the peace process and also trying to bring this situation which he inherited last year as the new president of Colombia under control, he is trying to put words into action. I understand that their Senate voted just yesterday, or this week, to extradite one Jaime Orlando Lara, who is a major drug kingpin figure. He will be extradited to the United States, and I understand there may be another one to follow. So Colombia, even though it is under siege, is taking initiatives. And it is unfortunate that they have almost lost their country; but, indeed, they are taking continued action to bring this situation under control. Some of my colleagues may have read that as many as 10 million Colombians took to the streets in the last few weeks to express their outrage about this war and the havoc that has reigned upon Colombia, and it is in our national interest, both because of the impact of the illegal narcotics, the death and destruction to our society, and also as an ally in this hemisphere to help. It is unfortunate, though, and it is almost unbelievable that the actions that Congress has taken in a positive fashion to assist this country are really stymied by bureaucracy, by inaction, by lack of will on the part of this administration. So I guess it is fitting in this budget ending here, as we try to provide funding for all of our programs, that the administration sort of hides in a corner and does not bring this issue forth. I can see why. I can see it being very embarrassing for them to come in and ask for a billion dollars of taxpayer money and not have been a good steward of the $321 million that was appropriated to get this situation under control. So it is sad indeed that we face this situation. Hopefully, through the hearing process, through Members on both sides of the aisle trying to prod the administration, we can get resources to turn this situation around. I mentioned yesterday that this morning I would be attending a high- level working group of United States and Mexican officials. And as I said, this is about the seventh of these meetings. I took our subcommittee down to Mexico City; and we met, I believe it was in January or February, after taking the position of chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, and we met with some of these same officials in Mexico. I said at that meeting with the Mexican officials in Mexico City that I was very disappointed with the actions that they had taken to date, and speaking about the previous year, 1998, and a decrease in the seizures of heroin, a decrease in the seizures of cocaine, a lack of action on the signing of a maritime agreement, a lack of action on extraditing Mexican drug kingpins, a lack of action in allowing our DEA agents, a limited number, in protecting themselves in their country, and a lack of action in enforcing some of the laws that had been passed by the Mexican officials. We had a rather testy meeting, and I must say that I asked them how they could sit idly by and watch their country be lost to drug traffickers and not do anything. I did not use exactly those words but, fortunately, that session was also behind closed doors. But I let them know our concern about the lack of action on those issues. And at the request of the Congress, we had passed resolutions asking for their assistance specifically on all of those items. I must report again that this morning I did have a little bit more complimentary attitude toward Mexican officials. They have begun the process of getting some of their act together, going after drug traffickers, cooperating more with U.S. officials. It is not a level of cooperation that I would like to see, but the seizures are up this year, and we must give credit where credit is due. They are good neighbors, have been good neighbors, and we have, I think, through our trade policy, extended incredible generosity with NAFTA, which has taken jobs out of the American market and provided jobs and opportunity to Mexico and Mexican citizens. When Mexico was in incredible financial shape we also helped Mexico, backing them up with loans, their country; and we backed them in international finance organizations. So some progress has been made. I expressed concern in two areas this morning in our meetings. Several of those areas are as follows: First of all, the latest information I have from our Drug Enforcement Agency is that heroin production, and we have had a problem of course with production in Colombia, the other country that we have had a problem with production, very limited production back into the 1980s, black tar heroin coming out of Mexico, which several years ago was at 14 percent of all the heroin seized in the United States we know came from Mexico. We know because of this signature heroin program we can do an analysis of the heroin and tell us almost to the field in the country where it came from. So we know that several years ago we had 14 percent, up from a single digit to double digit, of heroin produced in America. What is scary is that within 1 year it has jumped from 14 percent to 17 percent, the latest information that I received this week. That is a 20 percent increase in production. So I ask their cooperation and will reiterate requesting their cooperation in going after the production of heroin. The other thing that we see of course is methamphetamine, methamphetamines that are in our country. And we have done that through our hearings and investigations right to Mexico. Mexico is now the leading producer of methamphetamines coming into the United States. We need their cooperation. The other area in addition to those two big problem areas is the corruption of officials and cracking down on money laundering. If you can trace the money in illegal narcotics, you can find out who is involved. Unfortunately, some of the information we have received is absolutely startling and I have cited on the House floor and we had in our subcommittee testimony from one former Customs agent that one Mexican general was attempting to invest in the United States 1.1 billion American dollars. And we know that is from drug profits. We know that corruption has really destroyed families, officials in Mexico. Former President Salinas and his brother Raoul Salinas were heavily involved, hundreds of millions of dollars transferred to banks. We know that money came from their complicity with and cooperation with drug lords. If Mexico would cooperate with us rather than give us a hard time, as we had in operation Casa Blanca, which was a major Customs operation, the largest probably in the history of the U.S. Customs, hundreds of millions of dollars of money laundered with dozens of banks and bankers involved. And when we uncovered it and we had told Mexican officials, some that we could trust, about it, Mexican officials a year ago threatened to arrest our U.S. Customs officials and did not cooperate. Some of that has changed. But until Mexico makes up its mind that it is going to get this situation under control, enforces laws that their national legislature has passed, they passed some good laws, but not enforced them, and then go after corruption. I heard Senator Sessions from Alabama speak this morning. He was a former prosecutor and he said, ``I put in jail local officials and judges and others in the United States who dealt in illegal narcotics and profiting from them,'' and he asked Mexican leaders to do the same. And until they get that corruption under control, we will continue to have that problem. And still Mexico is the source of 50 to 60 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States, almost 300 metric tons of cocaine consumed in the United States. Fifty to 60 percent of that, as we know, comes from Mexico. We know now that Mexico is the source of 17 percent of the heroin seized last year by law enforcement. We know that Mexico is the leading smuggler of methamphetamine and also the base ingredient of methamphetamine, as well as marijuana. Unfortunately, as I said, in 1988 heroin seizures were down some 56 percent, cocaine seizures were down 35 percent. But the latest statistics we have, the information is that those seizures are up due to cooperation with the United States officials. So we still have lacking a maritime agreement, no progress on a maritime agreement, although some more cooperation with our maritime officials. But Mexico continues to be the source of so much of the illegal narcotics coming into the United States and the center of corruption. The former DEA administrator came before our subcommittee and also had testified and stated publicly something that I think bears repeating tonight, and that is Tom Constantine. He has since left that office and been replaced just recently by Donny Marshall, a very capable assistant in the DEA office and I think a very good appointment who will do a good job in trying to follow in the footsteps of Tom Constantine. But Tom Constantine, speaking about Mexico, said this, and let me quote the former DEA administrator. ``In my lifetime, I've never witnessed any group of criminals that has had such a terrible impact on so many individuals and communities in our nation.'' He said that, despite promises by Mexico to wage ``total war'' on drug smugglers, no major drug traffickers had been indicted, drug seizures had dropped significantly, and the total number of arrests declined. He cited part of the problems. To date, Mexico still has not extradited one major Mexican national drug kingpin. He cited what Colombia has done in the last few hours leading the way. Mexico needs to follow and show their drug traffickers what they fear the most, and that is extradition to face justice in the United States. One of the issues that has come up in the high-level working group and concerns me is the question of replacing the United States certification process as provided by law. Having been involved with Senator Hawkins and others in the development of this law back in the mid 1980s, and I have a copy of it here, the law is a simple law. It basically says that each year the President and the Department of State must certify what countries are doing to assist the United States in stopping in their own country and stopping the production and also the trafficking of illegal narcotics. A certification must be made to the Congress that those actions are taking place, those cooperative actions. That is done to make those countries eligible for benefits of the United States. It started out as foreign aid. If a country was in the cooperating, they were not to get foreign aid. And it seems natural to get a benefit if the United States foreign assistance, cash, that there should be some level of cooperation, especially when the inaction or lack of action or an ally's part or country's part results in death, destruction, devastation in the United States. A simple law, not very complicated. We even provided a waiver such as in countries like Colombia where the administration had concerns about human rights, about other activities to grant a waiver. Unfortunately, the administration has not properly applied this law. They should have decertified Mexico last year when they had a decrease in seizures, when they had a lack of cooperation, when they threatened to arrest our Customs officials. And they certified Mexico. They should have been decertified and granted a waiver in national interest. In addition to foreign aid, these countries also get financial assistance, backing in international organizations. The law is quite clear that it says, under this law, if they are decertified, the executive director of each multilateral development bank will vote after March 1 of each year against any loan or utilization of funds. Now, Mexico does not receive any foreign aid per se, but they receive tremendous trade and financial benefits by the United States. And it is unfortunate that now there is a move to destroy the certification process. And I was concerned and still am concerned that even officials from this administration would like to transfer that certification for being eligible for benefits of the United States to some third party or international group. I will fight that with every breath here. I did not think anyone should have the ability to determine eligibility for United States benefits other than representatives of the sovereign United States, that being the Congress, the President, executive branch. This concerns me about attempts to thwart the intent of the certification law. Let me tell my colleagues, they have never seen action in their life by any of these countries until they are faced with threat of decertification for not cooperating. Even in Mexico we saw incredible action just before the question of certification came before the administration and then before the Congress and we suddenly saw all this cooperation. And it has also been a good handle for the country to have on soliciting the support of these countries that are the producers of this deadly illegal narcotic substance. Again, a little update on that issue, and we will continue to follow it; I will continue to oppose that. Just in closing on the Mexico issue, I have a November 6 Reuters report about what death and destruction Mexico has experienced with this horrible situation that they have allowed to really get out of control. It said, this past week a lawyer for Mexico's most notorious drug cartel was shot to death by two gunmen who riddled his body with at least 43 bullets in the northwestern border town of Tijuana. This particular article says that Baez, I believe is his name, Mr. Baez became murder victim number 552 in Tijuana this year and that authorities believe that 65 percent of the killings have been drug related. This particular individual, Mr. Baez, became the third member of his family to be executed in the past 2 years following his sister, Yolanda Baez, and his nephew, Efren Baez. If Mexico does not get this situation under control in addition to losing the Baja Peninsula, the Yucatan Peninsula, they will lose their country and their sovereignty. Just ask anyone in Colombia who has seen the death, devastation, destruction, and displacement of people in that country, and now the situation with the United States and others trying to bail them out of their situation. Mr. Speaker, from the subject of illegal narcotics which does not often put a smile on my face to the final 10 minutes, I wanted to first just pay a moment of tribute to veterans. I will not be in the District in time for veterans celebration, but every American should pay particular attention and honor tomorrow, Veterans' Day. Veterans Day started out, I believe, at the end of World War I, on the 11th hour, the 11th day; and in my home communities from Daytona Beach to Orlando, we will have a series of wonderful ceremonies to honor veterans, at Woodlawn Cemetery in Orlando. David Christianson, the most decorated Vietnam hero, will be the featured speaker. In Port Orange, one of the young high school groups there will be having a flag retiring ceremony. In De Land, a beautiful community, tomorrow afternoon at 3, they will be having a parade through the community to honor our veterans and so on throughout central Florida. I would like to spend a moment to pay tribute to our veterans to whom we owe so much. I spent Monday on my way back to Washington visiting the Bill Chappell clinic in Daytona Beach and went around and talked to each of the veterans that was there on an unannounced visit to see how their care was and how they were being taken care of as far as patients in the veterans facility. I am pleased that almost all of them were very satisfied with the care. I pay also particular tribute to those who do care for our veterans in our hospitals and clinics across the country. The most important responsibility under this Constitution is indeed our national security. The reason for which this country came together was for national security. We must pay honor and tribute and respect to those veterans who are among us and also who are not with us who we remember on Memorial Day, but tomorrow we remember those who again have served this Nation. So we salute all of our veterans, not only in Florida's Seventh Congressional District from Orlando to Daytona Beach, but across this great land. That is one little tribute that I wanted to pay. The other item that I wanted to conclude with is some good news for the House of Representatives and the American people. Finally, after more than a decade, we have completed the first step in making a reality a visitors center for the American people when they visit our great Capitol. The Capitol has a rich history. It goes back to being located here in 1790 by an act of Congress. Congress was sort of vagabond before that, met in Philadelphia, New York, Annapolis, Harrisburg and a dozen different locations. Finally, in 1790, they decided to come here. They decided to begin construction in 1793 of the Capitol and it was to be two wings, the Senate wing here, actually sort of turned out like most government projects, it was running behind schedule and overbudget; and they decided just to build this one wing which is the north wing towards Union Station. To get that done and to get the Congress here by 1800, which will be 200 years, they worked feverishly and abandoned plans for the House wing. And then in 1800, in December, the House located here. In 1807, they built the second wing. They were connected actually in between by a trellis for a number of years. And then in 1827 they built the center rotunda and the Capitol looked a bit like this. This is a pretty good picture. One of the oldest pictures, that first Capitol was designed first of all by Dr. Thornton who actually did not even get in the competition that the Congress had advertised for, came in late, but Thomas Jefferson and George Washington liked the design so much that they took his design even if it came in after the bids all closed. In 1827 we completed the Bullfinch Dome and the Capitol had these two wings and the rotunda in between. Today, we have the Capitol with the dome which was added in 1863 and the wings, the House wing in 1857, the Senate wing, the north wing, in 1859. You can see the original first building, and then the House building, the connection, the changing of the center and the addition of this beautiful dome designed by Thomas Walters and the statue of freedom up on top, which was taken down recently, refurbished and put back, that was put up there in 1863. The other addition to the Capitol is the east front was redone. It was crumbling in the late 1950s, 1958 to I think 1962, that was taken off and redone. So they extended the east front of the Capitol. Not since that point have we enlarged the Capitol, and never to my knowledge have we really done anything specifically for the American people to accommodate them when they come to visit here. We have millions and millions of visitors who crowd the Capitol building. I am very pleased that we have completed work and approval; I served as a member of the Capitol Preservation Commission, on a Capitol visitors center. This was not my idea. It was started in the 1980s, late 1980s. I believe Vic Fazio, a Congressman from California, initiated some of the proposals that got into a partisan conflict; and it was derailed, although a study was done in 1991 to create a visitors center. This past week, the visitors center authorizing body, which is the Capitol Preservation Commission, 18 Members of the House and Senate authorized moving forward in the next phase the approval of some $12 million for the center and reconfirmed that the visitors center will be in the east front, towards the Supreme Court and the Library of Congress. Everything will be located underground. It will not change the view. There will be three stories underground, if I can get this up here quickly. Two stories will be exhibition space, solely for visitors. There will be three auditoriums, one 550-seat, two 250-seat. Right now we really do not even have a place to bring folks in. In fact, folks stand out in line in rain, snow, sleet, whatever, subject to the elements. Two top stories will accommodate visitors, rest rooms, first aid facilities. Again, everything underground. It will not change any of the view of the Capitol building. The bottom level will be a service floor, goods and services will come in through a tunnel. The tunnel was planned sometime ago, and part of it exists now. Rather than having the trash and garbage and other service deliveries through the front door of the Capitol, that will all be done underground. Accommodations for our visitors trying to bring to life the Capitol, and also to make their visit more pleasant. We are just about at capacity. Plus we do not have assistance for those who are disabled, handicapped and others to get around the Capitol. This is one of the most exciting improvements ever to our Nation's Capitol, the symbol of freedom for the entire world and, of course, our Nation. It will make visits for students, for adults, for elderly, for infirm so much more pleasant. I am so pleased to have had the leadership of the House and Senate in this effort. I commend all those involved. It is an exciting project not only for the Congress but for the American people and the country.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor late on a Tuesday night once again to talk about the issue of illegal narcotics. But before I get into the issue of illegal narcotics, I must follow up on some of the comments of my colleagues, and I am going to try to mesh my comments into part of the debate that we are having here in Congress as we wrap up the funding of our government. It does take 13 appropriations measures to fund our entire government. We have been through about nine of those bills. Really in most cases now we are down to the question of not how much more money to expend but how to operate programs. I am so pleased that my colleagues on the majority side, the Republican side, spent part of the time tonight talking about education and about some differences in philosophy. I think that is very important to particularly education. I chaired the House Civil Service Subcommittee for some 4 years. If you want to find out where the bodies and the bureaucrats are in our Federal Government, just chair that panel for a short period of time and you will. I quickly found that there are about 5,000 people in the United States Department of Education. I also found out that about 3,000 of them are located just within a stone's throw of the Capitol building right here in the Washington metropolitan area. Then another 2,000 are located in the approximately dozen regional offices throughout the United States. It is no surprise that none of them are located in the classroom. It is also no surprise that they earn between 50 and over $100,000 apiece on average. They are very well paid and they are education bureaucrats. Their responsibility is to really provide the administration for some, it was 760 Federal education programs. We have narrowed that down to approximately 700. In addition to that, they are part of what I call the RAD Patrol. The RAD Patrol is regulate, administer and dictate. Basically we found in our work on the Civil Service Subcommittee and again exploring what these individuals are doing, is basically they are again administering a mass of Federal programs and a mass of Federal regulations that are being pumped out. What that does in fact is it ties our teachers up in little knots, it ties our school boards and our States into bigger knots, and the last thing the teacher is able to do is teach. They have put so many constraints and requirements and reports and paperwork on our teacher, that if you talk to a teacher today, a teacher no longer has control of her classroom, his or her classroom, no longer has control over his or her agenda, no longer has discipline in the classroom and no longer has respect. All of that, I think we can trace back to this massive Federal bureaucracy. A part of the budget battle right now is how those education dollars are spent. They still want to maintain on the other side of the aisle control of the entire education agenda from Washington. I do not think that has ever been the case. The best schools have always been parent and teacher and local community led. This is a very fundamental argument. Balancing the budget was probably one of the easier tasks. Of course, we took our wounded in that battle and were accused of all kinds of misdeeds, but in fact we did bring the country's budget into order, not by decreasing any programs, in fact, we have increased the money in most of these programs, including education, but by, in fact, limiting some of the increases in the programs that had astronomical amounts of increases, the revenue that was coming in was not equal to the money in increases we were giving out and we got ourselves into two and $300 billion deficits. Every pension fund, every trust fund was raided, and for 40 years that continued. It was not buying votes but it was giving out more money than was coming in the treasury and then taking from all of these funds, some of them even pension funds. I oversaw some approximately 30 Federal pension funds out of about 36 or so that were totally without any hard assets. Every bit of money of the Federal employees had been taken out. In fact, that obligation to pay back just the interest on the money that has been taken from those funds amounts to about $40 billion and is projected to grow in the next 10 years to about $120 billion a year. It is, I believe, the fourth biggest budget item that we have, because there is no money in that. Everybody is upset about Social Security and they took basically all the money out of those funds, the hard cash put in certificates of indebtedness of the United States. Well, they did the same thing to the Federal employee pension funds. You look at program after program, we have had battle after battle to try to get those programs in order. The highway trust fund. I serve on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. The highway trust fund was another fund that was abused. The 18.4 cents that you were paying into this fund to build highways and public infrastructure, that money was not really going in there. Some of it was not being spent to artificially, quote, go towards balancing the budget. Then money was also taken out of there and used for other purposes other than what the highway trust fund was set up for, and that cost tens of billions of dollars to straighten that out. We have had a heck of a battle in the House of Representatives to try to straighten that out. So whether it is pension funds, whether it is Social Security, whether it is the transportation highway trust fund, for 40 years they played a game with the American people. Now we are paying a penalty in trying to straighten that out. But we are trying to do it in a legitimate fashion. I chair the Criminal Justice and Drug Policy Subcommittee of the House of Representatives. I try to speak at least once a week as the person who is responsible in the House in trying to help develop a national drug policy. I try to focus on that issue, get the Congress, Mr. Speaker, and my colleagues here and the American people to pay attention to what I consider the most serious social problem that we have, and certainly it is a criminal justice problem with our prisons nearly packed to capacity with some close to 2 million, 1.8 million Americans behind bars, some 70 percent of them there because they have been involved in some drug-related crime. We have a horrible situation. As I mentioned, we have had over 15,000 deaths; 15,973 deaths were reported from drug induced causes in 1997, our latest figures. That is up from 11,703 in 1992 when this administration changed hands. So we have a very serious national problem. This national problem also as far as narcotics is intertwined in this budget battle. As I say, we have 13 budget bills or appropriations measures that make up the total budget and appropriations to run the country. One of those funding measures is to fund the District of Columbia. We have an obligation under the Constitution since we established in 1790 the District of Columbia to fund the District of Columbia and act as stewards of our Nation's capital and the district that was set up. Unfortunately, in some 40 years of control by the other side, the District of Columbia, which should, again, be a shining example for all Americans, the place of our national seat of government, a respected capital in the world turned into a city in disgrace, a city in despair. When we inherited the District of Columbia in 1995, and I came in 1993 when the other side was in control, and controlled the House, the Senate, and the other body, and by wide majorities, and the executive office, of course, the presidency, they controlled the entire three major determiners of policy for the District of Columbia and for national policy. But we inherited in 1995 a Nation's capital in disgrace. Part of the budget battle today is, and one of the pending items that has not been approved, the President has vetoed it several times, and he may veto it again, is funding for the District of Columbia. I always like to cite from facts about the situation. I do not mean to do this in a partisan fashion. We inherited a responsibility here. We have had some 4-plus, going on 5 years of running the Nation's business, and also overseeing Federal policy towards the District of Columbia. I cite from some articles about what we inherited. A Washington newspaper, July 27, 1994, this article said about public housing, and I will quote from the article, ``Hundreds of D.C. families live in deplorable conditions as a result of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's failure to properly monitor owners and inspect various properties,'' says a report by the D.C. accounting office. ``The study found that 292 HUD subsidized units at Edgewood Terrace in the Northeast section of the city, the District of Columbia, failed to meet standards, and even called some of the 114 occupied apartments unfit for human habitation.'' This is the type of situation we inherited. The public housing units were not fit for human habitation. In fact, the housing agency was bankrupt. I spoke a minute ago about the taking of pension funds. Marion Barry, who was the chief executive, this report in the newspaper of November 9, Washington, 1994, states that there was $5 billion in unfunded police and firefighters pension liability which also was increasing costs. The D.C. General Hospital was hemorrhaging in red ink, and there were other fiscal problems. It goes on to cite the situation with pension funds, the hospital, and other matters that we inherited, again, as the new majority. The situation, I have cited this before, but even the morgue was a disaster. This report from early in 1996, again, a Washington paper, the Washington Post, reported, ``About 40 bodies are being stockpiled at the D.C. morgue because the crematorium broke down about a month ago, and the cash-strapped city government has no other way to dispose of the corpses.'' When the Republicans inherited, again, 40 years of their oversight of the District of Columbia, we were running approximately three-quarters of $1 billion in deficit that year that we inherited this mess. I am pleased that as a result of what we have done, not only with the national budget but also with the District budget, this is one of the first years that the District is nearly in a balanced budget situation. We have not replaced all of the funds that have been taken from these various funds, just like we have not replaced social security or unfunded Federal employee pensions, but we have begun that process. My point tonight is we do not want to turn back, whether it is those programs that I have mentioned or other programs. Another program I have mentioned tonight is the job training program. A Washington Post article of October 4, 1994, basically found that the city was spending a great deal of money and not training anyone. In fact, one of the reports we had was no one was trained in one year, and that in fact most of the money went for administration. Another Washington Post article talked in 1993 about drug and alcohol treatment, something that, of course, is very much of interest to me and also to our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources. This is what we inherited: ``Its drug and alcohol treatment programs,'' the District, ``however were denounced as inadequate last month by Federal officials.'' They go on to talk about lack of a mental health commissioner for the past year, and other deficits in programs here. Some of the worst examples of what we inherited as a new majority is this article from the Washington Post in April of 1995. With the city's financial situation in almost total bankruptcy, they did in fact treat the mentally ill children in this fashion. Let me read this from the article: ``Some mentally ill children at the District's St. Elizabeth's Hospital have been fed little more than rice, jello, and chicken for the last month after some suppliers refused to make deliveries because they have not been paid.'' This is, again, part of what we inherited here in the District. I could go on. There are more and more of these articles about what we inherited in the District of Columbia. My point tonight is that the District of Columbia is now beginning to be in some order, brought into some order by the new Republican majority. This is not the time to turn back. Tonight and this week we do not have an issue over dollars in the D.C. budget bill. We still have an issue, though, however, of policy. That policy difference is over a liberal approach to drug treatment, a liberal approach to needle exchange, a liberal approach to enforcing the laws about what are now illegal narcotics in the District of Columbia. The administration would like to change the philosophy. They would like a liberal philosophy, a liberal needle exchange policy, liberalization of the narcotics laws in the District of Columbia. Our side, the majority, says no, we should not make that step, that we think it is the wrong step. We have some good examples of what bad programs have done. I always cite just to the north of us Baltimore, which has had a liberal policy. That policy in fact has caused tremendous problems for Baltimore. Baltimore has gone from some 38,000 addicts just several years ago, in 1996, according to DEA, to the most recent statistics by one of the city council members there where Baltimore now has somewhere in the neighborhood of one out of every eight citizens, and that could be anywhere from 70,000 to 80,000 people in Baltimore are now drug or heroin addicts. I do not think we need to model liberal programs, liberal needle exchange programs, or a liberal program as far as drug laws and model it after Baltimore and have that in the District of Columbia. We have some 540,000 population here in the District. We probably have some 60,000 addicts, if we adopted that model and the same thing happened here in the District of Columbia. We do not think that, in fact, that is the way to go. I have also cited in the past, and I have another chart here tonight, showing zero tolerance and a tough enforcement policy. Some folks do not like that. Some folks call for liberalization. They say the drug laws are too tough. But we find this New York City chart, look at index of crime. We have index of crimes and that is going down as the arrests and enforcement go up. Not only do we have crime being reduced with tough enforcement with zero tolerance, the statistics on deaths are about as dramatic as any figures I have ever seen. There has been a 70 percent reduction in deaths since Mayor Giuliani took office. The early years of his taking office there were about 2,000 deaths, and in 1998 they are down to 629, a 70 percent reduction. Baltimore, again, a liberal drug policy, more liberal philosophy with their folks, has had 312 deaths in Baltimore in 1997, 312, the same figure, in 1998. And one can see what again a contrasting philosophy can do. So we think that it is very important that we continue the fight. If the President wants to veto the bill again, many of us here have said let him veto the bill, but we insist on some of these provisions. Again, we do have the finances of the District in order. We have brought them in order. We have gone from a $700-plus million deficit just in the District, almost three-quarters of a billion when we inherited the District, to nearly a balanced budget in the District of Columbia. We have reduced the number of employees from 48,000 to 33,000. We have put in new administration. Of course we had to put in a control board, some of the operations we had to privatize and some of them we had to reorganize. Programs are in order that were a disaster. Welfare and schools. They were paying some of the highest in taxes in the District of Columbia and some of the schools were the worst performing. Paying highest amount per capita, one of the highest in the Nation, and again getting some of the lowest results. We personally think this paying more and getting less out of government is a bad approach and we would hate to see us take now a liberal policy and adopt it in place of a conservative policy, a zero tolerance policy when it comes to drug enforcement. Again, the statistics are pretty dramatic. A lot of folks say that those in jail are there because they have committed some minor crime offense. That really is not the case. There are many myths that are relative to this war on drugs and the effort against illegal narcotics. We had a study, one of the most recent studies completed in the United States was completed in New York by their judicial officers and they found roughly 22,000 individuals serving time in New York State prisons for drug offenses. However, 87 percent of them were actually serving time for selling drugs, 70 percent of those folks had one or more felony convictions already on their record. So 70 percent of those 22,000 individuals were already multiple felons. Of the people that are serving time for drug possession, 76 percent were actually arrested for sale or intent to sell charges and eventually pled down to possession. So some of the folks that are in New York State prison are there who may be charged with more minor offenses but, in fact, have plea bargained down. And, in fact, some 70 percent of them have one or more felony convictions. So we are not exactly dealing with people who are being put in prison for some minor drug offense. We are dealing with repeat offenders. But the statistics do show in the manner in which this has been handled in New York that, in fact, this tough enforcement, zero tolerance does make a big difference and dramatically changes the lifestyle, as anyone who has visited New York or lives in New York can attest to. The other myth that I like to dispel and will talk about very briefly again tonight is that the war on drugs is a failure. Let me repeat some charts if I may. I hear over and over that the war on drugs is a failure. The war on drugs is not working. Let us just take a minute and look at what has happened. This chart does show 1980 and the Reagan administration and the Bush administration through 1990, and the Clinton administration. We see in this long-term trend in drug use a continuing decline. And this is through the Reagan and Bush administration, a tougher policy, awareness campaign that was made, interdiction and source country programs that were properly funded. We saw all of that come to an end in 1993 with the election of President Clinton and the new majority at that time in the House. Actually, the old majority. They controlled the House and the Senate, the Democrat side and the White House. One could almost trace the dismantling of the drug czar's office and he reduced that staff, and the Democrat Congress did, from 120 to some 20 individuals in the drug czar's staff. That would be the first blow. Then the next blow was of course the hiring of Jocelyn Elders who said ``Just say maybe'' to our young people. The next thing, if we looked at this chart and we added it in here, were the reductions in spending on interdiction and also on source country programs. Again, two Federal responsibilities. Stopping drugs at their source and then stopping drugs before they come into our country and into our borders. In the international source country programs, Federal drug spending on these programs declined 21 percent in just one year after the Clinton administration took office. So to go back to the chart, we see a 21 percent decrease. In fact, just in the last year, in this year, we will get us back to in international programs to the level of 1992 in spending and putting back together the cost-effective stopping drugs at their source. If one does not think these programs are successful, we have spent very few dollars in the last 2 years in Bolivia and Peru, two cooperating countries under the leadership of President Banzer in Bolivia and President Fujimori in Peru. In Peru, we have cut the coca production by 60 percent in a little over 2 years. And in Bolivia, some 50 percent of the cocaine production has been reduced. And we can almost see the beginning of cocaine trafficking use and abuse in the United States, in fact we do see that and we see less and less of the product coming into the country. So we know a little bit of money, out of billions and billions expended on other programs and certainly enforcement, certainly imprisonment and certainly treatment, are very expensive programs. But keeping the drugs out of our country again is a Federal responsibility. The interdiction programs, again, if we go back to the chart here and we see 1993, the Clinton administration reduced interdiction, cut interdiction some 23 percent 1 year after the Clinton administration took office. So these charts and, again, we can bring up the exact charts. It would almost be nice to superimpose those. But international programs, again, in the Reagan-Bush years were at this level. Dropped down. We are bringing them back up to where we were 1991, 1992 equivalent dollars, source country programs. Source country programs, interdiction programs, the same thing. They cut dramatically. Basically they stopped the war on drugs as far as any effort and put most of their effort into drug treatment programs. Most people would think that we have had a decline just of late or in that period in drug treatment programs. In fact, Federal drug treatment spending on treatment programs increased 37 percent from 1992 to 1998. It went from $2 billion to a little over $3 billion. Interestingly enough, even with the new majority, we have increased from 1995 when we took control some 12 percent in spending, not tremendous increases of that past, but there has been a steady increase. So contrary to some belief and some myths, we have been spending and increasing funding on treatment. But we know that dramatic reductions, again, in interdiction and source country programs cause problems. Those problems, of course, we are facing today in this budget battle. Also on the agenda in Washington this week is how much money we put into additional assistance. Today's Washington Post has a story that berates the Congress a bit not moving forward on funding for Colombia. I cited a success story the last couple of years in Peru and Bolivia where we have made great strides in curtailing illegal narcotics coming into the United States. In Colombia, we have a reverse situation. The administration in 1993 began an effort to really close down our efforts to assist Colombia. First of all, they stopped information sharing. Next, they stopped overflights and also information sharing from those overflights. Where we shared information on shoot-down policies, basically the administration shot down that policy. For some time, we were left without providing any assistance. The next dramatically destructive step that was taken was the decertification of Colombia. Now, Colombia could be decertified as not fully cooperating on the war of drugs, which is a Presidential responsibility in his annual assessment as charged by law. But there is in that law a provision for a waiver which would have allowed us to get equipment, resources to Colombia. In fact, that was not granted for several years. Until 1998, absolutely nothing went to Colombia. In the meantime, we have seen the disruption of Colombia. We have seen nearly a million people displaced in 1 year, 300,000. We have seen some 30,000 people slaughtered, some 4,000 to 5,000 police and public officials, Members of Congress, the Supreme Court slaughtered in Colombia. Now we see the disruption of Colombia and that disruption extending up into the Panama isthmus and to other countries. This region produces 20 percent of the United States daily oil supply, and suddenly this has become a crisis. The Washington Post asked today in the current budget negotiation, ``however, no one seems to be looking for money for Colombia.'' One of my responsibilities of chair of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Relations is to find out where the money has gone, investigate how it has been expended. Last year, we appropriated some $287 million towards the antinarcotics effort in a supplemental package, again to try to get us back on track with Colombia and in the international arena and interdiction arena. Today, this morning, and last week, I began a series of closed door meetings with the Department of State officials, DoD officials, in addition to public hearings that we have held, to find out where the money has gone. Of the money, I have found that about $200 million actually ended up going to the account designated for Colombia. Of that money, to date, only about half of the $200 million has actually been expended. Unfortunately, we have requested, and this has been a bipartisan request of the administration for the past 4-years, helicopters, equipment, resources, and assistance to Colombia so the Colombians can fight the Marxist insurgency that is financed by international narcotics, narcoterrorists. To date, unfortunately almost all of that equipment has not reached the shores of Colombia. We are told that we had delivered this past weekend three helicopters. We have six other helicopters. We have nine helicopters in total of which, really, not any of them are fully capable of missions yet. Some still need armoring. To make matters worse, we found that the ammunition that we have requested year after year to provide to the Colombian national police and their enforcement folks that are going after the narcotraffickers had been shipped November 1, some few days ago. They could not even confirm this morning to me that that has arrived. Now, we are willing to meet our budget obligations, and we will put into Colombia whatever money we need for Colombia to help get that situation under control. But we have repeatedly provided funding assistance. We have requested the administration to get resources, helicopters, ammunition, whatever it takes to go after the narcoterrorists. I must report to the Speaker and the House of Representatives tonight that the track record is absolutely dismal of performance by the administration. So it is unfortunate that, even with a supposed request, and I asked this morning for a specific request of how much money the administration will be asking for, and we have heard anywhere from $1 billion to $2 billion, some folks have recommended as much as $1.5 billion to assist them over a several-year period, we still do not have, and I still do not have as of this morning a specific proposal from the administration. I think this will be the December surprise. I think that once the Congress has finished its work in the next few days that the Congress will be presented with a price tag for this failure, failure to get the equipment there, failure to get the resources there, failure to spend the money that the Congress has already expended. So we are going to take a very hard look at that and see how those dollars should be expended. We will try to provide additional resources. But we must do it mindful of that we are guardians of the public Treasury and that those dollars that we ask to appropriate in a fashion go to those specific projects, and that the administration follow through as directed by the Congress of the United States before we pour more money into this war. Again, we are committed to put in whatever dollars are necessary to bring this situation under control. So we have a horrible situation getting worse. This last chart, as I close, shows the latest statistics showing from South America 65 percent of the heroin now an increase from 14 to 17 percent, the heroin coming from Mexico, and some 18 percent from southeast Asia. A picture that looks worse for Mexico, worse for South America, and worse for the American people and for the prospect of hard narcotics, in this case heroin, coming into our streets and our communities. Finally, tomorrow we will meet with the Mexican officials, their attorney general, their other officials who will be here with a high level of working group to discuss the United States and Mexico efforts to get illegal narcotics through the major transit country, Mexico, under control. It is my hope that we can we can be successful, but we are also going to take a large look at Mexican cooperation, which has been lacking. Mr. Speaker, hopefully next week we will have the opportunity with the Congress to come back and finish the narcotics report.

Mr. MICA

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

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of the time. I am pleased to join with the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), who is the ranking member on the Committee on House Administration to support this resolution, a simple task for the Congress this afternoon to print copies of the Constitution and some other documents and to be made available to the public and Members. In closing, I heard the gentleman from Maryland comment about Vaclav Havel and his presentation before the Congress. I was a Member of Congress at the time, but I sat as a guest in the House gallery; and I will never forget that infamous commentary by Mr. Havel who said just days ago he had been incarcerated in a prison and now he was addressing Congress. That event was particularly meaningful to me because my grandfather came from Slovakia which was part of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1989 when thousands and thousands of people took to the street in the beginning of the Velvet Revolution, and as we pass this small housekeeping resolution here to make these copies of our precious democratic documents available, we remember and commemorate today the fall of the Berlin Wall and basically the fall of Communism. It is through the documents that we are authorizing the publication of today that we have extended to the world our framework of government. These documents have been the cornerstone for providing a guide post for these people who have brought their nations out of the ages and decades and decades of darkness. Last night I had the opportunity to attend a dinner with the Czech and Slovak prime ministers and their ambassadors here as they celebrated. They had met with the President and other officials celebrating the 10th anniversary of their having gained freedom. Again, those documents that we provided offered encouragement. Programs that the United States promotes such as this help extend democracy, promotes freedom and opportunities, and provide the framework of government outlined by the Constitution to others. Today we see those results and it does give us a great sense of satisfaction. It gives me, in closing, a great sense of satisfaction to work in a bipartisan manner with the gentleman from Maryland and our chairman, the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas), in asking the House of Representatives to pass this concurrent resolution of the House, House Concurrent Resolution 221 at this time. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, today I come before the House to present this House Concurrent Resolution 221, which authorizes the printing of brochures entitled ``How Our Laws Are Made'' and ``Our American Government,'' the pocket version of the United States Constitution, and the document- sized annotated version of the United States Constitution. Very often when I come to the floor, I always like to cite what I consider the most important document that rules the governance of our country and really sets forth the pattern of organization for the Congress. Our Constitution details those responsibilities under that great document, and it is important that our Committee on House Administration as one of its responsibilities in administering the House of Representatives makes certain that these publications be made available. Each time we have young people visit the United States Capitol, I try to make pocket editions available to them so that they have a better understanding of how our government operates, what their responsibilities are under that great document as a citizen, and also how our government works. Most young people today do not have an awareness of the Constitution and basically how our government functions. That is unfortunate. Sometimes it is the failure of education. Not only do our schools and parents and communities have a responsibility but we as a Congress have that responsibility. And also it is important that the Committee on House Administration, charged with running the House of Representatives, insures that these important documents are published. The last time two of these documents were printed was during the 102nd Congress. The other two were printed during the 105th Congress. The pamphlet-sized publication of the Constitution has a revision to the foreword by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hyde), our distinguished chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary. The Parliamentarian has also provided revisions to ``How Our Laws Are Made,'' and the Congressional Research Service has provided revision to the document ``Our American Government.'' I would also notify Members of the House, Mr. Speaker, that each Member and Senator will receive 1,000 copies of each of these publications and an opportunity to acquire additional copies. They will be made available at an additional cost to the Members, and can be distributed to their constituents. These are important documents. It is an important responsibility of the House of Representatives to make certain again that our young people and our citizens have the basic tools and documents of government available to them, somewhat of a mundane responsibility but an important one that we are taking that up. I am pleased to take up this responsibility today on behalf of the gentleman from California (Mr. Thomas), who chairs the Committee on House Administration. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 221) authorizing printing of the brochures entitled ``How Our Laws Are Made'' and ``Our American Government'', the pocket version of the United States Constitution, and the document-sized, annotated version of the United States Constitution.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall No. 573, I was unavoidably detained. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Oklahoma for yielding me this time. The District of Columbia is probably a microcosm of what the Republican majority inherited some 4-plus years ago. We had big government and very high cost to the taxpayers. In fact, the District of Columbia, in my opinion, was the epitome of big government gone bad. In 1995, the new Republican majority inherited a District of Columbia which should have been a shining example for the whole country; but, instead, we inherited a district, which is our responsibility under the Constitution, riddled with debt, three-quarters of a billion dollars annual debt, schools that were failing, hospitals that were a disaster one would not take a patient to, child care programs that were defunct, housing that was disgraceful, public housing that one would not put one's worst enemy in, prisons that were taken over by the prisoners, utilities that had to be turned over to operate. And one of the saddest stories I read from the Washington Post was that mentally ill children, and the other side claims to be so compassionate about children, were fed jello and rice and chicken diets steady for a month because the District failed to pay its bills. That is what we inherited. That was the liberal policy. A liberal policy on spending, a liberal policy on government, and all done with the highest number of workers of any government unit probably except for the former Soviet Union, 48,000 employees. We cut that down to some 30,000-plus employees. Now, this question today before us is not about spending, because there is some control we have brought and we have gotten them out of the wilderness of debt. This is about a criminal drug policy. Now, I chair the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform. This is what a liberal drug policy did for Baltimore. This is 1996. They had 39,000 drug addicts after a liberalized needle exchange and liberalized program in that city; 312 deaths in 1997; 312 deaths in 1998. We were even able to bring down the deaths in the District of Columbia through a zero tolerance policy, through new administration that we have instituted in the District and through taking over these programs with fewer workers and fewer employees. The situation was so bad in Baltimore that one out of 10 citizens was a drug addict. That is how bad it was with the liberal drug policy. So the major difference here is a liberal approach to drug policy. Needle exchange is, again, a more liberal policy. Here is an example, again in Baltimore, 39,000 in 1996. Let me read from a Time magazine article dated September 6, 1999: ``Government officials dispute that it is one in ten,'' that is a drug addict in Baltimore from a liberal policy, ``it is more like one in eight.'' This is not my quote, ``says a veteran city councilwoman, Rikki Spector, and we have probably lost count.'' So the question before us today is do we let our people go? And I consider these my people, too. Do we let them go to a liberal policy, do we let them go into the devastation that we have seen in another community that has adopted these policies? I say no.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, it is good to come to the floor again tonight to talk about a subject which I try to address the House on each Tuesday, if possible, but at least once a week, to come before the forefront of the House of Representatives and the American people what I have as a congressional responsibility, and that is the issue of illegal narcotics and our national drug control policy. In this session of Congress, I have been responsible as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources for helping to bring together a coherent national drug policy, and also carry forward a program started by the new majority to restart the war on drugs. I will talk about what has happened with the so-called war on drugs in my remarks tonight. I will try to review a little bit of some of the current controversy concerning the war on drugs, and how to attack the problem of illegal narcotics and drugs, and then to trace some of the history and problems we were not able to get into last week, particularly on how we got ourselves into this situation with Colombia and the current situation with Panama that has made the news with many of our operations being closed down there, not only from a military standpoint, but also from the standpoint of trying to curtail illegal narcotics from their source from Panama as a forward operating location. Tonight I feel a little bit caught between the left and the right on the issue of illegal narcotics. I took over the chairmanship and responsibility of trying to develop a policy that would be more effective, and inherited that responsibility, as I said before, from the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who is now the Speaker of the House, who did a tremendous job in restarting our national effort to combat illegal narcotics. I took on this responsibility without a whole lot of preconceived notions, but again, a philosophy that is probably on the tough side of the agenda in dealing with illegal narcotics. But I found myself again this week sort of attacked a little bit from the right and a little bit from the left on the issue, both by some national columnists and some local columnists. We have done our best to provide an open, honest forum in our subcommittee hearings to intelligently discuss the options at hand and look at things that we have done in the past relating to illegal narcotics and our approach, and see what went wrong and how we go forward, because this problem does have an incredible social cost. As I have said, it is not just dollars and cents, but there is a human cost in tragedies across this Nation. There are hundreds of thousands of people, nearly 2 million Americans, in jail, and some 70 or 80 percent of them are there because of illegal narcotics crime activities. There have been 15,200-plus deaths, up almost 8 percent over the previous year, drug-induced deaths. The social cost is estimated at a quarter of a trillion dollars, a tremendous social cost in the problem of drug abuse and illegal narcotics, and then the cost to our judicial system, our health care system, our economic system, with lost unemployment, not to mention lost opportunities for so many Americans. But as I said, I am trapped a little bit tonight between the right and left. Some are saying that we have to learn to live with drugs, such as Ethan Nadelmann, who wrote this story which actually appears today in the Washington Post, I think it is a national column. Mr. Nadelmann is director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy institute with offices in New York and Chicago. I am told he is funded by Mr. Soros and some others who have advocated a little bit more liberal drug policy approach. He does attack the current approach to illegal narcotics, and he says in his article, ``Let's start by dropping the `zero tolerance' rhetoric and policies and the illusionary goal of drug-free societies.'' I think we have only to look at comparing, and I have done this before, a zero tolerance tough enforcement approach versus a more liberal approach, laissez-faire, towards illegal narcotics. We have good examples in the United States, and I have cited them before. One, of course, is Baltimore. I have had this chart up several times before. Baltimore adopted sometime ago a very laissez-faire, liberal drug approach, much as has been advocated by the administration in this budget battle that we have had in the past few weeks in funding the District of Columbia, one of the 13 appropriations measures we must pass to fund the government, and a Federal responsibility. But tucked in within that legislation to fund the government were provisions to liberalize needle exchange, to liberalize some of the approaches to marijuana, and a more liberal approach towards what are now illegal narcotics. We cite, again, a great example of Baltimore, which in 1996 had almost 39,000 drug addicts. This is the liberal approach. Now, they have gone from 39,000 in 1996 to somewhere in the range of 60,000 today. So today we have one in 10, and a city council person whom I have quoted before from Baltimore on the city council there has estimated that the real figures may be closer to one in eight. If we took this model, and we have a population of the United States we will say rounded off to 270 million, 280 million people, and if we had one in 10, our Nation, using this model, would have some 27 million to 28 million people addicted to drugs. Not only do we have the problem of drug addiction, we have the continual problem of death and other incredible costs, social costs. Baltimore is one of the few major cities that did not have a reduction in deaths. In fact, it remained the same from 1997, and in 1998 the figures were 312 deaths in the city, for a liberal policy. So we had a huge increase in addiction with the liberalization. This is an example of that liberal policy. The zero tolerance policy, which is bashed in Mr. Nadelmann's column today advocating, again, dropping this zero tolerance rhetoric, zero tolerance, Rudy Giuliani, the mayor of New York, has employed that, and it has worked very well. We have gone from over 2,200 deaths to 629 deaths. Again, think of Baltimore, which has a small population, 600,000, and 15 times that population in New York City, and half the deaths in Baltimore, 312 in one year versus 629 for a city of a multi- million population. This is the zero tolerance policy Mr. Nadelmann would like us to drop in his article today on the liberal side. I think this is part of the flaw of his reasoning on this. Again, we have some pretty hard evidence here. He goes on, and I would like to also cite his article in today's Washington Post. He says, With some foresight today, drug policymakers might finally grasp that their relentless efforts to eradicate coca crops have little impact on availability, price, or use of cocaine anywhere in the world. This is his statement today, November 2. I just wanted to share with my colleagues and the American people the latest information I have today. This chart actually was provided to me this afternoon by the vice president of Bolivia, who was visiting Washington. He met with me this afternoon. He presented this chart, again, the same day this article appears. He says, ``. . .the policymakers might finally grasp their relentless efforts to eradicate coca crops have little impact on the availability.'' Well, here is a project that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) started several years ago when the Republicans gained control of the majority. As we can see in the early nineties, we saw some decrease. This is under the Bush administration, the end of the Bush administration. We see the beginning of the Clinton administration, where we see the increase in coca cultivation. What happened here is that the international programs were cut by the Democrat majority. Now, they had a complete majority to do basically anything they wanted to in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, and President Clinton controlled the executive agency, so what they did in fact was slash the budgets for the number one responsibility, which was stopping the production at their source, the most cost-effective. So we saw an increase in production in the Clinton years, 1993 over here to where the Republicans take over in 1995. It took us from 1995 to 1996 really to get in place a very cost- effective program. I asked the vice president, how much American money would you estimate that has gone into coca eradication and alternative crop programs? And it is about $30 or $40 million over the past several years. So with very few dollars out of $17.8 billion, $30 or $40 million in several years, and again, if we go back to what happened in the Bush administration, we could trace this back to the Reagan administration, in very few years we have cut, for almost no money in comparison to what we are spending these huge amounts on for other efforts, we have cut coca cultivation. Again, Mr. Nadelmann is wrong. His facts are wrong. The production in just Bolivia is cut some 50 percent in 2 or 3 years, and we have a program working with them now with very few dollars to eradicate the production. Now, if I put up Peru, Peru and Bolivia, they accounted for about 90 percent of all the coca cultivation back in the beginning here, in the 1992 area, when the Clinton administration took over. Bolivia has had a 50 percent reduction, Peru has had a 60 percent reduction. Both have tough zero tolerance policies, and both with a little bit of help from their friends, very little U.S. money, but a determination for a zero tolerance for going after coca cultivation. The only chart that we would show where there has been an increase in cultivation would, of course, be Colombia, where the administration blocked assistance, aid, and stopped everything for a number of years. We saw that soar, until just the last year they have awakened to the problem that they have created through their policy of not stopping drugs at their source. Again, we have been able to affect this. We have also been able to affect the consumption and use of cocaine, which has dropped, and again, another chart shows the long-term prevalence of cocaine use here. We saw in the Reagan administration this levelling out, a dropping under Bush, the Bush administration, and again, the beginning of an increase when President Clinton took over, and now we see a drop in 1998 for the first time. We are seeing a drop again because of the decrease in availability of cocaine, particularly from Peru and Bolivia, where we have been successful. However, we have been unsuccessful in Colombia, where the administration has fought every attempt to get resources and assistance there for the past several years, and turned Colombia from a non- producer, it was a transit and processing country, into a producer of cocaine. So I think both of these charts demonstrate exactly what has happened when you have a tough policy, and when you have eradication programs that are cost-effective in countries such as the Bolivia model here and the Peruvian model, which would be very similar to what is shown here and presented by the vice president of Bolivia to me today. So, again, hit from the left by Mr. Nadelmann, we do search for the most cost effective means to deal with this problem. But I think he has missed the point, again, based on the facts and information that we have. Then a good friend who is a local columnist, but also a national columnist, Charlie Reese, who is well respected from the conservative side, last week, he gave us a broad side on the narcotics issue. He said, what do prohibition and drug war have in common, is his question. Sure failure. One of his comments is, if we ended the war on drugs, legalized these drugs, and allowed people to buy them by prescription or from carefully licensed and regulated dealers, would everyone in the United States go to Haites and everyone become an addict? Well, again, I will cite one of the best examples we have of a liberal policy, which I think will soon be changed after this election in Baltimore because of the devastation that it has done in that community. But we have seen an addiction problem turn from a small problem into an incredible problem where 1 in 10 are some of our official statistics, but 1 in 8, again according to elected local official there, are now addicts. Now, addicts do not come cheap. They have a tremendous cost on the health system, on society dealing with their addiction. I would imagine if we compared the cost of dealing with someone who is addicted and has an addiction problem and, again, their lost productivity, their health problems, supporting their addiction, loss to their families, and employment, economic opportunity, I think we would see a very serious charge in cost to society. We have seen that with the degradation of the community, both from an economic standpoint and from a life-style standpoint in Baltimore. So I can answer the question for Mr. Reese, does everyone become an addict? No, everyone will not become an addict. But 1 in 10 might become subject to addiction under this liberalized policy. There are some countries where they have tried to liberalize some of the access to drugs like marijuana; and I would cite here the Netherlands. The Netherlands has legalized in small quantities, they did try this, marijuana. It is sold across the counter in limited quantities, as I said. In talking with officials recently from the Netherlands, we found, first of all, they have reduced the amount that is available. Secondly, they have not only reduced the amount, but they have increased the penalties. They have gotten tougher on enforcement because they found that the liberal approach did not work. And others that took advantage of this situation, they found themselves also with higher addiction rates. So we have one example of one narcotic, both with tremendous problems, and both with trying it and then backing off from it. That is just dealing with marijuana. Mr. Reese in his article goes on to say there is nothing inherently evil in morphine, heroin, marijuana, or cocaine. They each produce certain effects just as other drugs do. But those effects do not cause people to commit crimes. Here again, I would have to differ with my good friend and columnist on the conservative side, Mr. Reese. We know that these drugs do cause some very serious side effects. I try to cite, not only the statistics in the drug-induced deaths, some 15,200 we were up to last year, the societal costs, which I have cited again tonight, but then some of the other cases that are not reported. We took the case, I believe it was Baby Sabrina, where the father allegedly was high on cocaine, according to some tapes that were obtained. The baby, everyone in Florida and around the country was concerned about its disappearance, and we find that the child may, in fact, have been a victim of a parent who was involved with cocaine. The Sheppard case which is so celebrated, the anti-gay case in Wyoming is another case, if one reads below the lines, the individuals involved there admit to being high on narcotics and alcohol. I am certain that that influenced their action. The New Jersey bus driver we cited who was under the influence of marijuana and some 20-plus people died in that bus accident. Plus we have seen what crack cocaine and the effects of other illegal narcotics have upon people. So I would have to disagree with Mr. Reese that the effects do not cause people to commit crime. He says what causes the crime is drug prohibition. Again, I would have to disagree with him. Not to mention the tremendous problem we have with growing illegal narcotics, which is methamphetamine. Now methamphetamine is so common that it has become epidemic through the Midwest and through the West, much of it produced, we have found through our subcommittee hearings and investigations, in Mexico and finding its way into the United States. But we find that, in fact, methamphetamine and some other drugs, where they have done these brain scans, a normal brain as shown here, a brain on meth for a short period of time, one can already see the change in some of the brain activities. The next figure here shows meth after some continued use. It almost patterns the last image here which is Parkinson's disease. So we know that certain illegal narcotics, and that is why they are illegal, have very serious damage to the bodies and the brain. This is what can happen. So we do have this problem in dealing with illegal narcotics. So I am a little bit hit from the right, a little bit hit by the left on the issue. We are trying to find out what are viable solutions. We have looked at the questions of decriminalization, of treating some of the drug problem more as a health problem. But that has very serious cost implications. We have also seen that, as we take the liberal turn, we have increased addiction. We have a serious problem with our treatment programs in that very few of them are effective the first time around, and sometimes the second and third time around, and sometimes not at all. So we increase the level of addiction. We increase the level of potential people who cannot be helped and who have become wards and charges because of their addiction to the State and to the Federal Government, of course to communities and families throughout the country. So we do take a very serious look at trying to find alternatives to the current way we go after illegal narcotics and drug abuse. But, again, nothing can be more effective than stopping illegal narcotics at their source and stopping the production at their source and then stopping illegal narcotics before they get to our borders. Once they get to our borders, it is pretty much a tough situation for law enforcement. One time a DEA agent described this to me when I was visiting in South America, he said, ``Mr. Mica, this is a little bit like having a garden hose and having a sprinkler with a 360-degree radius.'' He said, ``You can get cans and go out and try to catch all of the sprinkles from that 360-degree sprinkler or'', he says, ``you can come up here to the hose, and you can choke the water at its source, and it stops.'' That is a little bit of what our Federal responsibility is, with limited number of dollars, we try to stop the illegal narcotics first at their source; and then, as they leave the source, once it gets to the streets and into the communities and schools, neighborhoods, it is almost impossible for our enforcement people to handle. But we do find that where we do have the zero tolerance policies that we have a much better success rate in dealing with the problem and stemming addiction, stemming illegal activity with again zero tolerance as opposed to the liberalized policy which has been advocated. Now, that brings us to the point that I also raise about what has taken place. The war on drugs basically was closed down in 1993 with the advent of the Clinton administration, with the advent of a majority in both the House and Senate. If we look at the areas, again, that I have talked about tonight, the international areas of spending, we see, again, the first responsibility and most cost effective way to deal with illegal narcotics is to stop them at their source. This chart shows, again, 1991, 1992, in the Bush administration, advent of the Clinton administration, the cutting of international programs. Federal drug spending on international programs, that is stopping drugs at their source, declined 21 percent in 1 year after the Clinton administration took office. Federal drug spending decreased from $660 million in 1992 to $523 million in 1993. This chart shows exactly what took place there. Now, this is one key element to stopping drugs at their source. The other one, as I said, is the interdiction program; and that is, stopping drugs as they come from the source. The same thing happened. Again, we have in the beginning of this chart here the expenditures during the end of the Bush administration, the beginning of the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration, the Republican Congress. In interdiction, Federal drug spending on interdiction declined 23 percent 1 year after the Clinton administration took office. Federal drug spending decreased from $1.96 billion in 1992 to $1.5 billion in 1993. So basically we closed down the two primary areas of Federal responsibility. We cannot have State and local governments and other communities really dealing with these source countries or getting drugs stopped at the border. That is clearly a Federal responsibility. What is interesting is if we took these charts and we took drug use, and I have had this chart up once before that our staff produced, but these are exact statistics, again, the Reagan administration, it says Reagan administration right here, we go into the Bush administration, a decline in the prevalence of drug use. This is all drugs. Then we see the Bush administration ending and the Clinton administration, the change in policy, the change in stopping drugs at their source from coming into the country, we saw a flood of drugs coming in. We saw the end of programs to stop drugs at their source. That was a Federal war on drugs. That basically ended. We see this dramatic increase. This chart, again, every American and every Member of Congress should be aware of, we get to the beginning of the Republican administration where we have restored money back to the 1991, 1992 levels, and small amounts of money in comparison to an $18 billion program. This is maybe 5 percent, 10 percent of that entire program expended on a source country and also on interdiction. But this shows, without a doubt, that that policy does not work; that we did not have a war on drugs; that when we have a war on drugs, we see a decline and when we do not have one, we see an increase. When we have more of a zero tolerance policy, the same thing, the same pattern occurs. So, again, in those areas, we have not met our responsibility, or at least the old majority did not meet their responsibility. The new majority did. And we are trying to put things back to the 1991-1992 level as far as our efforts to keep illegal narcotics coming into our country. What is interesting is we often hear, and some of the liberal columnists and the liberal side also say that we should just spend more money on treatment. And that was part of the mantra of the Clinton experiment that failed. Federal drug spending on treatment programs increased 37 percent during the Clinton administration in 1992 to 1993. We went from $2.2 billion to $3.2 billion. Now, I will say that I believe treatment is very important. We have had problems with programs not having high success rates, and with high failures rates we do need to sort through that. There is nothing wrong with spending every available dollar we can on treatment programs. But, in fact, that was the policy that we had here, and we see the decreases in the two areas which I mentioned that are so important, and then the emphasis on just treatment. Federal drug spending on treatment increased 12 percent from 1993 to 1995. Even under the new Republican administration, and we are accused sometimes of reducing spending too much, in this important area we have had a 12 percent increase from the time we took responsibility here to the current funding year. So we have continued to put money into treatment all through this period, but again a change in emphasis. So those are some of the points that I wanted to make about the war on drugs being a failure, again being attacked by the right and being attacked by the left and some of those folks in between. But we have, as a new majority, tried to act responsibly. We have put some of these programs back together under a Republican-controlled Congress. Under the new majority, Federal drug spending on interdiction was increased 84 percent from 1995 to 1999, and that was to get us back to the level of 1991 and 1992 spending. Federal drug spending on international programs, stopping illegal narcotics from their source to our borders, was increased 170 percent during the Republican-controlled Congress from 1995 to 1999, again, getting us back to the levels that we were at when we so effectively dealt with the problem of illegal narcotics. Now, we all know that we have been able to curtail some illegal narcotics coming into the United States, and I demonstrated tonight two examples, very cost-effective examples, both in Bolivia and Peru. I have also spoken about Colombia. Right now about 70 percent of the illegal cocaine and heroin coming into the United States comes from Colombia. How did we get into a situation where Colombia, which some 6 years ago was really not even on the radar screen as far as production of coca, for cocaine, or production of heroin? In fact, there was almost no heroin produced in Colombia. I think it was a series of very strategic errors by this administration that got us to the situation we are in. And let me cite a little bit of the history of how we got to where we are with Colombia now being the source of about 70-plus percent of the hard narcotics coming into the country. In 1994, the Clinton administration stopped providing information and intelligence to the Colombians regarding drug flights tracked by the United States, which eliminated the effectiveness of Colombia's shootdown policy. So a very sharp directive by the Clinton administration, a change in policy, first stopping in 1994 the providing of information-sharing. The Colombians were using information and intelligence we gave them to go so far as to shoot down those trafficking in illegal narcotics. This is the first step in the beginning of the disaster that we are now inheriting, and the American taxpayers will have the tab for in a few more weeks, once we get passed this current appropriations discussion and resolution. The next step in this failed policy of bringing Colombia to the forefront of illegal narcotics production and activity was in 1996 and 1997. The Clinton administration distorted the certification law that Congress had passed back in the mid-1980s and decertified Colombia because the administration said Colombia was not doing enough in the fight against drugs, effectively stopping all United States anti- narcotics assistance to Colombia. Now, we passed in the mid-1980s a law that was called the decertification law that basically says that each year the administration must assess if countries are assisting in, one, stopping the production, and, two, stopping the trafficking of illegal narcotics. That is what must be certified. If they are certified as cooperating, then they are eligible for United States foreign aid, financial assistance, and trade benefits. However, we provided in that law, and I remember working on the law with Senator Hawkins and others in the mid-1980s when it was passed, a national security interest waiver. And certainly it is in the national security interest of the United States to make certain that assistance to a country like Colombia, which was producing illegal narcotics and was a source of illegal narcotics, might be decertified because some of their officials were not cooperating. But also we could grant a waiver, which would allow us to continue giving resources just for the fight against illegal narcotics. So a law that was carefully crafted to take into consideration situations like Colombia was ignored by the administration. In 1996 and 1997, the administration blocked every bit of assistance into Colombia. So first we had the 1994 shootdown policy and information-sharing policy fiasco and then in 1996 and 1997 a distortion and misapplication of the decertification law by the Clinton administration. What did that harvest? What were the results? What we did here, after a tremendous amount of effort in 1998, last year, after pressure from many Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, when we saw what was happening, we finally got Colombia certified with a national interest waiver so that equipment and resources could go to Colombia to fight the war on drugs there. And again, we have to remember that they stopped all of the assistance going into Colombia from basically 1993- 94 to 1998. The results were devastating for Colombia. In fact, according to a New York Times article, published October 25, a few weeks ago, 35,000 Colombians have been killed in the past decade because of the country's internal conflict. And the conflict there is Marxist terrorist groups financed by illegal narcotics activities. According to an Orlando Sentinel article published October 10, 23,000 people were slain in Colombia in 1998 alone. So if we look at the results from 1996 to 1998, when we stopped all of the aide and assistance, we had 23,000 people killed in Colombia alone in that 1 year. The Colombia National Police reported that since 1990, approximately 4,600 Colombian policemen have been killed in the line of duty, and many of them in fighting against the illegal narcotics trafficking. Again, we withheld aid and assistance for many years. According to The New York Times, another recent article, 1.5 million Colombians have been misplaced in the last decade because of the country's internal conflict. And I am told in 1 year, over 300,000 were displaced, a tragedy, a disruption of a society equal to Bosnia, equal to the conflict that we have seen in the Balkans, in Kosovo, not only in number of lives taken but in displaced individuals from their homes and their communities. Now, my colleagues might say, and I have heard some people say this, that I need to tell what the Republicans have done to deal with this. As I said, we put tremendous pressure last year on Colombia. But to go back to 1994, we urged the change in the policy, the shootdown policy and information sharing. We finally did get some minor changes in this. And just in the last few months, the administration has gone back to a policy of providing information sharing. But repeatedly, time after time, we requested the administration to go back to providing assistance. What was very sad is during this period of time, even resources that we appropriated, the President took some of the money, we know, and diverted it to Haiti. Some of it was diverted to Bosnia. The Vice President, I am told, directed U-2 overflights, which provided information so they could go after drug traffickers and the rebel activity there, he ordered those U-2 planes sent to Alaska to check for oil spills. In the meantime, thousands dead, a civil war financed by illegal narcotics, profits raging, and tremendous disruption. So Republicans, at every juncture, and since we took the majority, have provided funding, assistance, and requested the administration to move forward. Last year, we provided $287 million to Colombia. This morning, I was to have a meeting with representatives from the Department of State, Department of Defense, National Security Council, and others, who are involved in expending this money and making certain that it gets to Colombia, for a report on where that money has been spent. Unfortunately, that was canceled by the administration this morning. I think their strategy is to keep as quiet as possible about how the money has been spent, to not come forward and answer questions as to why equipment, resources and what the Congress, the Republican majority, provided to deal with that situation, what has been done with those funds and how that has been expended and what has not been done. There is also a great reluctance to talk about the $1.5 billion plan that was presented but not officially introduced to the Congress some weeks ago to deal with the escalating problems now that the administration faces. We face a Bosnia and Kosovo right in our own backyard here with Colombia financed again by narco-terrorists. What is sad is I held hearings as recently as August of 1999 and found that helicopters, riverine patrol aircraft, crop spraying aircraft, and support equipment that were supposed to be delivered still had not been delivered. And again, under the Republican Congress, we provided resources and hard dollars that should have been there. As of October 1999, only a fraction of that assistance has been delivered. Unfortunately, again the administration canceled a meeting today to report on what they have done with the balance. I think that is partly due to trying to get the Congress out of town before they present the Congress officially and the American people with a multi- billion-dollar tab for their mistakes and errors in Colombia. This is a big business, though, for the guerillas in Colombia. They earn, according to a Reuter's report, up to $600 million a year profits from the drug trade. So the Marxist terrorist guerillas are disrupting this country and the region by fueling it and financing it through the profits of illegal narcotics. In fact, General McCaffrey, who is our drug czar, has said that there is no line and no distinction between the terrorists and narco- terrorists' illegal drug activities. So we have now seen what has turned from a minor problem at the beginning of this administration that could have been contained with the proper policy into a major problem and a disruption of the entire region. General McCaffrey, again our drug czar, stated in a hearing that we had, ``The United States has paid inadequate attention to a serious and growing emergency.'' I would like to echo his statement. Unfortunately, now the huge bill and tab comes forward; and, unfortunately, now to this date, we still do not have before the Congress a solid plan to deal with that. And I think they are embarrassed because of the current budget battle and appropriations battle of coming forward with that plan at this point. But we are looking for probably a $1.5 billion tab on those mistakes. This situation is so serious that last week we had an estimated 2 million people in Colombia who went into the streets and demonstrated for peace. I wish I could tell those Colombians that our policy had not gotten them into this situation but, in fact, it has. And now we are going to pay very dearly. What is sad about the situation in Colombia, and let me put this up here, we have Colombia down here and we have Mexico through here and we see that narcotics are coming up in Colombia through the Isthmus of Panama, Central America into Mexico. This is, basically, the pattern that we see today. I have a little better chart showing Colombia specifically and Panama. This shows some of the guerilla activity. But here is Panama right here, a very strategic location. Colombia, the darkest areas are the opium growing areas here. A little bit lighter areas here cocaine. Now, again, in 1992 there was almost no production. This was mostly a transiting and a processing country. And now we see these production areas. Again, I think all beneficiaries of a failed policy. But we see the strategic location with Panama. And again, if I had the other chart up here, we would see the transiting through Mexico into the United States and the sea routes and these circles here showing the guerilla activity, and now they control about two-thirds of the land area in Colombia. What is of particular concern to some of us who have responsibility in this area is that this whole problem is now escalating and affecting the region. This region produces, I am told, about 20 percent of all the oil consumed in the United States comes from this region. Panama, who has been a strategic location, and we have as of today this headline in the Washington Post. It says, ``U.S. Air Force Leaves Panama. A little quiet, but finally yesterday the last wave of U.S. airmen and women pulled out of Panama yesterday when Howard Air Force Base reverted to Panamanian control closing eight decades of U.S. air power.'' Now, we had all of our forward operating drug locations out of Panama right in this area. We have lost that capability in Panama. What is of concern are the reports that I am getting. Here is a report from a news account last week. It says, a leading Panamanian clerk says continuing incidents along the border of Colombia could affect future Panama Canal operations.'' And this clerk, again his name is Romulo Emiliani, a Roman Catholic bishop, said, ``If Panama falls into instability, the Panama Canal could lose its users.'' Well, in fact, yesterday with a news account that I read, we did lose our base at Howard Air Force Base, not only the strategic military location, but this was the site of 15,000 annual flights into South America, into Central America over the drug producing region. Again, we provided information, sharing, to the Colombians, the Bolivians, the Peruvians and others to interdict illegal narcotics at their source and we were restarting these again in Panama. One of the problems we have is we have lost this installation. Yesterday, the last Air Force folks moved out. May 1 all flights stopped. That did not come at any small price to the taxpayers. The United States is surrendering 70,000 acres of land to Panama as they assume control of the canal. The United States has also lost 5,600 buildings to Panama and the resources at the canal. The United States is, in fact, surrendering in the next few days here some 10 to 13 billion dollars in infrastructure to Panama. There is a great contrast between what the Republicans have done on the narcotics issue in Panama and the Democrats. It is ironic to know that some 10 years ago George Bush sent American troops into Panama because Mr. Noriega, the Panamanian leader, was we know involved in illegal narcotics trafficking and drug smuggling through this region. We sent troops in there and actually Americans died taking back this area and arresting him, and he now is in prison. This year the Clinton administration is turning back the Panama Canal. What is sad is they have turned the Panama Canal back to primarily red Chinese dominated firms. And that would be bad enough by itself, but in fact almost everyone who has looked at this say they were illegal or corrupt tenders that allowed the Panamanians to give the control, both the Pacific and Caribbean port access, to again red Chinese interests, a great contrast again between what the Bush administration did and what the Clinton administration is doing in the next few weeks here. What is also a particular concern is that again the instability from Colombia, and this cleric does cite that, will influence Panama has caused destabilization on the Venezuelan side. And even Equador is having difficulty in keeping these narco-terrorists from invading into their border. So we see what has turned into a small problem a big problem. The price of moving our forward operating locations from Panama now down to Manta, Equador and up to Caracas, Aruba is also of great concern to me as chairman the Subcommittee on Drug Policy. It is a concern because right now we only have a fraction of the previous overflights and information, so we have the possibility of more illegal narcotics coming into our country when we are trying to, in fact, restart these programs. What concerns me is the administration came forward with their first proposal with $70-plus million to move these locations. Of course, we just lost 10 to 13 billion dollars in getting kicked out and losing 5,600 buildings. So now we have to replace that with infrastructure and expenditures in Equador and also in the Netherlands Antilles. But again, we have the administration having failed to negotiate any long- term agreements with either the Antilles or with Equador. We have a short-term agreement with one for several more months and another one that expires in April. Then the administration came back after asking for $70-plus million and asked for another $40 million. I sent some of our staff down to look at what the cost would be, and we may be at a quarter of a billion dollars, according to our staff report and their investigation of this situation, plus not operating at anywhere near full capacity in this arena, which is so important now in trying to keep some of this activity curtailed and on the verge of spending $1.5 billion that the administration, we expect, as the November surprise after Congress exits stage right and resolves some of the financial problems that we have right now. So that is a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in tonight. It is not a pretty scene. It is complex both in addressing the drug abuse and illegal narcotics activities in the United States, let alone the international problems and challenges we face. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be joined by the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder), who is a member of our subcommittee who has done incredible work at great personal sacrifice, tremendous time and effort on the illegal narcotics problem, one of the stars of our subcommittee. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for his efforts and others in the Congress, both sides of the aisle. Some serious mistakes have been made in the past. We cannot afford to make them in the future. A lot of hard-earned taxpayers' money is going into this effort, whether it is eradication, interdiction, treatment, enforcement, whatever the expenditure. And then we have an incredible loss of human life and resources that are in this country. So we will continue our efforts.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Souder).

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, first I want to pay just a few moments of tribute to one of the most distinguished gentlemen I know in the State of Florida, a gentleman I have known for the past decade, who has headed the University of Florida, Mr. John Lombardi. John Lombardi is retiring as the President of the University of Florida. I have had an opportunity since I first attended the University of Florida, it will be some 40 years ago, in 1960, as a freshman on that campus, to see the University of Florida, which gave me an incredible opportunity in life, an educational advantage. I have seen many Presidents, J. Wayne Reitz, Phil O'Connell, Bob Marston, Marshall Criser, the interim President Bryan and others who have done a superb job in leading our first and foremost university in Florida, the University of Florida in Gainesville. But I have never seen an individual who has done a more incredible job in bringing together success in academics, success in programs, success in contributions to the university, both financial contributions and incredible standing. There just is no one who has done a more incredible job than John Lombardi. As he departs this week after a decade of service to our university, to our State, I salute him along with other members of the Florida delegation for what he has done for my alma mater, in raising the academic standards and improving student performance and increasing graduation rates, and for increasing the number of degreed programs and again the academic standing that he brought to the University of Florida through his efforts. Just a word of praise, also, for his gracious, hardworking wife Carolyn who also with John Lombardi provided her leadership as really our first lady and spokesperson for the university and tremendous hostess for the university. Another tireless, devoted individual who gave so much to the University of Florida. We truly will miss them, but we are truly grateful for their tremendous contributions, Mr. Speaker. The final tribute is not given by me but given by the graduates to John Lombardi of this fall's term. Even though there is an interim president coming, a very distinguished gentleman coming, they have signed a petition, the graduating seniors, to request that John Lombardi sign their diplomas, a final salute, not only from alumni and distinguished alumni from throughout the country and the State but even from those graduating this year. So, John Lombardi, we salute you, and you have done a tremendous job. Mr. Speaker, I also wanted to speak in my remaining few moments to the comments of the last speakers who accuse the Republicans of stealing or robbing from Social Security. What could be more absurd? Every time the Democrats came to the floor and controlled the House of Representatives for 40 years, they in fact not only spent all the money in the Social Security trust fund, they went beyond that and spent 200 and $300 billion more per year in funding beyond that. This Republican controlled Congress is the first time we have brought our financial house into order. We have never said to do away with Social Security. We said the other side bankrupted Social Security. We laid the facts and the information before the American public and we looked for alternatives to take pressure off of Social Security so that Social Security could be secure and not robbed. So for the first time, and again I cannot believe they can come to the floor with a straight face and to the American people and say that the Republicans have not been good trustees of this fund. I urge my colleagues and the American people to look for the truth, not rhetoric.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, on rollcall Nos. 550, 551, and 552, I was unavoidably delayed due to mechanical problems on Delta Airlines flight to Washington, DC. Had I been present, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Madam Speaker, I am pleased to come to the floor of the House again on a Tuesday night to talk about an issue that I talk about as often as possible, and that is the problem that we have in our country and also in dealing in Congress with the issue of illegal narcotics and the tremendous impact that illegal narcotics are having on our young people. Tonight I am going to focus a little bit on some of the issues that relate to the question of the District of Columbia's appropriation and some specific measures that are in the appropriations bill that deal with the District of Columbia. I also intend to talk a bit about the general war on drugs and review a little bit how we got ourselves into that situation. Time permitting, Madam Speaker, I also hope to talk some about Colombia and the administration's potential request, which certainly will dramatically affect our spending as soon as we finish with the problems we have now in funding the fiscal year 1999-2000 requirements. We are expecting a rather substantial request to come in by the administration, and we will talk about that and Colombia and how we got ourselves into that particular dilemma. And I will also talk a bit about the situation in Panama, that whole region that has been such an active area as far as illegal narcotics trafficking and disruption in general for the entire hemisphere. So those are a few subjects, and then, time permitting, I will get into some of the updates that I usually try to do on problems relating to illegal narcotics and how they affect all our communities across the land. The first thing that I want to talk about tonight is something that I hear repeatedly over and over; that the war on drugs has failed; that, indeed, we have lost the war on drugs. I have some very good friends, even on the conservative side, and I noticed one of the columnists, who is very conservative in his opinion, this past week came out and said why not legalize narcotics; that the war on drugs is a failure. I always try to relate my topic of discussion to the facts and deal with the facts and statistics, information that we have had presented to us in the subcommittee which I chair, which is the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform. We have had many, many hearings since I have taken that subcommittee over the beginning of the year dealing with illegal narcotics, and we have looked at the question of whether or not the war on drugs is indeed a failure. We have looked at the question of legalization. In fact, we probably conducted the first hearing, the only hearing to date, on the question of legalization and decriminalization of drug penalties. We have talked in our subcommittee and held hearings on the problems with Mexico, with Colombia, with some of our treatment programs and, most recently, the education program that this Congress has funded to the tune of a billion dollars over the next 5 years getting an update on that first year's progress in that program. Additionally, the southwest border and the billions of dollars we spent in Federal resources at that border in trying to contain not only illegal narcotics but illegal immigration and trafficking, illegal commerce across our borders. So we have covered the gamut of this topic. We have heard from GAO, DEA, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of State, many, many agencies of Federal Government and rely on their facts and support and statistics in our reports. Basically, I came to the conclusion, and I think my colleagues would too if they spent time in those hearings as we have done, we came to the conclusion that, in fact, the war on drugs did not fail. What happened was we had an end of the war on drugs in 1993 with the Clinton administration, which took over not only the executive branch of Government, which executes the law, but also had very substantial majorities in both the House of Representatives and also the other body, the United States Senate. They controlled and dominated the agenda, the legislative agenda, and the executive and administrative operations of this Government for over 2 years, from 1993 through 1995. I have had these charts out before, and I will refer to them once again. Foremost in our responsibility as a Federal Government are our programs to stop illegal narcotics at their source, outside the country. Now, State and local governments law enforcement folks cannot do that, but it certainly must be done. And whether we legalize what are now illegal narcotics or not, we would still have a fundamental responsibility in keeping what would be an illegal commodity coming into the United States. In this case, it happens to be primarily heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamines. The first thing that the Clinton administration did after completely decimating the drug czar's office, and that was the beginning of the ending of the war on drugs, they took the drug czar's office down from a staffing level of over 120 to some less than 2 dozen personnel. That was the first cut, slash, burn that ended the war on drugs. The next thing they did, and again Federal responsibility is to stop drugs at their source, that is, outside the boundaries of the country, clearly a Federal responsibility, if you look at the chart, Federal spending and international programs, these are source country programs we see this dramatic decline in 1993 right in this period here through 1995, up to 1996 it bottomed out. This is where the Republicans took control of the House and the other body. Then you see a dramatic reversal in that spending. And these are really not very big dollars, this is $633 million, in the scheme of our entire war on drugs. And you have to understand that illegal narcotics and drug abuse and crime and operating our justice system and everything, all the costs run us about a quarter of a trillion dollars a year. So this is $633 million back in 1991. And in 1999 we are up to about that level. If you look at 1990 dollars, you see that we have gotten us back into the war on drugs in the source country programs. And that has been particularly effective in cocaine, where we have had two programs that the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) help start them, Mr. Zeliff, formerly a member, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) now the Speaker, when they took over this responsibility which I now chair, they began very effective international programs in both Peru and Bolivia. I am pleased to say that, in Peru, almost 60 percent of the cocaine production has been eliminated and in Bolivia over 50 percent. President Fujimori of Peru has done an outstanding job. And the President of Bolivia has done an excellent job, too. Mr. Banzer, the President there, has, as I said, eliminated over almost half the production and has a program that in the next 2 years, 24 months, to eliminate the balance. So we have seen cocaine production figures drop most cost effectively, small amounts of money, in those countries. The one disaster in all of this is Colombia, and I will talk about that later, where specific administration policy closed down not only the war on drugs internationally but, more specifically, in Colombia. And that has done the most damage and where we are getting now most the cocaine and heroin entering the United States is now produced there. But we see, in fact, our primary responsibility as a Federal Government would be in the international arena spending cost effectively these dollars, and in 2 to 3 years they did an incredible amount of damage. The next responsibility as far as the Federal Government and working with our agencies to stop illegal narcotics would be to stop them from the source to the border coming into the United States. Again, the war on drugs basically closed down. If we took these figures back to when Ronald Reagan was President and George Bush, we would see a dramatic drop and they made tremendous progress in stopping illegal narcotics coming in, stopping the production and also interdicting and using the resources of our various agencies. Basically, again, the Clinton administration and the Democrat controlled Congress stopped the military from being involved in the war on drugs. And some way, well, the military should be involved in this effort. But, in fact, they do patrol outside our borders. In fact, their planes do go up every day. In fact, we have servicemen and women serving around the world. If we looked at the impact of any type of damage to our country, I said a quarter of a trillion dollars in expenditures and lost lives and production in this effort, our military are there, they are on duty. And they were brought into this war by President Reagan and also there with the blessing of President Bush, and they did a tremendous job and we saw a decline in illegal narcotics coming into the country. And it was most cost effective since we are paying the tab for the military in these arenas anyway. Additionally, if you took at the casualties, and I have cited the most casualties we had released just a few months ago, it was over 15,200 Americans died from drug-induced deaths, if you take from the time President Clinton was elected to today, we are probably looking at close to 80,000 Americans have died as a result of drug induced deaths. And that is as many as any of the conflicts, the Vietnam conflict, the Korean conflict. And that does not address the other social problems, the human tragedy cost to so many who are not mentioned in just the death figures but the destruction again of families. Again, the second most important responsibility, stopping drugs before they come into our country, very cost effective again. We were up to $2 billion totally. And again this is money that would have been spent by the military in any event, almost all of this money. Because we have the planes, we have the ships, we have the personnel which are the bulk of the costs. But, again, their disdain for the military, their disdain for a real war on drugs, they took them out of this effort. We also used the Coast Guard to protect our borders, particularly around the coastal areas. Puerto Rico is a great example. And my area has been very hard hit. I represent central Florida, Orlando, where our heroin overdoses and drug overdoses now exceed homicide as a cause of death, more deadly than any gun or knife or weapon that is used in the destruction of human life. Drugs have decimated my area. Most of those drugs came in from a very simple action of the Clinton administration in cutting the Coast Guard budget. This House of Representatives and the Senate, dominated by the Democrats in 1993, 1994 up to 1995, slashed those budgets. Talk to anyone who is in the Coast Guard. They cut the shield that protected Puerto Rico. And drugs float in there. Once they are in Puerto Rico, they are in the United States. And the next thing we knew, they were flooding our area and Central Florida, and other areas have been hit by the same type of heroin epidemic. But there are consequences to our policy. The policy adopted by this Congress is very clear. They killed the war on drugs, dead as a doornail. So we had again no leadership as far as the national level. In fact, we had contra-leadership with the appointment of Joslyn Elders, who was our Nation's number one health advocate, and she said ``just say maybe.'' They slashed the drug czar's office from 120 positions down to some 20 positions. They cut the spending in the Federal areas of most critical importance. Again, source country, very cost effectively. Just a few dollars took the military of the Coast Guard and others out of this war. So, my colleagues, that is how we got ourselves into this situation, with incredible quantities of heroin coming into the United States, incredible quantities of cocaine, methamphetamines, and other drugs coming into the United States, cheap and on our streets in large quantities. Now, those policies had some very direct results. I wish I could take a transparency and put what they did as far as their policy over these next charts. These charts, and I showed them, one other time we have used them, but they show the long-term trend and lifetime prevalence of drug use. If we look again, this puts it in perspective. I hope we can focus on this. If we look at the Reagan years and we see the prevalence of drug use in the Reagan years starting to decline, the Bush years declining dramatically, the Clinton years almost like a rocket it is launched from the time that Bill Clinton, with the help, assistance and aided and abetted by the House of Representatives, did what I cited in these two charts and gave us this result. And it is dramatic, if you look at just in the short time the Republicans took control of the House and the Senate, how we have already begun to turn that tide. And that is through restoring interdiction, through bringing the military back into this effort. By a full court press, so to speak, we have restored the drug czar's office. In fact, I checked today and we funded over 150 positions. If you are going to fight a war on drugs, you have to have the ammunition, you have to have the equipment. You cannot cut the staff out of the leadership from 120 to 20. Barry McCaffrey, our drug czar, I will say has done an admirable job in taking up this responsibility. And he not only has to have the responsibility, but he has to have the support of the Congress; and the support was not there. We see the results again in the lifetime drug use. And it is just not coincidence. These are facts. If we look at the long-term trend in lifetime of prevalence of cocaine, we see the same thing. We see during the Reagan administration, and I was a staffer in the United States Senate in those early days, I remember helping work with Senator Hawkins and others of the Reagan administration, the Republicans at that period of time controlled the administration and also the U.S. Senate, and we were able and we had support, I remember even the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel) and some of the Democrats on the other side help, and we turned around this situation with cocaine. If you look, it goes back down to President Bush. Incredible declines in the prevalence of cocaine use through the Bush administration. And then, with ``just say maybe,'' with lack of Federal leadership, with lack of executive direction, the cocaine use takes off again under President Clinton. These are very dramatic charts showing exactly what happened. The information is not something the Republicans have just developed or our staff just put together. These are all from solid reports. This chart should be quite startling to everyone because it shows the latest drug of choice, and it is doing so much destruction not only in my community but also the land. This shows again during the Reagan administration it sort of leveled out and the Bush administration, the prevalence of heroin use. We do see some decline in the Bush years, and then we see in the Clinton years it taking off like a rocket. And then when the Republicans took over again and we reinstituted a multifaceted, as I said, a full-court press against illegal narcotics, we have seen the beginning of a turnaround. You cannot take the critical elements out of a war on drugs, just like any war that you fight. You cannot just be treating those wounded in battle. Interestingly enough, and we have the statistics on this, but from 1993 when the other side took control of the Congress and they controlled the White House, since then we have about doubled the amount of money on treatment. There is nothing wrong with spending money on treatment so long as those treatment programs are effective. But they must be effective and they must work. They must not be a revolving door. But we have doubled the money. In fact, with the Republican leadership just since we have taken over, there has been a 26 percent increase in funding from this Congress, Republican-controlled Congress, in treatment funding. Tonight, I want to talk again about the budget battle. We are engaged in the House and the Senate with the administration in a very serious and difficult budget battle. We must pass 13 appropriations measures to fund all the operations of government. We have passed some seven or eight of those and some of those have been vetoed by the President. The President I believe yesterday signed into law the Defense bill. That is sort of a no-brainer. It had pay raises for our military that is long overdue. Depletion of the military, we have restored funds. It has really one of the few increases, but again we have to remember that this administration that detests the military has used the military in more deployments than ever in the history of any administration that has existed. There is great cost and to that cost we must have responsibility. It is also a big agency and there is an opportunity for improving payment patterns and expenditures and cutting waste and inefficiency out of it. We are trying to do that. In fact, we are trying to do that in all of these bills. But again Defense is sort of a no-brainer. One of the other bills that the President has vetoed is the District of Columbia appropriations bill. One of the 13 bills that we pass to fund our Federal Government, we also pass to support the District of Columbia, and that is a constitutional responsibility set out from the very beginning when we created the District in 1790, we have had that responsibility, but I think that bill is sort of a microcosm of what we are facing in the larger picture, how the Republicans inherited sort of a mess, an incredible mess, trust funds that were robbed, Social Security funds that were depleted, unfunded pensions, pension accounts; just numerous inefficiencies, programs that had been expanded. We had 760 Federal education programs, 200 job training programs, hundreds and hundreds of programs and built incredible bureaucracies in Washington. In fact, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Service, I think there are somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million Federal civil servants just within 50 miles of where I am speaking around Washington. They had built this huge bureaucracy that had sort of spun out of control and in the process to fund this and also to keep power, in order to keep power you have to keep getting more people hooked on the Federal take, so to speak, and I am not speaking about just Federal employees. There are thousands of them that do a great job. I was chairman of Civil Service for 4 years. There are some great Federal employees out there. Many of them are hampered by the laws and regulations which the majority put into place and they could do a better job if we let them more effectively operate. The District of Columbia is a great example of government gone wrong. What the folks on the other side who had 40 years to straighten out the District of Columbia, 40 years to make changes in programs, 40 years to bring the government of the District under control and the government of the United States, what they did and now what the President is threatening to do, the President is threatening to veto again, and we have already had one veto on the District appropriations bill, but part of the discussion is, one, we are not spending enough money, the other is that we have not adopted liberal enough policies. How do I get into this mix? I am chairman of the drug policy subcommittee but also an observer of the District and of what has gone on here, both before we came into power and after we came into power. But the same liberal policies that they are trying to adopt now, spend more and then adopt a more liberal drug policy, are exactly what got the District into difficulty. We have been able to bring the District out of some of that difficulty. We have done the same thing with the District we have done for the country at large. Now, stop and think about this. Think about the District of Columbia in 1995 when we inherited the District of Columbia. The other side ruled it for 40 years, again very tight rule, specific rule, giving them everything they want. There was a $722 million deficit just in 1995 in running the District of Columbia. It was just like the Federal Government. We were running 200 and $300 billion deficits annually in addition to taking all the money out of the Social Security trust fund. They were taking all that money, then spending beyond that a couple of hundred billion more. They had run the District into indebtedness and reliance on the Federal taxpayers' largesse to the tune of three-quarters of a billion dollars a year. They had 40 years. In just over 4 years we have gotten their finances straightened out. The first thing we had to do was basically take over the District, put in a control board and get some personnel who could do something. I want to cite again what we inherited here and talk about the policy that they are trying now to foster and the President is trying to impose with these vetoes. The District of Columbia had, in 1995, 48,000 people employed in the District. It was the third in size as far as municipal employees, exceeded only by New York and Los Angeles. The revenue from all sources in 1995 was over $7,200 per capita. They had plenty of money coming in. In fact, it was the highest in the United States. When we took over, they were charging more. The expenditures per capita, $7,150, you guessed it, was the highest rate of expenditures in the country. So they had more employees than anyplace except for the two largest cities and on a per capita basis probably exceeded only by the former Soviet Union. The debt was the third highest in the United States at $6,354 per person. That is what we inherited. Again, three-quarters of a billion dollars running annual deficit. Let me tell you what else we inherited, and this is from the folks who are now saying they are going to straighten out Social Security and the District of Columbia. Let me talk about a few of the programs that are important to people, and they always give you this baloney that the Democrats or the liberals are more interested in people than the Republicans or the conservative side of the aisle. This is what they did to the people that they are supposed to care about. According to, and these are all articles except for one of these, it is from the Washington Post, not exactly a conservative publication but we will use the Post as a source. According to the Post in 1995, the Department of Housing and Urban Development rating system, the District's subsidized housing program achieved the lowest ranking of any urban public housing agency in the Nation. Now, that is an accomplishment. They had control of this place, control of the District and the housing program basically failed. The prison. This is from 1995, again, the same story. ``Authorities have uncovered a multimillion-dollar heroin ring that was run out of the Lorton correctional complex. That is the D.C. prison. Prosecutors have obtained convictions on more than 30 corrections employees in the past 3 years for smuggling drugs, accepting bribes and corruption. A jail suicide expert recently described the D.C. jail situation as catastrophic.'' This is what we inherited in 1995, the new majority. We have had to basically take the Federal prison, take the housing authority and revamp all of these programs, practically eliminate the prison here because the prisoners had basically taken over control. Now, again these are supposed to be the most compassionate people, they tell you how they are saving Social Security and children and they always line up the children in the photo ops and all of that. This is what they were doing with the children, again their liberal, failed policies. This is from the Washington Post. The article is right here. I will read right from it: ``Some mentally ill children at the District's St. Elizabeth Hospital have been fed little more than rice, jello and chicken for the last month after some suppliers refused to make deliveries because they hadn't been paid.'' Here those that are probably the least well off, least able to help themselves, the mentally ill children in the District, they were the recipients of their policy, and again this is something that we have had to straighten out in the last little more than 4 years. They had 40 years to create this mess. And now they want to go back to that. This is a great story from the Washington Post, October 7, 1994: A city funded program aimed at spurring economic development has made few loans, created few jobs and after 6 years is still sitting on millions of dollars, according to the D.C. auditor Russell Smith. Smith said the Economic Development Finance Corporation, which began operating in 1988, again under these folks, has failed in its mission. He contended that it has improperly invested $6 million in a private for-profit group and furthermore that again their programs were a failure. Finally, the report criticized this group, the economic development group, for improper expenses, including food, flowers and political contributions made. This is what the other side did when they controlled the District of Columbia. One of the other areas I spoke a little bit about and I think is important to all of those who do not have housing, is public housing. The other side claims to be able to do more for folks. But again in February 1993, the Washington Post reported about the housing project, again under their watch: ``Fraught with contracting delays, staffing problems and an endless crush of maintenance requests, the city's housing department still has 1,895 units boarded up and unfit for anyone, not the record number of families in shelters for the homeless, not the 11,000 people waiting on average of 5 years for public housing.'' And then in their drug and alcohol treatment programs, trying to help those who we want to help and who we are now trying to help with our programs and policies that are incorporated in the legislation that the President has vetoed for the District. This is 1993 again. ``Its drug and alcohol treatment programs, however, were denounced as inadequate last month by Federal officials. However, the city has also gone without a permanent mental health commissioner for the past year. Its public housing department is being sued for failing to fix apartments and its Department of Human Services, responsible for tackling most of the social problems affecting the city, is still bound by 16 court orders to improve its work.'' Now, this is what they did in 40 years and we inherited, and in a little over 4 years we have begun to straighten out this mess, but the President does not want to see that continued. He wants more spending, more liberal programs. Public housing, the situation was horrible. I remember seeing a television report with rats and infestations you would not put, as I said on the floor of the House in a previous speech, your dog in one of these units, public housing units, that were under the control and supervision of these folks here. Again, a question of a liberal policy, a conservative policy. Then the question of pensions, and the previous speaker to me was talking about the Republicans and how they are not good custodians of Social Security. Now my colleagues have to remember that in 1993, 1994, 1995 and before that, they were spending 200 to $300 billion a year in excess of the revenues coming in and then all the money in the Social Security Trust Fund. This particular chart tells it all. It shows Democrat control, spending from the Social Security Trust Fund. Democrat control, 1984, 1985, right in this period when they took over the House and the Senate, and the Congress controls the spending, folks. The President can recommend it or veto some, but basically the authority under the Constitution is with the House of Representatives and the Senate. This is the most graphic and telling chart that I have ever seen. Every American should look at this. And how they can come to the floor with a face and tell us that we are not doing a good job, we are not good stewards of this, or we are proposing plans to spend from the trust fund. When you see what they did when they controlled this, they spent all the money that came in, all of that into indebtedness, and then all of the trust fund money. It is absolutely astounding that they could come with straight faces, come to the floor and accuse us of this. They also distorted, and I heard, again, previous speakers talking about this, about Republicans wanted to do away with Social Security. Well, I do not know of any Republican who has advocated doing away with Social Security. Most of us are concerned because of their years and years of spending out of the trust fund. It is very difficult to put it back put the money back in there, and we are doing that for the first time. Without a doubt we are doing it. But it is beyond belief that, again, they could come to the floor with a straight face and say that we have a plan to do this. Now I cite this because they did the same thing with the District of Columbia when Marion Berry in 1994 was here, and this is from the Washington Times, the only one I have from the Washington Times. But I think the facts are correct in it. It says Marion Berry has proposed little beyond the $140 million mandate to shore up the city's sagging finances. With a $40 million deficit remaining from fiscal 1994, an $18 million shortage in payments to Metro, 5 billion in unfunded police and firefighters' pension liability; not only did they do it to the Social Security Trust Fund, they did it to the District's pension funds. And again I just do not know how you can dispute the facts. This chart has not been doctored in any way. This tells it like it is. In fact, the other side had their chance some 40 years and a little more than 4 years. It is absolutely incredible what we have been able to do in fighting and kicking and screaming with the President vetoing our legislation, even the District bill. Again, if you take what the Democrats did with education, and you hear them talk about how they have done so much with education. In fact, my wife was a former educator. Myself, I graduated from the University of Florida with a degree from the College of Education. Though I never professionally taught, Mr. Speaker, I am an observer of what has taken place in education, both again living with a teacher and closely monitoring what has happened. What they have adopted as their policy for public education is what I call RAD. It is called regulate, administer and dictate, RAD; R-A-D, regulate, administer and dictate. And that is what they have done over 40 years, bringing more control and power. Now what is interesting, only between 4 and 5 cents of every dollar that goes into education in fact comes from the Federal level; 95-96 cents comes from State and local sources. But year after year they have created more federal programs; I told you some 760; I think we have it down to a little below 700 now kicking and screaming, but consolidating some of the administration, the A in that, the regulations. They want to regulate and control. As long as they regulate and control, administer programs, decide who gets the grant, who gets this, we have said that we want 90 percent of the money in the classroom and for basic education. They, in fact, have had 90 percent of the money not going into the classroom and for education. They want to determine whether we use the money for school construction, or they want to determine the hiring and firing of teachers. We think that should be left to the local school boards and local officials. It is a liberal philosophy, a liberal philosophy of RAD. Regulate from Washington, administer from Washington, and dictate from Washington. Now they did the same thing with the District of Columbia, and what did we inherit in the District? We basically inherited a school system where they are spending more per student than almost any place in the United States and getting less, some of the worst performance records. In an article in 1996, again of what we inherited, the D.C. public school system had 91 leaky roofs, currently they had 20 condemned boilers and a hundred of 230 buses are nonoperational. This is what we inherited, and, again, straightening this out has been very difficult, and again the President wants to veto our approach to education in the District, our approach to drug policy in the District, our approach to fiscal responsibility in the District and go back to the reckless ways of spending. I love these articles because they cite again what we inherited, what this new Republican majority inherited, and I think every Republican should be proud whether it is the American who is out there and registered as a Republican, whether it is a Republican in this Congress, whether it is some of my colleagues who were beaten up and defeated for the fiscal responsibility that they brought about, but I think they should be very proud of what they have done not only in the Congress for the country, but I think what we have done for our Nation's capital. A nation's capital should be a shining example. Instead it was a disgraceful situation here that we inherited. This 1996 Washington Post article talks about what we inherited with some of the medical facilities; in this case, the morgue, and I have cited this one before. This is just unbelievable: Cockroaches crawling across stainless steel autopsy tables, clogged drains that often send blood and body fluid spilling on to the faded tile floor, flies droning in the hot stench, so thick it sticks to your skin and leaves fowl taste in your mouth. And here is a quote from one of the workers there: We try to do the autopsies early in the morning, it is cooler then. This was the scene yesterday at the District's dilapidated morgue near the D.C. General Hospital in southeast Washington where 74 corpses, more than three times the morgue's intended capacity, are being stored in a facility where refrigeration sometimes cuts off when it rains. This is the mess that we inherited with the District of Columbia. This is the way they operated it and administered it, a very important fiduciary responsibility in the Constitution. The Congress is responsible for the District. It gets even worse. It says one body, and this is the report from this reporter, Washington Post, who looked at it then. One body was on the floor, and some were in body bags that had split open exposing the faces of the corpses. The backlog has occurred in parts because the crematorium the morgue uses to dispose of unclaimed bodies broke down a month ago, and the cash-strapped city had no other way to dispose of the corpses. This is a part of this argument, and, as my colleagues know, I have said before it was easy for us to balance the budget because what we did is we limited the increases. They have you think that we took food out of the mouths of babies, we closed down social programs. The argument we got into was limiting the increases in spending. They had huge 10, 12, 14 percent, not mentioning the giveaway programs of the District. Seven hundred and twenty-two million, three-quarters of a billion in 1 year, to pay for this mess. This is what we inherited; it is a disgrace. Can people not deal with these facts? I know this has to be embarrassing for the other side, but this, in fact, is what our majority inherited, what we have been able in a little more than 4 years to straighten out situations like this. Then, again, we talk about caring for those who are in most need. I talked about the mentally ill children feeding them Jello and rice for months. That is the compassionate liberal solution. Here, and I used this one last week, I will cite it again: neglected and abused children. Now what can be more responsible than taking care of neglected and abused children? Here is a worker, a welfare specialist who came in from Guam, and said she saw some very difficult situations in Guam. This is in 1995. But after 6 months in the District's bureaucratic trenches she knows she made a terrible mistake. This is quoting from the article. She quit Friday saddened and shocked, she says, by a foster care system so bad that it actually compounds the problems of the neglected children and their families, and she said and then to come here and see one of the worst situations, it is depressing. She quit in 1995. This is what we inherited. This is how the so-called compassionate liberals are taking care, custodians of the Nation's capital, spending huge amounts. We have gotten that into balance. We have to take it over, and we are getting these programs into order. The difficult part is getting these programs into order. But this is the disgusting and irresponsible mess that we inherited. The trauma center, the hospitals. Basically the hospitals were defunct in the District. March 1995, another Washington Post article: Impending cutbacks at D.C. General Hospital make it apparently inevitable that Washington's only public hospital will close its trauma center. This is the busiest center in the city, and the D.C. General Hospital is the only hospital equipped to treat gun shot, stabbing and other major injuries on the city's eastern side which has the most violence and the greatest number of uninsured patients. 1995, March; this is the story. This is what we inherited. Now, again remember $722 million supplement; in other words, they are running that debt, the taxpayers of the whole country were funding this mess. This is part of what the argument about is with the President of the United States. He vetoed our legislation which is responsible legislation. We brought the District into an administrative order. The 48,000 employees, down to some 33,000, and it should be cut even more; kicking and screaming, they came, and they picketed us, and they boycotted our offices. They kicked and screamed and yelled, but that had to be done to bring the administration, to bring the finances of the District into order. Again, we face a veto by the president of the United States over what has been proposed as far as getting the District's house in order and as far as liberal versus conservative policies. I could go on. We have even more stories about what we inherited in the District of Columbia and the battle, the budget battle that is now being fought. I guess the latest strategy from our side is to incorporate in the Health and Human Services appropriations measure the District bill and the President will veto that again. But do we want to go back to where they had the District of Columbia? Do we want to go to where they had the people of the United States facing incredible deficits and the robbing of trust funds and taking the money from Social Security funds? I say no. But the proposal before the Congress and the President also deals, and I want to talk specifically about that here, with whether or not to adopt liberal drug policies for the District in addition to liberal spending policies. Liberal drug policies in the bill are manifested in a prohibition of using Federal money on needle exchanges, for one matter, and the other side says give them free needles and they will not get HIV. In fact, our subcommittee, I chair this Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources and our staff looked into some of the needle exchange programs, not only in the United States but around the world. One of the first needle exchange programs was in Australia, and we have a report here, a 1997 report, that said free distribution of needles for injections of illicit drugs was introduced in Australia in the late 80's on the hypothesis it would play an important role in prevention of HIV transmission. Free needle distribution and exchange began officially in Sydney, where both HIV infection and IV drug use are concentrated, with a trial program in 1987. Then a report was done in 1997 in Australia, and it said it specifically provides no evidence, let me read from it, ``it provides no evidence to support the importance of free needle or needle exchange programs and much is to indicate irrelevance to HIV infection in Australia.'' This study also goes on to cite several other areas, and I have also cited the Vancouver study, which also showed that this needle exchange program actually can have an opposite effect. But that is what the President of the United States, that is what the liberal side of the aisle would like to impose, is a needle exchange program, federally funded by all the taxpayers, on the premise that, again, it cuts down on HIV transmission. The facts are to the contrary, the studies are to the contrary, a liberal policy versus a conservative policy. Now, Baltimore really is the premier city that has had a liberal policy. Baltimore is a liberal jurisdiction policy and has had needle exchange. I like to use Baltimore as an example because Baltimore, which adopted a legal needle exchange program, has actually dramatically increased its heroin addicts. In 1996 they went to almost 39,000, according to this chart provided by DEA. In 1998, they were over 56,000, according to DEA. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) has told me he estimates it to be 60,000 drug addicts. In fact, from Time Magazine, this liberal policy, again which the President would like to have us adopt and the other side would like to have us adopt, this is from Time Magazine just a few weeks ago, not my quote, it is a quote of one of their officials, ``One of every 10 citizens is a drug addict. Government officials dispute the last claim. It is more like 1 in 8, says veteran City Councilwoman Rikki Spector. We probably lost count.'' Again, not my words, a Time Magazine report. A liberal policy. If you look at what we have done, again, one of the things I am most proud of is we have taken a tougher stance in Washington the last four years, and the murder rate in Washington has decreased 14 percent from 1997 to 1998. We are down to 260 murders. It was in the 400-plus range when I came here. Every night young African Americans were being slaughtered on the streets. This is still not acceptable, but there has been a decrease through a more conservative oversight by, again, I think this Republican Policy Committee and the types of policy we want in the bill that we presented to the President, which he has vetoed. The same thing has happened with New York. The murder rate decreased there 17 percent in 1997 to 1998. In fact, in Baltimore, the deaths in 1997-1998, this liberal drug policy, it is actually one of the few jurisdictions where they have stayed the same. In fact, they are exactly the same, 312 in 1997 and 312 in 1998. This is the liberal policy that the President wants to adopt relating to drug programs and to approaches as far as legislative oversight and as far as spending. So we can see factually what happens. You get a dramatic increase in the number of addicts. The contrary is true, and I have held this job up in New York City under the leadership and conservative zero tolerance approach of Mayor Giuliani, went from over 2,000 murders down to 629 murders. New York, I am not sure what the population of New York is, but it has to be 9 or 10 million people, at least. Baltimore has about 500,000, 600,000 population now, and it has 312 murders, about half the number. That must be 10 or 15 times the murder rate. A conservative approach of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who has dramatically cut 70 percent of the deaths in New York City. So we have a choice. We have a choice between a liberal policy and we have a choice between a conservative approach. Mr. Speaker, with only 3 minutes remaining, I have spoken mostly tonight again on the situation we find ourselves in, but, you know, it is sad, because the District of Columbia has some wonderful people. They go to work and they try to make a living. There are families here, there are single parents here, there are so many good Americans in the District of Columbia, and we do have an important responsibility over the District of Columbia. But we tried their way. The jails failed, the prisons were destroyed. The public housing was a disgrace. The programs for the mentally ill, the children in most need, the neglected, the education programs, they all failed. Fortunately, that entire model was not transposed on the country. The pension fund, just as I pointed out, the pension fund of the District was even taken from, just as Social Security. I will hold this up as I close, because it is important, not only this one bill for the District of Columbia. Many people in America, many Members of Congress, may or may not care about the District specifically. We are very much, particularly in the House, oriented towards the problems of our own District. But it is a Federal responsibility. These are decent human beings. But should we return to the chaos that they created in 40 years? After some four years-plus of hard work and effort to put money back in the trust fund, to make the District of Columbia something you can be proud of, that people can live and work here, and it is our Nation's Capital, it should be a shining example, and those trust funds should be really part of our trust. That is why the people of America sent us here, for trust, to make sure these programs operate. So I hope that the American people will read between the lines. I hope that the President will not continue to insist on these vetoes, to bring more liberal policies on needle exchange and other drug legalization schemes, and then have the fiscal responsibility that is so important. It is tough. It is tough being a Member of Congress today because we do want to do the right thing, particularly on our side.

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I come to the floor late tonight to talk about a subject I often talk about, normally on Tuesday nights in a special order, but did not get that opportunity this week, so I am here tonight to talk about what I consider to be one of the most important social problems facing not only the Congress but the American people in almost every community and almost every family across our land, and that is the problem of illegal narcotics. In the House of Representatives, I have the honor and privilege of chairing the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform. And in that subcommittee we have done our best to try to bring together every possible resource of the Congress and of the American government in an effort to combat illegal narcotics. The ravages of illegal narcotics and its impact on our population I have spoken to many times on the floor of the House. I just mentioned last week that we now exceed 15,200 individuals who died last year, in 1998, from dug-induced deaths. This is up some nearly 8 percent over the previous year. I have also talked on the floor of the House of Representatives and to my colleagues about some of the policies that were passed by the Clinton administration in 1993, when they controlled both the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, all three bodies, and fairly large voting margins in the House of Representatives. So, basically, they could do whatever they wanted to do. Unfortunately, as is now history, they took a wrong turn in the effort to combat illegal narcotics. They began by closing down the drug czar's office from some nearly 120 employees in that office to about two dozen employees in that office. They dismissed nearly all of the drug czar's staff. With the Republican Congress, and through the efforts of the former chairman of the oversight committee of drug policy, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who is now Speaker of the House of Representatives, we have restored those cuts. We have manpower now in that office of nearly 150 individuals under the supervision of our drug czar, General Barry McCaffrey. Under the Clinton administration, the source country programs to stop illegal narcotics at their source were stopped in 1993. They were slashed some 50 percent plus. This took the military out of the interdiction effort, which closed down much of the interdiction effort and having the Coast Guard work to secure some of our borders and our maritime areas. Those efforts were dramatically slashed. And, additionally, other cuts were made. Changes in policy were made that were quite dramatic. The surgeon general, chief health officer of the United States, appointed by the President, was then Joycelyn Elders, and that individual sent the wrong message: Just say maybe. So we had the highest leadership in the land and we had the highest health officer developing a different policy, a policy that really failed us. I have some dramatic charts here tonight that show exactly what happened. I had our subcommittee staff put these together to show the long-term trend and lifetime prevalence of drug use. We can see during the Reagan and Bush administration that the long-term trend in lifetime drug use was on a decline. And I have talked about this and sort of illustrated it by hand, but we have graphically detailed this from 1980, when President Reagan took office, on down to where President Clinton took office. I do not think there is anything that I have shown on the floor that can more dramatically illustrate the direct effects of that change in policy. And that policy, as we can see, had illegal narcotics going up. What is interesting is we see a slight change here, and that is after the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives and the United States Senate and started to put, as I say, Humpty Dumpty back together again. Because we basically had no drug war here. If we want to call it a drug war, we have actually almost doubled the amount of money for treatment. Now, just putting money on treatment of those afflicted by illegal narcotics, not having the equipment, the resources, the interdiction, the source country programs, is like conducting a war and just treating the wounded. Someone told me it is sort of like having a MASH unit and not giving the soldiers any ammunition or the ability to fight or conduct the war. And this is so dramatically revealed in this chart. What is interesting, if we look at some other charts of specific narcotics, we see sort of a steady up-and-down trend, and a good trend down during the Bush administration in the long-term, lifetime prevalence in the use of heroin. In the Clinton administration, it practically shoots off the chart. And again, when we restarted our war on drugs, through the leadership of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), who chaired the subcommittee with this responsibility before me, and in this Republican-controlled Congress, there was a renewed emphasis, a change in policy, employing a multifaceted approach which again began attacking drugs at their source, again employing interdiction, again trying to utilize every resource that we have in this effort. And it is a national responsibility to stop illegal narcotics at their source. And now here we see graphically displayed what has happened with heroin use. What is absolutely startling is that some of this usage in this area, these dramatic increases, we had an 875 percent increase in teen use of heroin in that period of time that we see here with the Clinton administration. Eight hundred seventy-five percent. And we are experiencing dozens and dozens of deaths in my central Florida community from this heroin, because it is not the same heroin that was on the streets in the 1980s or the 1970s that had a purity of 6 and 7 percent. This is 80 and 90 percent pure. These young people take it and they die. And there are more and more of them using it. But we have managed to begin to turn this around through the efforts, again, of a Republican-led Congress. And this shows, again, some dramatic change in usage. This is another absolutely startling chart that our staff has prepared. We traced the long-term trend in the prevalence of cocaine use. In the Reagan administration, we see here where we had a problem. And I remember as a staffer working with Senator Hawkins, who led some of the effort in the United States Senate back in the early 1980s, that they began the downturn. In the Bush administration, incredible progress was made. Back in the Clinton administration, we see again a rise of cocaine use and drug abuse. And this is basically where they closed down the war on drugs. Now, what is very interesting is we are at a very important juncture here in the House of Representatives. We need 13 appropriations measures to fund the Government. And among the 13 appropriations measures, one of those is to fund and assist with the finance and operations of the District of Columbia. Many people do not pay much attention to this. Some of the Members pay little attention to this. But I think that the situation with the District of Columbia is very important to talk about tonight as it relates to changes in drug policy. We have to remember that one of the major issues of contention here between the Republican Congress and between the Democrat side of the aisle is a liberalization of drug policy. That manifests itself in two ways. First, there is support on the other side of the aisle for a needle exchange program in the District. There is also an effort here to allow the medical use of marijuana and liberalization of some of the marijuana laws here, two policies with a liberal slant. Now, let me say something about the liberal policies that have been tried. And I have used this chart before. Let me take this chart and put it up here. This is the policy of Baltimore which Baltimore adopted some 10 years ago. Baltimore has a needle exchange program. That needle exchange program has resulted in 1996 in 38,900, according to DEA at that time, drug addicts. So they started a needle exchange program, they lost population, and they gained dramatic increase in drug addiction, particularly heroin addiction. Now, this is the chart from 1996. I have a Time Magazine article from September 6, and it says, and this is not my quote, it is a quote from this article, it says one in every 10 citizens is a drug addict. And that is more to what the representative from Maryland in that particular area has told me. However, listen to this: Government officials dispute the last claim. Here is a quote, and it is not my quote. ``It is more like one in eight,'' says veteran City Councilwoman Rikki Spector, ``and we have probably lost count.'' So a liberal policy that this House of Representatives' Democrat representation wants for Washington, that this President wants for Washington has been tried in Baltimore. This is the result. I also will illustrate what has taken place in New York City with the murder decline. In New York City, you have Mayor Rudy Giuliani who has adopted a zero tolerance, no-nonsense, get tough and the opposite of a liberal policy but a tough policy. From the 2000 mark, they are down to the 600 level. In other words, in Baltimore, Baltimore in 1997, and I checked the figures, had 312 murders. In 1998, they had 312 murders. No decline, static, and with a liberal policy. Here is a tough policy, and we see a dramatic decrease. It is almost a 70-percent decrease in murders. I think if you look at these murders in both of these cities you will find that they are drug and illegal narcotics related. So the question before the Congress and the question before us tonight is really do we adopt a liberal policy? Now, we have been there, and we have done that. I came to this Congress in 1992 and watched how with the other side controlling the House, the Senate, and the White House what they did. They had 40 years of control of this body and over policy of the District of Columbia. We have had a little more than 4 years. This is what we inherited. We inherited almost three-quarters of a billion dollar deficit that they were running here. Here are some of the statistics about what had happened in Washington, and I will read these from The Washington Post and some other articles. They are not my quotes or statements. But the facts are, although the District of Columbia was 19th in size among American cities, its full-time employee population then was 48,000. We have got it down to some 33,000 kicking and screaming. It was only exceeded by New York and Los Angeles when we inherited that responsibility. So we had a liberal policy which gave us one of the highest debts of any local government in the Nation, one of the highest number of employees. And the question was, was enough revenue coming in. D.C. also had revenues per capita of $7,289, which at that time was the highest in the Nation. We have managed in a little over 4 years to balance the budget in this budget that is being presented, that is being vetoed and the D.C. appropriations measure, that is being vetoed has been vetoed by the President. The debt that the average citizen had was one of the highest figures in the United States at $6,354. And that is what we inherited here. The other side is always concerned about how policies affect people. The Republicans inherited the District of Columbia. This is an article from 1995 when we inherited it of the impending cutbacks at D.C. General, this is the hospital, make it apparently inevitable that Washington's own public hospital will close its trauma center. And who would be hurt the hardest? This article says that thousands of poor and expensive-to- treat patients would be those who were hurt. This is what we inherited. Now we have gotten this in order, and the question is do we want to go back to those liberal policies and high-spending, high-taxing policies? Here is a great story. Talk about helping children. After 6 months in the District bureaucratic trenches, this is a woman who came from Guam and was a welfare specialist and this is quoted from 1995 in The Washington Post. This lady quit. Saddened and shocked, she said, by a foster care system so bad that it actually compounds the problems of neglected children and their families. She said she came here from Guam, she worked in Guam, and she said then to come here and see one of the worst situations, it is depressing. This is what the Republican majority inherited, and this is what the other side would like to go back to with again their liberal policies, their tax policies. Here is an article that I saved from 1996. ``Ghost payrolls ought to determine dead retirees in District getting pensions.'' Again, a system out of control. Again, the question of responsibility and education. This is what we inherited in 1995. Currently, we have 20 condemned boilers in the schools, 103 of 230 buses are non-operational because of the budget crisis. And at that time again they were spending three- quarters of a billion over their budget. And very sadly, I recall and I saved this article. It says, ``With past due, St. Elizabeth skimps on children's meals.'' They want to go back to those wonderful days of yesteryear when they controlled the District of Columbia for some 40 years. This is what they did for those people that they supposedly care about after taxing them nearly to death, running business, running population out. This is a quote: ``Some mentally ill children at the District's St. Elizabeths Hospital have been fed little more than rice, jello and chicken for the last month after some suppliers refused to make deliveries because they haven't been paid.'' And they had not been paid even with running a supplement from the taxpayers across the United States of three- quarters of a billion dollars running in debt. The housing program in the District of Columbia, again to return to those wonderful days of yesteryear when they controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House, this is 1995. According to a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development rating system, the District subsidized housing program achieved the lowest ranking of any urban public housing agency in the Nation. On a scale where a score below 60 places an agency in the troubled category, the District's rating plunged from 37 in 1991 to 19 in 1993. They ran it into the ground and now they want to do it again. What is interesting is, I had another chart here that I wanted to show, but I will not have time tonight. I will try to get back to it next Tuesday when we continue our effort to show why we should not go to a liberal policy on narcotics, on spending, on taxation that is being proposed by the other side of the aisle. Mr. Speaker, do I have any time remaining?

Mr. MICA. In that case, Mr. Speaker, I would like to continue tonight rather than wait until next Tuesday night, again with some information that I think is very important. I talked about the situation with Baltimore and with Washington and the inclination of the other side of the aisle to go now to a liberal drug policy with needle exchange. Many people say, well, if you adopt a needle exchange, it will help cut down on HIV infections, it will help drug users. Let me just quote a program that was tried, a needle exchange program report that was given to our subcommittee, and tell a little bit about what took place with that particular needle exchange program which now I believe the President and the other side of the aisle would like to protect with the President's veto of the D.C. appropriations measure. A 1997, Vancouver study reported that when their needle exchange program started in 1988, HIV prevalence in IV drug addicts was only 1 to 2 percent. It is now 23 percent. We see that when they started out with a needle exchange program, at the very beginning they only had 1 to 2 percent infection rate. Now it jumped to 23 percent. The study found that 40 percent of HIV-positive addicts had lent their used syringe in the previous 6 months. So the very intent of not having needles being exchanged and spreading HIV was actually increased by giving out these free needles. Again, this is the results of a needle exchange program study in Vancouver in 1998. Additionally, the study found that 39 percent of the HIV negative addicts had borrowed a used syringe in the previous 6 months. A Montreal study showed that HIV addicts who used needle exchange programs were more than twice likely to become infected with HIV as HIV addicts who did not use the needle exchange program. That is another study in Montreal. The American Journal of Epidemiology in 1990 reported on a study that was entitled ``Syringe Exchange and Risk of Infection With Hepatitis B and C Viruses.'' In this study there was no indication of a protective effect of syringe exchange against HBV or HCV infection. Indeed, the highest incidence of infection occurred among current users in the needle exchange program. If it was not more conflicting than anything to have the administration, the President, veto the D.C. measure and also again the liberal side of the aisle here encourage and fight over adoption of a more liberal drug policy and a needle exchange policy, even the administration's own head of the Office of Drug Policy, General Barry McCaffrey, who is respected on both sides of the aisle has said, and let me quote from him, ``By handing out needles, we encourage drug use. Such a message would be inconsistent with the tenor of our national youth-oriented antidrug campaign.'' That is again a quote by General McCaffrey. So we have a choice of really going back to, as I said, the days of yesteryear when we had the housing programs in the District of Columbia in default, we had the emergency medical services and the hospitals closing down or not able to operate. I have cited before on the House floor a story that I read in the Washington Post back again with the other side controlling the District budget, with the other side letting the funding of the District budget run amuck, with the other side letting a liberal policy of spending and taxation prevail in the District, I cited this report in the Washington Post where in fact it was said by a reporter that at that time you could dial 911 for emergency services or you could dial for a pizza to be delivered and you would get the pizza sometimes quicker than you could get the emergency medical services. Again, the other side had 40 years to run this body and also to oversee the operations under the Constitution, and it is a specific constitutional mandate that the Congress do conduct oversight and is responsible for the District of Columbia. The question again before us is whether we want to return to the liberal policies and the failed policies of the past. In addition to some of the areas that I cited that we inherited in the District for responsibility were also the prisons. The other side spent a fortune on the prisons. We ended up with inheriting a prison system that was basically out of control. In fact, it was so bad we basically had to close down the Lorton prison. The prisoners had taken over the prison. Another story that was reported here in the Washington Post was the water system. Sometimes you could not drink the water in the District and basically the system was broken down and had to be renovated. The District office building, which was the seat of government, basically looked like a third world country capital headquarters. Air conditioners were falling out of the windows. I ask anyone to drive by the District office building now and see the refurbishing that is going on. It would make you very proud of the District of Columbia. That again is something we have been able to do in a little over 4 years, and they let go into default in some 40 years of their stewardship. So do we want to return to that time of high spending, high taxes, of liberal policies? When I came to the District of Columbia some 7 years ago, the murder rate and most of the murders here are black-on-black murders and young males between the ages of 14 and 40, and we still have horrendous deaths here, but even in the District of Columbia through oversight of this new Republican majority, I think we have been able to bring down some of those deaths, to straighten out the law enforcement activities in the District which also were hurt tremendously by the liberal policies of spending and taxation that almost ruined our Nation's capital. So we had a capital that was hemorrhaging, a capital that indeed had so many problems, I could probably spend the rest of the night citing article after article about the waste and abuse that we inherited here. Again we are at a critical juncture in this appropriations process. The question is: Do we return again to those spending tendencies, and just because they spent more did not mean people got less. You heard what happened to the critically ill, you heard what happened to those children who were cares and wards of the city and the District of Columbia, you heard those who relied on public housing had a defunct public housing, the water system, the prison system. So this is a real challenge, and it really magnifies what is going on with the rest of these appropriations bills, whether it is education that we discussed here today. Education system, and again in Washington they were spending more per capita and their students were performing at lower levels. Spend more; get a lower result, and regulate and administer in a very expensive fashion. That is similar to some of the conflict that we face in these spending and appropriation bills. I call it the RAD approach, Regulate, Administer and Dictate, and that is what has happened in Washington, and that is what we are trying to fight as we try to pass 13 appropriations measures. The real easy thing for the new majority, although we took a tremendous amount of guff for it, and people called us names and said that the sliced bread, as we know it, would no longer exist, and accused of all kind of things. We did bring our Nation's finances into order just as we brought the District of Columbia's finances into order, and it was a fairly simple thing. What you do is limit your expenditures. We did not have huge increases in these programs. Just like I cited the District of Columbia, we did not have huge increases. We moderated the increases. We were able to balance the budget. Sometimes I think that was the easy part, even though we got a lot of grief for it. The tough part is now in trying to take these programs like education that we have brought power and authority and programs to Washington so that a teacher cannot teach, so that there is not authority at the local level, so that there is not discipline in the classroom, so that the emphasis, again, is on creating regulations from Washington, administering from Washington and keeping the power in Washington as opposed to out there. So now we are engaged, and even today we have been spending incredible amounts of money for young people and their education, and yet they have not performed well, and particularly those young people who are the most disadvantaged in our society and our schools and communities. So, programs like title I that are so important, we need to revisit; Head Start programs, we need to revisit; not eliminate, not destroy, not cut out, but make them work so that every dollar is effectively applied and that those young people have the best opportunity ever. So this is what the debate is about, 13 appropriations measures. The President has vetoed the District bill and several other bills. He is holding several bills hostage. We have passed several this afternoon. We passed an Interior appropriations measure, and we must fund the government. The hard work, as I said, is taking each of these programs together, whether it is Department of Interior, Education, Commerce, defense bills and making them work. My responsibility is a small responsibility, and that is trying to take the drug war that was closed down in 1993 by the Clinton administration, the drug policy which destroyed our ability to stop drugs cost effectively at their source or interdict them before they got to their borders. Once they get past our borders, it becomes almost an impossible task for our law enforcement, local communities and families to deal with that. So we have seen an incredible increase in the supply of hard narcotics coming in with our guard let down with a doubling, in fact, of the money on treatment, and I have no problem with spending two or three times what we are spending on treatment as long as it is effective. But it must also be part of a multi-faceted program, a program of interdiction, eradication at source countries, a strong program of enforcement. As I cited, the New York experience, zero tolerance does work. The liberal policy they tried in Baltimore and some other communities does not work. We could take Los Angeles and other communities that have had tough crack-down policies, and these figures and statistics from zero tolerance and tough enforcement are so dramatic they have affected our national crime rate. And then of course education, and under the leadership of the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert) who chaired this responsibility before me we initiated and launched the largest effort, a media campaign effort, ever by, I think, any government in probably the history of America or any government in getting an anti-narcotics message, a billion-dollars campaign over 5 years. We are now a little over a year into it. Last week our subcommittee held a hearing on where we are, how that money has been spent, is it being spent effectively. So that is another part of this puzzle that we need to put back together, a part that really was not even there even in the Bush and Reagan administration and even through the Clinton administration. That money, that billion dollars we put up in taxpayer money, is matched by an equal or an amount in excess of that Federal contribution by a donation, so we think we are seeing again, and I will be glad to put the charts up again, see the beginning of a downturn. But it takes all of those efforts, not closing down the War on Drugs, and there was not a War on Drugs after 1993 to 1995, and it has taken us several years to get that back on track, to put, as I say Humpty Dumpty back together again. So we have learned some lessons. Liberal policies, they just do not work. The District is a very, a very, very exact case, and we can cite it agency after agency. We look at our federal bureaucracy, and we have the same thing, big spending, spend more get less. That is not the answer. But we need to make these programs less. If we need to spend more, I do not think there are folks here on our side of the aisle that would not adequately fund programs, but we want to see results. We do not want to return to a destroyed District of Columbia with the high spending, with the high taxes, with the agency after agency defunct with people who need help and people who need government to work, have it actually work against them, as it did here in the District of Columbia and now does in some programs which we have not been able to change because of opposition, because of name calling and trying to hold on to the vestiges of the liberal past policies that do not work. So tonight is not a full hour, and we will return next week with more information about our efforts to get our drug policy back on track and to make some of these programs work, but we certainly will stay here, will endure vetoes by the President and slings and arrows from the other side, but we are going to make these things work, and we are going to make them work effectively and stay on track even though it is a difficult path. So, with those comments, Mr. Speaker, and almost at the appointed hour of recess I am pleased to yield back.

Mr. MICA

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

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, we have a constitutional responsibility of stewardship over the District of Columbia. The other side for 40 years had that responsibility. When we inherited, a little over 4 years ago, almost 5 years ago, that responsibility, we inherited a District of Columbia where the education system was a failure, where the hospitals were nearly closed down, where HUD and the housing authority were bankrupt. We could not drink the water, and the water had to be turned over to others to operate. The utilities had to be turned over to others to operate. The prison system was such a disaster that we basically had to close down the prison and have it run by someone else. The morgue was in such bad shape that the bodies were stacked, and there were unburied bodies. That is what we inherited as a new majority, plus a deficit that was running in the hundreds of millions, a half a billion dollars a year. In 4 years, what we have done is we have begun to turn things around, reduce the murders in this city. This is today's paper. Read today's paper, the homicides. Aaron Walker, 18, found dead. Derrick Edwards, 22, found dead and murdered. Theodore Garvin, 17. These are just 2 days of deaths. Do we want to turn back to that time when they had their opportunity, and let us inherit a disaster as far as deaths, and most of them drug-related? Baltimore, and these are the statistics from 1996, went from just a few drug addicts in the beginning of their needle exchange program to, in 1996, 38,000. We had testimony and comments from one of the city councilmen in Baltimore that that figure has risen to one in eight in the population. Do we want to turn back to that liberal policy? Do we want to see more deaths? I say no.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I submit for the Record an article entitled ``Needle Exchange Programs Have Not Proven to Prevent HIV/AIDS.'' [From Drug Watch International] Needle Exchange Programs: 1998 Report (By Janet D. Lapey, MD) Needle Exchange Programs Have Not Been Proven to Prevent HIV/AIDS Outreach/education programs have been shown to be very effective in preventing HIV/ AIDS. For instance, a Chicago study showed that HIV seroconversion rates fell from 8.4 to 2.4 per 100 person- years, a drop of 71%, in IV drug addicts through outreach/ education alone without provision of needles. Needle exchange programs (NEPs) add needle provision to such programs. Therefore, in order to prove that the needle component of a program is beneficial, NEPs must be compared to outreach/ education programs which do not dispense needles. This point was made in a Montreal study which stated, ``We caution against trying to prove directly the causal relation between NEP use and reduction in HIV incidence. Evaluating the effect of NEPs per se without accounting for other interventions and changes over time in the dynamics of the epidemic may prove to be a perilous exercise. The authors conclude, ``Observational epidemiological studies . . . are yet to provide unequivocal evidence of benefit for NEPs.'' An example of this failure to control for variables is a NEP study in The Lancet which compared HIV prevalence in different cities but did not compare differences in outreach/ education and/or treatment facilities. Furthermore, recent studies of Needle Exchange Programs show a marked increase in AIDS. A 1997 Vancouver study reported that when their NEP started in 1988, HIV prevalence in IV drug addicts was only 1-2%, now it is 23%. HIV seroconversion rate in addicts (92% of whom have used the NEP) is now 18.6 per 100 person-years. Vancouver, with a population of 450,000, has the largest NEP in North America, providing over 2 million needles per year. However, a very high rate of needle sharing still occurs. The study found that 40% of HIV-positive addicts had lent their used syringe in the previous 6 months, and 39% of HIV-negative addicts had borrowed a used syringe in the previous 6 months. Heroin use has also risen as will be described below. Ironically, the Vancouver NEP was highly praised in a 1993 study sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control. The Vancouver study corroborates a previous Chicago study which also demonstrated that their NEP did not reduce needle- sharing and other risky injecting behavior among participants. The Chicago study found that 39% of program participants shared syringes vs 38% of non-participants; 39% of program participants ``handed off'' dirty needles vs 38% of non-participants; and 68% of program participants displayed injecting risks vs 66% of non-participants. A Montreal study showed that IV addicts who used the NEP were more than twice as likely to become infected with HIV as IV addicts who did not use the NEP.vii(7) There was an HIV seroconversion rate of 7.9 per 100 person years among those who attended the needle program, and a rate of 3.1 per 100 person-years among those who did not. The data was collected from 1988-1995 with 974 subjects involved in the seroconversion analysis.

Mr. MICA

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

Mr. MICA

Mr. MICA. Madam Speaker, the House today and this week and for the next number of days will be engaged in a very important debate. That debate is really a totally partisan debate. It is a debate about those who want liberal, big government programs and liberal programs for our government, and then on the other side, there are folks that think that we have too much power, too much spending, too many programs in Washington and that the policy of some 40 years did not, in many instances, work. This afternoon we had a debate about a policy relating to the District of Columbia. The President has vetoed the District of Columbia appropriations measure. Within that measure and that bill are provisions which would allow liberalization of drug policy for the District of Columbia. That is one of the things that is holding that measure up. Again, a contrast between a liberal policy, wanting to spend more money, and also a liberal drug policy for the District of Columbia versus a conservative approach. Now, let me tell my colleagues, the other side of the aisle and the liberals tried for 40 years to deal with the District of Columbia, and under the Constitution of the United States, the Congress is charged with that responsibility, and we take that very seriously. Now, when I came to Congress, as I said earlier this afternoon, in 1993, the District of Columbia, after 40 years of liberal Democrat rule, was in shambles. The Nation's Capital was a disgrace. The murder rate exceeded anywhere in the Nation. The schools had the highest per capita and per student expenditures and costs and some of the lowest performances. The hospitals were a joke. In fact, there was an article in the Washington Post that I have cited a number of times that said you could dial 911 for an emergency for EMS and The Washington Post said you could dial for a pizza and get the pizza served quicker than you could get the EMS in the District. This is what they brought to the Nation's Capital, what should have been the gem of the Nation turned into despair. They had 60,000 employees, almost one in 10 people in the District of Columbia were employed in this massive Federal bureaucracy created under again, liberal Democrat rule. The prisons, as I said, were in such bad shape that the new Republican majority has had to take over control of the prisons and basically disbanned Lorton. And again, deaths, and most of those deaths, drug-related in the District, were in the neighborhood of 500. They were killing them in scores. Now, just in a few years, in less than five years, this new Republican majority has brought some of these programs under control. We have brought some meaningful reform. They had a job training program here I reported on in the District that spent millions and millions of dollars and not one person trained. We have gotten that program under control. The District was running a surplus, I believe it was two- thirds of a billion dollars; if we check the exact statistics, we will find it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. This Republican Congress, in less than five years, has brought that budget under control. We had to institute a control board and policies to do that. Now, we are engaged in the same debate about Social Security. Here are the folks that spent, for 40 years, Social Security, all the money in the trust fund, every penny in the trust fund, and on top of that added hundreds of billions of dollars of debt per year. They spent all of the money that should be in the trust fund. All that is in there now are certificates of indebtedness of the United States. And now they are telling us they want to fix it. They have the same liberal policies, liberal drug exchange policies. I have cited before that Baltimore in 1996 had 39,000 drug addicts, a dramatic increase since they started that program. That is what they want here. And the latest statistics are it is close to 60,000, or one in eight of the population in Baltimore under this liberal policy of needle exchanges is now a drug addict in Baltimore. A disgrace. But they want to take their model and impose it on the District of Columbia. I do not care if there are 1,000 vetoes by the President. This is our charge and this is our responsibility, and we should not let what happened in a liberal venue happen in our Nation's Capital.