Mark Souder

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield such time as he may consume to the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger), the sponsor of this legislation.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, H.R. 1465, introduced by the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Ballenger), designates the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 4832 East Highway 27 in Iron Station, North Carolina, as the General Charles Gabriel Post Office. The entire delegation from the State of North Carolina has cosponsored this legislation. Mr. Speaker, General Charles Gabriel was the 11th chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. A lifelong North Carolina resident, he graduated with a bachelor's degree from the U.S. Military Academy in 1950 and was commissioned in the Air Force. He subsequently began studying to be a pilot and completed advanced training in December 1951. By August 1980, Charles Gabriel eventually had worked his way up to the position of commander in chief of the U.S. Air Forces in Europe at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. From that position, he was named Air Force chief of staff and moved to Washington, D.C. in July 1982. General Gabriel retired 4 years later on July 1, 1986. Mr. Speaker, General Charles Gabriel's decorated career in our Nation's Air Force is worthy of commendation by this House. I am proud to be part of the proceedings that honor General Charles Gabriel. I urge all Members to support the passage of H.R. 1465. I thank my colleague from North Carolina for introducing this important legislation. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 1465) to designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 4832 East Highway 27 in Iron Station, North Carolina, as the ``General Charles Gabriel Post Office''.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 231) supporting the goals and ideals of Peace Officers Memorial Day.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Colorado for introducing this important legislation honoring the peace officers of America. I urge all Members to support the adoption of this resolution.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I urge all Members to support adoption of this measure, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, H. Res. 195, introduced by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez), celebrates and congratulates Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs for hitting 500 major league home runs. It is a unique honor to bring up this legislation to recognize the accomplishments of Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs, who certainly is one of the greatest ball players of our generation, and likely of all time. While the resolution before us this afternoon congratulates him for hitting his 500th home run earlier this season, I believe it is also appropriate to recognize his many accomplishments, on and off the field, as a superlative hitter, goodwill ambassador for his native Dominican Republic and, most importantly, as the exemplification of the best qualities the game of baseball holds for every American. Let me start with Sammy's formidable accomplishments and sustained excellence on the field. I am told that the record today literally will not hold a listing of each of his 500 career home runs. He is just the 18th player in the history of baseball to reach this milestone. He is the only player ever to get 60 or more home runs in three seasons. Sammy Sosa, Babe Ruth, and Mark McGwire are the only players ever to have had more than two seasons hitting 50 home runs. Sammy holds or shares 24 major league records and an additional 10 National League records. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record a listing of those records as well as a summary of his accomplishments and listing by year of each of his career home runs. In recent years, there have been other players who have arguably performed as well in one season, but no one has matched or sustained the overall level of excellence set by Sammy Sosa. But what is so extraordinary about these achievements is not their difficulty as an athletic accomplishment or place in the history of baseball. Sammy Sosa's success as a ball player and a citizen is a living testament to the possibilities that America can offer to anyone from any place or circumstance in the world. Born in the Dominican Republic, he lost his father at an early age, and the family struggled. Sammy demonstrated the American values of perseverance, hard work, and honesty by working as a shoe-shine boy, washing cars and selling oranges to bring food to his mother and the rest of his family. The same circumstances led him to baseball. While he played early in his career for the Texas Rangers and the Chicago White Sox, he did not truly find his home until the White Sox traded him to the Cubs for George Bell. Bell played 2 years for the White Sox and hit 38 home runs before retiring. Since the trade, Sammy has hit 476 home runs for the Cubs. While we are proud of President Bush in so many different areas, the President of the United States has openly acknowledged that he believes one of the biggest mistakes he ever made was trading Sammy from the Texas Rangers, when he was owner of that team. Sammy Sosa became a national figure during the home run race of the 1998 season, which broadcaster Tim McCarver called ``the perfect season.'' Both Sosa and Mark McGwire assaulted the home run record of Roger Maris, which at that time had stood for 37 years and was widely believed to be unbreakable. McCarver astutely noted that not only Sosa and McGwire had pushed each other toward those accomplishments, but also that Sosa had understood that the race for the record was about far more than statistics. McCarver wrote the following: ``I think it was Sosa who made McGwire realize they could be ambassadors for the game.'' Sosa said, ``I like the fact that baseball is touching the fans in their hearts.'' As America watched, a genuine bond of respect and affection formed between the white, privileged, former USC student and the black Spanish- speaking Sosa, who was so poor growing up in the Dominican Republic that he learned baseball while using rolled up socks for a ball, a milk carton for a glove, and a tree limb for a bat. McGwire and Sosa, McCarver continued, would not dignify questions about their home run race having racial overtones and the notion that some fans were favoring one over the other, based solely on skin color or heritage. They became each other's greatest champions. America had rarely seen such sportsmanship, brotherhood, humility and class wrapped in a competitive cocoon. McGwire and Sosa transcended sports and entered the national consciousness. Mr. Speaker, those are the values and contributions to America that we honor today in this resolution, which were also honored when Sammy Sosa stood in the gallery of this Chamber in 1999 to receive bipartisan praise and applause at the State of the Union address. He said in his autobiography, ``Here I was, once a humble kid from the Dominican Republic, and now the lawmakers of the United States were standing and applauding me in the halls of Congress. It was a great moment.'' In addition to his civic leadership, Sammy is also widely recognized for his never-ending goodwill and good humor, such as when he sprints to his position at the beginning of every game at Wrigley Field and taps his heart for the fans in the right field bleachers. His is also a symbol for his native country, so much so that former Ambassador Bernardo Vega was quoted as saying, ``As far as I am concerned, he is the real Dominican ambassador. I just shuffle papers.'' But nothing speaks so eloquently to Sammy Sosa's contributions to both our culture and our sport as what he did during the Cubs' first game after the September 11 attacks when the Nation returned to baseball in a very small part of the national healing. Sammy Sosa hit a home run, and he carried a small American flag around the bases at Wrigley Field. I strongly encourage my colleagues to support the resolution.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I want to again thank the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Gutierrez) for introducing this important legislation. I have to admit it has not been the easiest bill for me to handle. I have a Heartland statue of longtime Mr. Cub Ernie Banks in my office; my father was a Cubs fan; my former boss, House Member and Senator Dan Coats was such a Cubs fan that on the second day of his honeymoon he went to a Cubs game; and my subcommittee staff director, Chris Donesa, is not only a Cubs fan and fanatic, he is a Sammy Sosa fanatic. But I am a White Sox fan like my colleague, the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis); and it is not without a little heartburn that we are paying such tribute, because if he were in the White Sox outfield today, we might be national champions. I hope the Cubs can do the same. Mr. Speaker, I urge the adoption of this measure.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 195) congratulating Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs for hitting 500 major league home runs.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, House Resolution 159, introduced by my distinguished colleague from the State of Texas (Mr. Hinojosa), expresses profound sorrow on the occasion of the death of Irma Rangel. Mr. Speaker, this legislation is a fitting tribute to the life and career of a remarkable public servant who passed away in March. Irma Rangel was the first Mexican American woman elected to the Texas State House of Representatives, and she was every bit as trailblazing as this distinction might suggest. First elected in 1976, Representative Rangel was best known for her outspoken work on educational issues, largely because she was a schoolteacher and principal prior to her career in government. She rose to the Chair of the House Higher Education Committee in 1995 in Texas. Her political career was as well known for her humility as it was for her many accomplishments, as she delighted only in improving the lives of her Texas constituents. Irma Rangel sadly lost her valiant struggle against cancer on March 18, 2003. The Texas Governor ordered all State office building flags to be flown at half mast on the day she passed away. All Texans, and indeed all Americans, will miss Irma Rangel for her unrelenting passion and devotion to all people. Therefore, I urge all Members to support the adoption of House Resolution 159 that honors Representative Irma Rangel, and I thank my colleague from Texas for introducing this important measure. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend their remarks on H. Res. 159, the resolution now under consideration.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution (H. Res. 159) expressing profound sorrow on the occasion of the death of Irma Rangel.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that when the House adjourns today it adjourn to meet at 10:30 a.m. tomorrow for morning hour debates.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, first I, too, want to thank the gentleman from Colorado (Mr. Tancredo), the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), the gentleman from Arizona (Mr. Shadegg) and others who have been down on the border. We held a hearing there in the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources just weeks ago, particularly going down to Organ Pipe, one of our more beautiful national monuments where the cactus, unlike the saguaro, come up, and hence the name, the Organ Pipe. They have saguaro cactus there as well. But unfortunately right now because of all the illegal immigrants and all the drug smuggling moving through that park, one of the most beautiful hiking trails in the country is sealed off because it is too dangerous for people to hike there. When you walk through the park, you see milk containers all over the place. If they are clear, it means they were water of people walking into the deserts by the hundreds. You can see them across the line because we basically have little protection on that border. If they are black, it is clear they had narcotics and were moving narcotics through. The area where this brave ranger was killed is just east of the main crossing point. It was in a wash. As he and seven other agents from Customs and Border Patrol and others were trying to capture this illegal immigrant and drug smuggler, the immigrant, the smuggler, hid in some bushes. The ranger, as he was being guided by a helicopter above him, could not see where the shots came from. They hit him, went through his vest and another protective device, through one side and the other side of his body. When he committed to work for the National Park Service, he thought he was going to be working with people who were trying to cut down trees or flowers, or who were basically having inner kind of conflicts in the parks. But we have watched our parks and monuments change into places, particularly around our borders or in our national forests and our parks where they are growing marijuana or producing methamphetamine, into far more dangerous places, endangering not only our rangers, but the people that are there. When you walk through this visitors' center at the Organ Pipe and when you walk through the park headquarters there, you see this young ranger's picture there. You see many pictures of him. You hear from every staff person at that park. They miss Kris. They miss the loss there. All of a sudden it has taken their profession, probably the highest-rated profession in the United States, and any poll shows that park rangers and the people who are serving our public parks are supposed to be a happy place, not a sad place. The parents, when the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra) brought them in and I met them, they said, ``We don't want our son's loss to be in vain.'' By naming this visitors' center, it is a reminder to Members of Congress and the American people that unless we can make our borders more secure, and I also serve on the subcommittee of the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp) as well as chairing the narcotics committee, we are not going to be secure in this country. We do not know who is going to come across, unless we can do a better job of restricting the narcotics coming in that are also killing people all over our country. Kris was out there trying to protect people in Fort Wayne, Indiana, all over America, by going after this drug dealer. But unless we can make those borders more secure, unless we are more aggressive, we are putting people in our national parks at risk, we are putting our national forests at risk, everybody else along the borders. One last comment. As we start to address the problems of Organ Pipe, we have pushed it over to the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation next door. The Shadow Wolves, who were just highlighted in ``Smithsonian Magazine'' a couple months ago as well as ``People Magazine,'' are now threatened with disbandment, that what we saw when we did our hearing, we saw four busts while we were doing the hearing of 1,500 pounds more than they seized all of last year in this Indian reservation, and we need to understand that while we are naming this monument after Kris and saying we are going to remember him and the people who sacrificed like him, that we also have to think of the adjacent areas and do not just push it through the next community as we address this. We have to get control, responsible control, of our borders, or we will not be secure in the United States, and hopefully this resolution today will help remind us of that.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to have my name removed as a cosponsor of H.R. 660.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, what is really disturbing in debates is how to counter misinformation when it is repeated on a constant basis on the floor of this House. The constitutional protection for religious liberty also extends to churches and it extends to organizations that reflect faith. That applies in the Tax Code. I presume a previous speaker, based on that logic, would not want to give a tax deduction to a church or a religious organization that discriminates in their hiring practices. For example, you would not have a Christian as the head of a synagogue, or you would not have a Muslim preaching at a Christian church. The charitable deduction is shaped that way; tax deductions are shaped that way. We have all sorts of court-approved guidelines, for example, in the sense of they have ruled in some of the schools you can fund a computer, but you cannot fund the software, if you look at it that way. In other words, busing programs and other things can even be funded directly by the government. But what is debated here is indirect funding. That is vouchers. We have numerous programs that have passed overwhelmingly in this House that have said when there is a choice, when no one is forced into it, why should people not be able to choose a job training program, an after-school program, a literacy program or other such type of thing that would enable them to be better prepared for the workplace? If there is a secular choice and if there are multiple choices in job training, why can one of those choices not be in an inner-city neighborhood, where the churches are often the cultural organizing institution? Why can one of those choices not be, like the black churches in my district or some of the Hispanic outreach programs run through the Catholic Church, or some of the charismatic programs run in some of the immigrant Hispanic communities, where they are doing the job training, where we can leverage the dollars and have people committed as much as possible? We know that regardless of who controls this House and the State houses, there will never be enough money to meet all the needs of those who are trying to find work, who are trying to secure health care, who are people with AIDS and so on; and unless we can engage the private sector that is faith-based, we will be overwhelmed with these problems. This bill is one small step, and we should not practice religious bigotry and say everyone can be involved except for people of faith unless they give up their faith. That is just not right when there is choice.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Chairman, first I want to thank the chairman, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), and the chairman of the subcommittee, the gentleman from California (Mr. McKeon), for their work with this bill. It is very important that we have these job training programs updated on a regular basis; that we have the flexibility to implement, particularly when we are struggling in the Midwest and many other parts of the country. This legislation is historic and very important. I especially want to address some misstatements that have been on the floor this afternoon regarding the faith-based provision; and it really troubles me as a committed Christian, but really anybody of devoted faith, whether you are Muslim or Jewish or whatever your background, of what seems to be a rise of antireligious bigotry in America right now. It is basically saying you are not welcome to practice your faith here. The fact is, people of devoted faith have been involved in both the public and private arena for many years. We started this morning with a prayer. Of all the lawgivers above us, there is Moses, the only one of the lawgivers that is faced this direction on the House floor who is looking straight down, and In God We Trust. We have passed multiple times on this floor legislation that has included and allowed faith- based organizations to permit, to participate in welfare reform initiatives, in multiple other initiatives, drug treatment, where people can participate with their faith, without having to give up basic tenets of their faith, in helping the poor and practicing compassion. In fact, the courts have upheld allowing buses and computers being given to private schools. We have charitable contributions which are indirect, allowing people to keep money and exempt Tax Codes. We allow students to choose to go to a college and get a student loan which is, once again, indirect funding. The question is, are you forcing anybody directly or indirectly into a specific program? In job training there are many choices. This bill has programs where there are many choices. Why can any of those choices not include a faith-based component? There is simply not enough money to cover all the needs in this society. When people are willing to leverage their own private dollars, to give of their own time and to work with individuals and individuals, particularly when we are targeting the poor many of these people are in urban areas. Many of the churches that are talked about are churches in my district of Ft. Wayne that are African American churches or Hispanic churches that want to get involved. They are the most trusted parts of their communities in most cases. They want to be involved in the literacy. They want to be involved in the job training. They want to be involved in the after- school programs. And nobody is saying that they are not going to be covered in this. Other people have a choice of where they want to go. What we are saying is if a church wants to be involved, you cannot tell them who they have to have in their pulpit. You can tell them that if somebody is practicing pornography and their religion does not believe in pornography that they cannot remove that person. Under the governmental laws, you cannot remove a person for watching legal pornography. But if you are a Christian like I am and you believe the church and church organizations are supposed to reflect the glory of your Savior or in another religion that faith, to ask that faith to change their hiring practices, to change the basic tenets of their faith so that they can help the poor is to ask them to do something inconsistent. Nobody is forcing anybody into any religion. What we are saying in the public arena where people are getting job training and so on, can one of their choices be to go to a faith of their choice where they can get the training along with the character development and with groups that are leveraging the funding. I commend the chairmen for their initiative with this. I commend our President, and I am appalled at the religious bigotry that I hear that is really challenging far more than this bill. It is challenging our Tax Code. It is challenging other Court-upheld decisions because they in effect would force the faith-based community, those who have deeply held beliefs that we may disagree about, out of the public arena; and that is wrong.

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, tonight I would like to focus on the illegal narcotics problem in the United States, as well as a little bit around the world. We have several legislative initiatives that are about to come in front of this Congress, including one moving through my subcommittee, the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources of the Committee on Government Reform, which is the Office of National Drug Control Policy reauthorization bill. The ONDC Director, commonly known as the Drug Czar of the United States, is John Walters. This bill will reauthorize for 5 years the entire oversight of the narcotics programs of the United States. In addition, in our emergency terrorism bill, we had money for Colombia. We will have in a number of appropriations bills in front of us money for the Andean region and other international narcotics control programs. So I thought tonight would be a good time to start with my colleagues and staff and others who are watching this discussion, laying out a little bit of the big picture on what we are tackling, mostly focusing tonight on the international drug problem, some on our domestic and some oversight, and then as we move into the markup in the next few weeks in subcommittee and full committee on this House floor, we will be spending a lot more time discussing the millions, and, in fact, billions of dollars that we spend fighting illegal narcotics. First, it is very important to understand that while tonight we are going to be talking about a lot of international concerns, this is directly a concern that hits every Congressional district. In every city and town, no matter how small or large, drug and alcohol problems in America account for, depending on the judge or prosecutor, 70 to 85 percent of all crime in America. Not just drug crime, this counts robberies, this counts rapes. This even counts child support payment problems, because often the people not making their child support payments, the people declaring bankruptcy, are having problems with drug and alcohol addiction. The use of illegal narcotics have gone up and down in our country. We will never eliminate them. It is a false goal to say we will eliminate the use of illegal drugs in the United States. There will always be, every day, new kids exposed in junior high, elementary school and high school. Somebody will lose a job. Somebody will have a problem in their marriage, and they will look for a way out. Rather than confronting their problem directly, they will look for a way out. So every day hundreds of thousands of people are exposed for the first time to the temptations of illegal narcotics. Furthermore, where there is a market, there will be a demand meeting that market, and we will never completely stop this. We have some people in this body and others who say well, if we cannot eliminate it, why are we spending all this money on it? I would ask the same question about child abuse. I would ask the same question about spouse abuse. I would ask the same question about rape. I would ask the same question about breast cancer and about other types of disease, heart disease and others. We do it because we need to keep tackling it. We need to make as much progress as we can. Particularly for those things that are controllable by individuals, such as rape, spouse abuse, child abuse, narcotics abuse and other things, we need to stay on top of it so the problems do not get bigger. It may be that that all we can do is hold it even, and sometimes we will make progress. There has been a lot of misinformation in the United States that we have not made progress on drug abuse. In fact, drug abuse in the United States is way down compared to at the peak point when former President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan said ``just say no.'' We constantly hear ``just say no'' being mocked, but ``just say no'' was the centerpiece of an aggressive program in interdiction, enforcement, treatment and prevention, that in the 1980s had a dramatic reduction. After the late sixties, where I went to college and early seventies, where you saw an overwhelming majority of kids on the college campuses using marijuana, at least, and Ecstasy and LSD and all these psychedelic drugs, by Timothy Leary and all the romancing of it in the '70s. In the '80s we made tremendous progress. In the '90s we were making some progress, and it started to level off. From 1992 to 1994 we saw a surge in drug use in the United States that would now, in those 2 years, require us to have a 50 percent reduction to get back to where we were when the former President took office. Now, that was still a lower point than when the Reagans took over in 1980 and made 10 years of steady progress. The bottom line is it is wrong to say we have not made progress, it is wrong to say that you cannot make progress, and there are points in our American history where relaxed government policies, of joking about inhaling, cutting back drug interdiction, you see it soar, and we have to recover again. But the trend line over a long period has actually been down, and you would never guess that from all the people who say that there is no hope in this battle. There is hope, but we will never completely win. Right now, we have a goal annually, according to President Bush, to reduce this by 5 percent a year. To do that, we have to stay aggressive in all fronts and be vigilant in all parts of the war on narcotics, because even that said, we have tens of thousands of people killed every year by the abuse of drug and alcohol. To give an example of proportion, the World Trade Center disaster, which was absolutely terrible, was around 3,000. In illegal narcotics, it is somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 a year, depending on how you want to count it. In my hometown, we see it on a weekly basis practically of a murder, or an accident, or some type of drug-related death, either through murder or through somebody in the highways. Often they get attributed to alcohol. It is usually poly-drug use, marijuana, LSD. Most police departments do not test for Ecstasy or LSD after an accident, and often the people involved have done that. We have had cases of young kids high on multiple different drugs hitting a car. One killed a senior, rolled through the interstate, killed another person. The person high on drugs actually lived through it. We have had a really visible case in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the conflict got so great that one of the kids, one of the little gang groups, basically took another young person to a field in a rural area and burned them, in effect, at the stake. As one of the other kids at school threatened to bring that up, they took her up and burned her as well. One defended themselves by saying they had a gun at their head and they had to light the match. This is what people who are whacked out on narcotics will start to do to each other. We see this corruption in every community in America, big or small, and we have to stay vigilant and aggressive. Now, let me lay out a little bit of the challenge we are facing. The number one entry level, if you are an underage person, it is a combination usually of tobacco, alcohol and marijuana. You start hanging around with kids who abuse those drugs. They are all illegal, and you get in an illegal cluster, and sooner or later somebody is going to expose you to marijuana. The gateway to all other narcotics is marijuana. Furthermore, we have a terrible misnomer in the United States that marijuana would be forms of what we called historically in Indiana ``ditch weed.'' Some areas might compare it to hemp, where you are looking at THC contents of about 8 percent. The new marijuana that is on the streets today is not what your ``parents smoked,'' if they did. It is THC contents from 15 to 28 percent. In my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, BC Bud, one of these high form things coming in from Canada, marijuana, and other high grade marijuana, as well as in New York and Boston, sells for the same as cocaine, because its kick and danger to the body, this marijuana, is the same as cocaine and heroin. It is ridiculous for those who would downplay marijuana. There are wide ranges of marijuana. At the least harmful form, it still causes harm and long-term damage to the body worst than alcohol or tobacco, if you use it regularly. But in the high grades it is more like cocaine and heroin. It is not a harmless substance. That is our number one problem. Number two is cocaine, number three is heroin. We hear most about meth, because it is the newest, and it is out in the rural areas in particular. So there are many Members of this body involved in the Meth Caucus because it is the newest challenge to those communities. But the fact is that methamphetamines are not as much of a national threat at this point as cocaine, heroin and marijuana. It is just our fastest growth category, and in my district, as well as elsewhere, we are really going after methamphetamine. Ecstasy is another synthetic drug that has been at the rave clubs. It kind of goes up and down in fads as do other psychedelic drugs, and it will probably come and go, depending on the awareness of people about it, but there will be replacements in these dance clubs and other places where kids are exposed to the dangers of those. Now, for cocaine and heroin in particular, there are two major source areas, and for marijuana as well. The two major source areas are the Andean nations, which would be Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, edges of Venezuela and Brazil, and Mexico. There are other primary source countries, but those are the biggest areas, the Andean region and Mexico. The other areas would include Southeast Asia for heroin, Afghanistan where it was the predominant way that al Qaeda was funded, and the so- called Golden Triangle, a triangle area around Burma, Thailand and China, less so there, and most of those narcotics are moving to Europe, only about 25 percent to the United States, to our West Coast. But it is a direct threat. Afghanistan is one we have kind of turned the other way on, and, unfortunately, they are replanting the poppy, and because we do not at this point directly going to al Qaeda, we have not been aggressive enough. Quite frankly, we need to be aggressive with the Northern Alliance and our allies in the Afghan War, not just on those who fought us through the terrorists. It may not anymore be directly funding the terrorists, we are still watching that closely, the Afghan heroin, clearly other times of narcotics are, but we still have to get control of that heroin production in Afghanistan or it is going to flow through the entire world. We also have Canada that is a major supplier of this high grade marijuana, and also almost all of the precursor chemicals coming in seem to be coming in through Canada right now. Now, in all fairness to Canada, we are their big exporter. Often this BC Bud, Quebec Gold, meth precursors are coming into the United States in return for cocaine and heroin flowing through the United States. So we are also a drug exporter, and we are the biggest to Canada. So that border is more or less a swap border. Sometimes they trade marijuana for guns. The Netherlands has become the world center of transporting meth precursors, as well as Ecstasy, and it is a major drug center for synthetic drugs. We also grow a lot of marijuana and manufacture meth domestically, so we are also a primary source country as well as a primary user, although we do not ship, other than to Canada, in most cases, drugs out. There are many other transit countries. The Bahama islands are a major way that the drugs come up through the Andean region or even Mexico, but mostly through the Andean region. Some of what comes from South America bounces over to Spain, to Madrid, and then bounces back into its United States. We see it come also through Vietnam and places in Southeast Asia that are transit areas. But let me look at now some more particulars. This map is a map of Colombia. To orient, the United States is further north, central America comes down, Panama connects to Colombia. Panama years ago was part of Colombia. It was separated by Teddy Roosevelt so we could build a canal there. It is in the northwest corner of South America. It is a beautiful country. It is the oldest democracy in South America. It is mountainous for most of its region, and the Andes start to move up to 20,000 feet down in this region. Coca grows in the Andean region because you are near the Amazon, the center of the equator; the equator runs somewhere about right in here. So you have damp areas, warm areas that you can grow year-round, and yet you have some mountainous zones where you can get a little bit, not completely wet, but still have plenty of water. In addition, you can have access to the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean. Furthermore, in this area, heroin poppy grows best at about 12,000 feet, between 8,000 and 12,000 feet, which is why you see it over in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan and why you see it in the Andean region, because these are the places that have been best in the world to grow high-grade coca and heroin poppy. Colombia is the oldest democracy, and has produced many products that we in the United States use. They are our biggest supplier of flowers. Approximately 70 percent of all U.S. flowers that you buy come from Colombia. Historically, coffee is what you think of. You think of Colombian emeralds. They were our eighth largest supplier or sixth largest supplier of oil until the pipeline came under attack by the narcotics and terrorist groups in Colombia. Now they are net even, but they were one of our primary suppliers of oil. They also export many other products to us. Textiles, all sorts of other types of things. Their democracy has been steadily undermined by American drug use and, to a lesser degree, European drug use. They have had 30,000 police officers killed in Colombia. They have had constant terrorist attacks. The current President of Colombia who was here yesterday and today and we met with him this afternoon, his father was assassinated by the narcoterrorists years ago. They have made multiple attempts on his life, including when I was at his inauguration, the FARC launched from a Howitzer shells at the building where we were, blew off the corner of the presidential palace during the inauguration. For those of my colleagues who may have read Tom Clancy's book ``Clear and Present Danger'' or seen the movie, I asked former Ambassador Busby whether the movie was fairly accurate; and he said, mostly, although I did not die like in the movie. The fact is that they shot and murdered a big percentage of their supreme court. They kill mayors, they kidnap, and they are doing it because of our drug abuse. This was not because they were using the narcotics. It is because we were using the narcotics, providing billions of dollars with which to arm the FARC, in particular, as well as other groups that are providing protection. Now, in Colombia, President Uribe has made fairly dramatic changes and gone aggressively after the coca and heroin production. I would like a few of these things to be put in the Record, because we had a fairly close vote in this House on assistance to Colombia because President Uribe is heavily under attack, he is trying to be aggressive, and lots of misinformation was distributed here about the ineffectiveness of what was happening. Now, here are a couple of key statistics. Terrorist attacks have increased in Colombia if you flatten the line, but they have in fact gone up and down. And basically they go up when you squeeze the coca and the heroin. So when we read in our newspapers, as there was yesterday and a few weeks ago, as we had a few Americans kidnapped a month or so, 2 months ago, that when we read that, we need to understand that those incidents are increasing when we are successfully pressing on the coca and the heroin. But, even with that, this government, President Uribe's government in Colombia has increased, almost doubled, the efforts to go after the illegal self-defense groups and so-called paramilitaries; they have gone aggressively after the subversive groups, increasing, in both of those cases, almost doubling the efforts of going after these terrorist groups. They have been so aggressive that while it seems like in the United States that we are reading more about Colombia because we have put money down there, the plain truth of the matter is that since President Uribe started these attacks, though some of them are now getting more publicity because they are in Bogota or they are trying to go after Americans to try to get us to be squeamish, just like they initially tried to do with the attacks in Iraq, by trying not to win a war, but trying to back up the American people so we give up rather than going on through, these attacks have actually been dramatically reduced under President Uribe. Whether it be kidnapping of mayors, they are down; whether it is kidnappings of people are down, the number of attacks on bridges are down, the number of attacks on schools are down, because they have a President who is being more aggressive and successful. But because of where they are doing some of them, because our attention is up, it seems like it is not working in Colombia when in fact it is working in Colombia. Let me give an example. One of the business groups from Colombia that was in my office when they were there and they had, a few years ago, under former President Pastrana when we had a so-called temporary peace agreement, they were there and the phone rang and one of them took it and at the school where many of their kids were, a pregnant mom and her daughter had just been trapped on a bridge and kidnapped; and they were each trying to check to see whether it was their family. This happens all the time. Gabriel Garcia Marques' book, ``Diary of a Kidnapper,'' talks about this particular phenomenon that has just gone rampant in Colombia. But the fact is that as we have a president there and a government committed to going after this, they have actually reduced the number of incidents. The question is, will we in the United States Congress have the courage to continue this pressure, or can they, through public relations and high-profile attacks, convince the American people that we are actually losing in Colombia when we are actually winning the battle in Colombia? Furthermore, we have had the most dramatic reduction in coca that we have ever seen in Colombia. I have been down to Colombia seven times or nine times, I lose track. I got elected in 1994; I have been there at least once a year ever since then and sometimes twice, particularly the last few years as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources. What we see in Colombia is a case like happened in Bolivia and Peru where often we will eradicate one time the coca crop, but we will not stay focused, and because they can grow year around, they come back in with it. What President Uribe has done is he has basically hit these areas three times. Now, you can imagine if you are a farmer, think of it in terms like in the Midwest and Indiana and elsewhere, I am from Indiana, we have soybeans and corn. And if we hit that three times, obviously, the corn growers and the soybean growers would not be happy. They are used to being hit maybe once and going back to a very profitable crop. Just like kids on our street corners can make $400 as a lookout, but only, say, $6 at McDonald's, so they would rather be a lookout if there is not a punishment. But if you arrest them, if they are afraid they are going to get shot, if there is a penalty for being the $400 lookout, then maybe the $6 at McDonald's is not such a bad deal. You can work your way up and maybe someday get $20. You are never going to get $400 an hour most likely, but you are also not going to kill people with the illegal narcotics. Well, if there was not any pressure on the people growing it on a steady basis, like they sometimes grew palm heart or pineapples, and then you would see underneath it the coca hiding in the fields. Well, President Uribe has gone aggressively after it. His own wife and two sons at the inauguration afterwards, after they attacked the palace, they were panicked. They know that there is a good chance that their husband is going to be killed, or that they are going to be killed. They talked about coming to the United States and he said, no, we are going to stay here. We are going to go after these illegal drugs. The problem is the United States' problem, but we are going to go after them, because it is wrecking our country too. When somebody shows that courage, we need to show the courage in this Congress to stand behind them. There are some Members in this body who have gone to towns in Colombia and seen the terror. It is unbelievable. First one group comes through that is the leftist narcogroup, and they kill anybody who is not willing to help them. Then, groups that are often contracted initially to try to stop that group will come through and kill anybody who takes the other side. Pretty soon the group that was supposed to be providing the protection gets into narcotrafficking too, then they fight over who gets to have the little village. Several of my colleagues have visited those villages even this year, and there are several that are still overrun. But here are the facts. Since President Uribe has taken over in Colombia, they have reestablished control over most of the country. The glass is not full; the glass is half full. It is not emptying out, however; it is filling up, and we are making progress. Now is not the time to turn and run. Now is the time to back up the bold people in Colombia and our advisors down there and say, we are going to go after the illegal narcotics that are killing 30,000 Americans a year, and the biggest pressure point is Colombia. It used to be in the region. In the region, Colombia used to be only 30 percent. But as Bolivia went after it and as Peru went after it, it moved to Colombia. Now, if we can take out Colombia, there is going to be some seepage back. Earlier this morning I met with a number of members of the Peruvian Parliament, as well as their military navy and army and talked about their worry about spillover. If we are successful in Colombia, will the coca and heroin production move to Peru? Possibly. Possibly to Ecuador. Possibly back to Bolivia where the Cocaleros are fighting really hard and destabilizing the government of Bolivia. But it looks like a lot of it is moving to Venezuela on the north border, because President Chavez has been a weak President. He has been flirting most of the time with Castro, does not have the same commitment to help the United States and to go after terrorists in that nation. They are the biggest trading partner with Colombia. It is right up here on the north border. We have a huge stake in this. This area right here is the biggest oil provider to the United States or was until Chavez could not keep it flowing. If you go to a Citgo station in the United States, not that long ago, Venezuela was running ads in all of our papers saying we own the Citgo stations. So it was at that point about 12 percent of the U.S. market. To give you an idea, Alaska may be 3, Kuwait may be 2 or 3. Venezuela, in this area of Colombia, has one of the richest oil fields in the world. We cannot let that area be controlled by narcotrafficking. Plus straight to the north you move towards Florida and the Caribbean Sea as far as the transit area into the United States. We have to maintain control in Venezuela and Suriname. And then, in the western side of Brazil where the Amazon basin is, you have mostly jungle, and it is very difficult. So if we squeeze in Colombia, some of it is going to move in that direction, and some is going to move in that direction, and some is going to move in that direction. So that is why we have an Andean strategy. But the primary focus is Colombia because they are people who have the labs that process it. And it is easiest and the cocaine comes into the United States cheapest and purest if it comes out of Colombia. If we scatter them, at least we will get the prices up and the purity down. I next want to move to the Caribbean Sea. As it comes out of the Andean region, it can move several ways. About a third moves through the Caribbean Sea, about two-thirds through Mexico. And when it comes into the Caribbean out of Colombia down here, it moves up; and the biggest vulnerability we have are all of these Bahamian islands. There are a thousand islands. They can pick which island they want to come in on. By the way, everything I say today about narcotics and narcotics terrorists are also true about Islamic or any kind of terrorists; IRA, anybody who wants to hit us. Because if we cannot find a drug person coming in, we also cannot find an al Qaeda person coming in. If we cannot find an illegal immigrant coming across the Mexican border, we also cannot find an al Qaeda person coming across the Mexican border. It is one and the same. So when we are talking about illegal narcotics and we are talking about terrorism, we are not only talking about the primary way terrorists are funded, we are talking about how they get into our country. And while we do not talk about specific incidents, let us just say we have been intercepting them coming in the south and the Mexican border as well as the primary method which would be the Canadian border or our airports. But as they come through, you have major points. Dominican Republic. They have huge networks of Dominicans in the United States where they can hide among. Most Dominicans would not be involved in drug trafficking; but where there are big communities, a few people can get involved with that. Similar with Jamaican communities, and similar with Puerto Rican communities. So in certain areas, for example Jamaica is the primary transit to England. In this sea of islands, some are very small. Some are Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese. Most of those countries are part of the European Common Market. What Libya, for example, has figured out is that if they move people into these islands, in a period of years they become citizens of those islands. When we look at their visas to try to see if they are part of a terrorist-supporting nation, such as Libya, they do not show up as Libyan; they show up as European. For example, Curacao is Dutch. If they can get citizenship on a Dutch island and get European citizenship, we do not flag them in our system as Libyan; they are going to look like they are Dutch. It is a vulnerability on the south that we are going to have to figure out in terrorism as well as in narcotics. But the Caribbean Sea is one of our vulnerabilities. Another, and the biggest transit point for most of the United States, is Mexico. Under President Vincente Fox, there has been a dramatic improvement in Mexico. It is still, bottom line, a mess; but a dramatic improvement. Their police forces are paid virtually nothing. Compared to the couple hundred thousand dollars they can be offered to let a semi load of narcotics go through, their salary is nothing. It is a fraction of the U.S. salary. Even U.S. salaries can be overwhelmed with the dollars that are being offered, so we have had an incredible corruption problem along the border. The President of Mexico, understanding that this was a tremendous pressure, has located additional forces there. He is aggressively trying to clean up the forces, but this is a huge challenge. Let me talk a little bit in particular about that fact that we have had a series of hearings on the north and south border looking at homeland security issues. I also now serve on the new Select Committee on Homeland Security. We will be holding a hearing in the Buffalo- Niagara area in conjunction with my Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, which also has oversight over the Justice Department and other agencies, and the new Subcommittee on Infrastructure and Border Security chaired by my colleague, the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Camp). We will be holding a hearing up on the north border. We have just held a hearing over here on Tohono O'odham Indian Nation lands in southwest Arizona, and then just during the last break we were down at El Paso where we had a hearing and spent about 4 days on the Texas border. Let me describe some of our challenges on this border. Starting with California, San Isidro by San Diego is the biggest human cross point. More people cross at San Isidro than anywhere else. It is easy to hide to some degree just because of the sheer volume of people. But because we have a fence there now, we have changed some of the dynamic. Years ago, I believe in my second or first term when I was down in the area east of San Diego, I saw, at about 2 in the morning, approximately somewhere between 800 and 1,200 people massed, ready to make a dash for the U.S. border. Their penalty if we catch them is that they are detained to see if they have any other violations, and then they are sent back. I learned they had packages for $1,500 or $2,000 where you can get guaranteed that in 7 days you would make it through to the United States or you got your money back. That sounds ridiculous, but why would you not start to offer those packages? Why would capitalists not start to offer that if there is no penalty for constantly crossing, other than if you have another crime? Now, the fact is that what I saw that night was people playing frizbees, eating their picnic lunches. For that package they get a place to sleep, two meals, and they are guaranteed to make it in 7 days. Like I say, that was about 6 years ago. Over in Texas, we ran into the same thing. I think it is now $2,000 guaranteeing the crossing in Texas. It does not always work, by the way. We are starting to crack down on those kinds of things. In particular, we are going after the people who are doing the packages. The fact is that those types of market things will develop. Unfortunately, some of the people now, because we have tightened the fence here and we do not see that massing, they used to mass to about 1,200 and make a run at the five Border Patrol agents they would see, and most would not even get stopped. But as we put the fence up, as we passed more Border Patrol agents, we have moved it to the open lands, so at the Tohono O'odham Nation, west of Nogales and east of Yuma, in Arizona, in that area, west of Nogales and east of Yuma, we have basically sand. We have an Indian nation, and we have the Organ Pipe National Monument, where a ranger was killed in a shootout, one of the first of the rangers killed, a national park ranger. We have a fish and wildlife area, and we have a little bit of the Barry Goldwater Air Force range where they do bombing runs. Now, what happens, because we have done a better job of sealing off Nogales, a better job of sealing off California, we are starting to make some progress over in the eastern side of Arizona in Douglas. What we see are these people who sell these packages and others trying to make a run through the desert. As we drove along this border a little over a month ago, we could see the people huddled getting ready to make their late afternoon run. We could see the fences cut. There was one area where it was just hard for me to conceive of this happening. Unless Members see it with their own eyes, they may not believe it either. This is how bold some of the people on the border are. We have a barbed wire fence along the border. At one place, the farmer on the other side was having trouble keeping his cattle in, so he took the fence from our border, put it across the road that runs across and over on his land in Mexico. We have not moved the fence back to the U.S. side because in fact it is serving a good purpose. At least it is not getting cut this way. They go around the Mexican farmer, they go on the road, they have a clear way in, but it has detained more people on the Mexican side than it did on our side. But think of the boldness to actually steal the fence, move it, and claim it as their own property when it is a United States Federal Government protection border. It is snipped. We can see where they will make the runs in along the wash. One of the most popular hiking trails in Arizona is basically sealed off right now because so many illegals are moving through, and it is so violent and so many drugs are moving through that area it is not safe to backpack there right now. You can see discarded milk cartons, the larger plastic containers. If they are clear, it meant they were water; if they were black, it meant they were narcotics for a pick-up. We see trash all along the border as they discard it and move. Also, the poor illegals who are coming across are often misinformed. They have been dumped here on the border or have been told it is just a couple hours' walk to Phoenix. It is a couple days' walk to Phoenix across desert with no water or food, and we are having tremendous human casualties in this area because of the misinformation of the people who want to take advantage of the people who are coming across. When we were having the hearing in the little town of Sells, Arizona, when Members hear about narcotics busts in their hometown, think about this. We are having a hearing. We have the room filled with people from Phoenix and Tucson. We have, in effect, gathered the Customs and Border Patrol, the DEA, the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife, the local police, the State police in the town of Sells, which is a town of 5,000 people, or maybe 10,000 at maximum. And I may have doubled their population at 5,000. It is a relatively some small town, capital of the Tohono O'odham that used to be the Papago. This Tohono O'odham capital had been complaining that as we squeezed other areas, drug runners were running through and destroying their Native American culture. While we were having the hearing, showing the stupidity of drug runners, if nothing else, they had one bust of 300 pounds, one bust of 500 pounds, one bust of 400 pounds; and at 100 they don't even bother with them. Later that night, a run of seven SUVs as we were leaving were coming across the border. They had two Blackhawks on them and another helicopter chasing them. They got most of them. One shot his way out. They got, I think, another 500 pounds. To put it in perspective, think of 500 pounds, and then take that in one day what they managed to catch was close to, I think, 1,400. The previous rest of the year had been 1,500. The previous year had been approximately 1,500. In other words, it has gone so exponentially to that open area. We do not really know how much is coming across these borders. Furthermore, remember, in addition to funding the killing in narcotics, they are also funding primary sources for any terrorist networks. As we seize the assets of things like the Holy Land Foundation and other fronts, they move to illegal monies, child trafficking and drug trafficking being the two primary. Secondly, wherever you can move narcotics, you can move weapons of mass destruction or anything else. In other words, if we cannot stop one, what makes us think we can stop the other? That is why we need to be more aggressive. That is why the President created the Department of Homeland Security. That is why he put Border Patrol, Customs, and Coast Guard agencies in the Department of Homeland Security, which is really the Department of Border Security. It does not have FBI, CIA. It is predominantly to focus on the border. We have to get control of this border. The Mexican border with Texas is a huge problem, as well. Long-term, we are going to have to have some realistic discussions about immigration strategies in the United States, because every State has been benefiting from having many of these low-income workers come in and take jobs that Americans do not want to take. We have duck and chicken processing plants in my district; and there is very little English spoken there, and not very many people who speak English will apply there. If we go to a gas station or motel almost anywhere in the United States, there are not a lot of people willing to take those jobs, just like our ancestors as they came in as immigrants took those jobs. We have to figure out how we are going to accommodate in a reasonable way those who want to come here to work and make a living here, most of whom send as much as 50 percent of their income back not only to Mexico, but Guatemala, Honduras, Ecuador and other countries; and those who are coming in for illegal purposes to sell narcotics or to terrorize our Nation. If we cannot make that distinction between those who want to be law- abiding but are violating the immigration laws and have some kind of balance here, what we are going to have is just huge holes in our system that will move around, and we will never have enough money to seal this big a border. Now, this is, to be blunt, nothing compared to the problem on the terrorism side, the northern border, where we do not even have sand to serve as a deterrent, or the Rio Grande River. From Glacier National Park in Montana to Lake of the Woods in Minnesota, we have thousands of miles of basically flat, open land. The good news is if a terrorist walks across in northwest North Dakota we can probably see him from about 500 miles away. The bad news is that that is about how far it is to the next policeman. It is a huge challenge in these big open spaces of the Northwest as we look how to control, and as the narcotraffickers and other terrorists probe to see where our vulnerabilities are. We are constantly changing. We have a lot of methods they do not see, but we have to be aggressive. We have intercepted, on the terrorist side, probably 125-or-so attempts at us since 9-11. It is because we have done a better job of sealing our borders. With the PATRIOT Act, we have done a better job of getting people who are suspects who then talk about other people and breaking up the networks. Let me give the most famous example on the Canadian border, the Millenium Bomber. Had he succeeded at LAX Airport, more people would have died than at the World Trade Center. But he was intercepted, but it showed us how these networks worked. He was in Montreal and back and forth from the United States apparently multiple times. We do not know how many. He is the person who identified some of the al Qaeda cells later, because after we captured him, he decided to sing; and it was not the national anthem. He fingered the networks of other places and other people. He had rented a car in Montreal, drove across all of Canada over to the West to Vancouver, then took a ferry from Vancouver to Victoria, then took another ferry in the late afternoon to Port Angeles, a small city in northwest Washington State right outside of Olympic Park. There Deanna Dean and the other Customs agents detained him. They thought he seemed nervous so they asked him a few questions. When they sealed his car, he decided to make a run for it. They intercepted him. They brought him back. They opened his trunk, and they thought they had a meth lab. It had lots of white powder substances, a couple of big gallon jugs of some kind of materials. They carried it to their local station. It turned out it was two huge jugs of nitroglycerine, with maps of LAX Airport. He told of his plans, how he was to meet somebody else. Now, think of the challenges when somebody is willing to rent a car and move clear across the country, take two ferries, come late in the afternoon to a town of 14,000, and drive all the way from Seattle to Los Angeles to meet up with somebody else to do the attack; but we got him. The good news is that we were successful. The bad news is it is going to be hard to get all of them. What is true for narcotics, what is true for illegal immigration, is also true for terrorism. We have to be vigilant on the north border as well as the south border. Detroit and Buffalo are the two biggest places where we have transshipments of goods. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, in my hometown, the GM plant, according to a former GM official, there are 100 crossings from Canada to the U.S. involved in the making of every pick-up, the largest pick-up plant in the United States. We cannot squeeze trade; we are too interconnected. We have to figure out how to do personal clearance systems, how to make sure they are monitored, how to have more VACA systems so we can see inside the trucks; so we have more drug dogs, bomb dogs, more methods to detect radiation devices. We have to make sure that our borders are secure from multiple threats to the United States, and the Canadian border is one of those critical things. We have had multiple meetings, and this hearing in Buffalo will include several Canada parliamentarians, as did the one in Seattle and British Columbia, and the one in Quebec-New York and the Vermont border. We have huge problems on the north border that are actually growing. On the South border it has been open for a long time, and we are actually making that a little more secure. I am pleased that the Canadians are working with us, as well as, better than in the past, the Mexican authorities, although that is still problematic. Let me talk a little bit about a few other issues. I have spent most of the time on our borders and on the transit countries, but I want to conclude here with a few minutes looking at the ONDCP reauthorization, the Office of Narcotics Drug Control Policy. We have to be aggressive on the domestic side as well as the interdiction side. And as we look at this reauthorization, in addition to the Colombia money we will see, in addition to the Office of Drug Control Policy and the State Department, in addition to the multiple problems in the Justice Department, drug czar John Walters oversees a broad range of programs. Several are specific inside ONDCP. One is the HIDTAs, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas. To some degree this program has been diluted. While they are meritorious programs, these were supposed to provide our primary protection. And unless Members of Congress and the American people understand some of what we laid out tonight, they will not understand what the purpose of a HIDTA is. Every area has a drug problem. Every area drug tracks. If you are in the southwest border, they will come across. If you are in Dallas, they will come through. If you are in the Midwest they are transiting through. Furthermore, if you are in a city like Chicago, you become a supplier not only to Chicago but the Midwest. If you are in a city like Fort Wayne, you become a supplier not only to Fort Wayne, but the mid- sized cities around it like Muncie, Anderson, and Warsaw. If you are in Muncie you become a supplier to the mall. So every area is a drug trafficking area. But what was the point of this program? It was for the high intensity drug trafficking areas so we could, before it gets to the Midwest, seize the stuff at the major ports and major ports of entry. But this has become a pork program where everybody wants a HIDTA. Therefore, once everybody has it, it is not that it is not doing good work, but we are losing the point of the program which was to seize it at the highest intense area before it got to those areas. We are going to be looking at some of those hard issues and lots of Congressmen are going to receive local pressure to say, oh, we have a drug problem. We know that. That is why we have community drug initiatives. That is why we have all kinds of prevention programs. That is why we have drug free workplace bills. That is why we have drug free school bills. We have local law enforcement, State police. This was a program intended particularly for the southwest border and the major drug trafficking areas so that it did not overwhelm us at the local level. Next, the National Ad Campaign. The National Ad Campaign has served a valuable function to make Americans more aware of the problems of drug use. We are inundated, with all due respect, by rock music, by much of what we see in the movies. I saw an article, I think it was yesterday, saying that we thought that the heroin look was out, but they are praising this new group that is coming in that has this emaciated death look that once again promotes intense drug use in the United States by promoting a look and an action that you get from basically destroying your body. To combat that we have to have an organized effort such as the anti- terrorism campaign which was very successful in making that link, the current anti-marijuana campaign which is one of the least understood issues in America, the dangers of this particular hydrochloride impact marijuana has on America. We need to make sure that ad campaign is functioning and targeted. We also have a very important technology transfer program to make sure that local law enforcement gets the equipment that they need to be able to battle in these HIDTA areas and also at the local area. I have many small towns ranging from a couple thousand people up to 15,000 people that have been particularly pleased with the technology transfer program because they would not, in their small budgets, have been able to afford the type of equipment that they need to match up with these drug trafficking organizations that have billions of dollars behind them. So I want to conclude tonight by saying that this problem is complex. Over the next few weeks, we will be talking about this more and more on the floor as these pieces of legislation move. But what I do hope that my colleagues will not repeat on this floor is that we have failed because we have not. We have made steady progress, if you take a line with ups and downs in it for nearly 20 years. We have made steady progress in Colombia and the Andean region. But the more we squeeze the narco-traffickers, the more we squeeze the drug traffickers, the more violence there will be because we are actually hurting business. They cannot just write it off as a bad loss which they kind of do now because they abandon loads. But the more we squeeze them, they will not be able to abandon loads. The more we squeeze them the higher the prices are in the streets. The more we squeeze, the more the purity goes down, the less harmed our kids and families and people are, the more kids will have a dad or mom home that night who is not whacked out on drugs, the safer you will be as you drive down the highway. This is a very important effort that we were undertaking in Congress. Often it gets lost in all the others. But I hope the Members of Congress will focus on this because every dime we spend is likely to save another life in America.

Mr. SOUDER

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

Mr. SOUDER

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Speaker, I congratulate the gentleman for his work on this and in trying to get the Department of Justice aware that they are in direct contradiction of the goals of this President and this Congress which has said we are looking at how to maximize the private sector and put Americans who are law-abiding citizens back to work. I do not want to face people in my district who might have to wear a button that says ``I follow the law, I am employed.'' We need to look for options for people to be trained. This is not about not giving people in prison an opportunity, but there is no reason that going to prison should give people an unfair advantage, particularly going through foreign countries, against people who in America have followed the law who are working hard who have actually outcompeted foreign companies to hold their sector until the U.S. Government behind them, waiving regulations and waiving capital costs, then giving them a mandatory advantage to go for higher prices with less quality and say you still must buy it, and then have the gall to come to Congress and say we are trying to contract out. We are trying to save money for the Federal Government when, in fact, they are putting people in our districts out of work. It does not make sense and it does not fly, and I hope more Members and staff will pay attention to this debate. It is pretty much of a no- brainer. I hope that the Department of Justice will turn around on this. They are projecting this as a growth industry. It is incredible to me that they would not be humiliated by this, and instead look at it as a growth industry.

Mr. SOUDER. If the gentleman will yield, one of my concerns is that this inertia starts to develop a bigger and bigger base; and I hope our colleagues understand that if they do not move soon, the bigger this machine gets, the more people that get involved in contracting and building the prison industry infrastructure itself, all of a sudden we will have a monster that starts to consume society. The other day when I was driving to the airport, or being driven to the airport, I saw a crew out cleaning the roads who were on a work- release-type program. Imagine if our county and State governments picked this up and instead of doing a work-release program, they decided they will run the local gas station, which would be the equivalent here. So when you come up to an interstate exit or a highway exit you would now have gas stations operated by people who are in prison, restaurants operated by people in prison. There would be an outrage. But manufacturing is not as visible to the consumer eye as retailing. They are taking jobs away in the industrial sector and transferring them. And by the way, those industrial sector jobs have the biggest multiplier effect on our economy. You know, I am a little older, too; and when I was getting my MBA back in 1974 from Notre Dame, one manufacturing job was the equivalent of seven. Now it is closer to 15 in its impact that brings dollars into the community. So when you rip those manufacturing jobs away, maybe they are in a building you cannot see. But if you start to visualize that you are taking as many jobs in my little hometown, say 40, as would be employed in the grocery store, plus the dairy sweet, plus the gas station, plus a couple of other small retailers in this town, and say all this retail infrastructure is going to be operated by prison industries, you would have more outrage in the community. Yet those retailing jobs do not extend dollars to the community like the manufacturing jobs. We have to wake up. And lest I step on another sore point here in Congress, we years ago decided for good or ill that Indian gaming could be allowed. But Members started to realize that that same clause could be used for supergas stations or retailing operations that could be based and moved around similarly by exits. The best thing you can say about the comparison with the Native Americans and how they were using it was, hey, it was originally their land, we probably took the land unjustly, they are following the law. This group, which is doing in effect the same type of expansion of their categories of industry, putting law-abiding Americans out of work, do not have an injustice; they are there because they committed an injustice and we are trying to rehabilitate them. They do not have any prior claims, yet you see them stealthily moving through sectors of the economy threatening American jobs. The fundamental question is: Why is this not like other types of illegal dumping from other countries, where they are subsidized? Why is this not like other countries, where we lose competition because they do not have to have the same American laws? And why is it not focused on trying to gain jobs that have gone outside of America in Federal Prison Industries rather than take law-abiding jobs? How do you answer those questions? How does any Member of Congress answer the question, when some factory in America loses a job, and that person says, if I robbed a bank, if I abused cocaine, would I be able to keep my job? It is backwards, and it makes absolutely no sense. I am worried that if we do not move here with a Justice Department that you would expect to be favorable and a Congress that should be paying attention that this momentum and this inertia is just going to overwhelm us. My esteemed colleague has been gaining sponsors, but not fast enough. And we really need to get a sense of urgency in this House and in this administration. You know, you cannot talk about losing jobs in America, you cannot walk out there with a straight face and say we are trying to help the economy, and by the way we are taking away from law-abiding citizens. It does not fly.