The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“DRUG INTERDICTION STRATEGY” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H6820-H6824 on July 11, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
DRUG INTERDICTION STRATEGY
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from Maryland [Mr. Ehrlich] is recognized for 30 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. EHRLICH. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New York [Mr. Solomon].
November's Election
Mr. SOLOMON. Mr. Speaker, I am here tonight basically to commend something that has happened in this House, and that was the election that took place back in November, because you know it brought 73 new Republican faces to this Congress that have literally changed this Congress.
I can recall last year, the year before, the year before that, when very few of us even talked about a balanced budget. The real problem facing this Nation being the national deficit that is literally turning this country into a sea of red ink and is threatening our children and our grandchildren.
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Mr. Speaker, when I look at what has happened now, when we brought the budgets to the floor of this Congress, all the alternatives this year were with a balanced budget. Even the liberals were forced to come on this floor and offer a balanced budget. Theirs decimated the defense budget, it ruined our foreign policy. Nevertheless, every vote that was taken was on a balanced budget. Now we even have the President of the United States talking about doing it sometime into the next century, which is not satisfactory.
Mr. Speaker, what we were debating was this. Here is a 1,700-page document that is a legislative encyclopedia containing more than 500 specific spending reform proposals, as the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mark Neumann, has spoken to earlier. It contains more than $900 billion in budget savings over 5 years, itemized program by program in a format that is so easily transformed into other individual bills or amendments.
The bill is not intended to be used in total but as a resource document that any Member of this Congress can use. Whether it is page 47 or page 1,600, the work has been done for each of the 435 Members of Congress that want to live up to their rhetoric, and that is to bring about a balanced budget and stop this irresponsible spending by this Congress.
Mr. Speaker, I will not go on any further, but the bill, of course, does something that needs to be done. I recall back in 1985 when we had something called a Gramm-Rudman bill that was supposed to balance the budget in 5 years. Of course, the bill was well-intentioned, but the truth of the matter is that after a couple of elections, and the changing faces of the Congress, Congress decided they could not live up to the Gramm-Rudman piece of legislation, and consequently, we abandoned it entirely, and so did we abandon any kind of fiscal responsibility.
Mr. Speaker, I would offer this again to every single Member of the Congress, and hope that as we debate these appropriation bills one by one over the next 5 weeks, that Members will take advantage of what has been done here in this legislation, use it, and let us bring about some fiscal sanity to this Congress.
Again, Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the freshman
Republican class for what they have done. We are really going to do it this time, and it is so exciting. The American people really ought to be excited about it. I commend all of the Members for their great work.
Mr. EHRLICH. Mr. Speaker, on behalf of the freshman class, the chairman of the Committee on Rules is an honorary Member of the freshman class. His enthusiasm, his leadership, has pulled a lot of us through, not just during the campaign, but certainly during the first 6 months of our term here in the 104th Congress. We love him and we look to him for leadership and we thank him.
Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Kansas.
Mr. TIAHRT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Maryland for yielding to me. Mr. Speaker, I came to Washington because I was concerned about the future for my children. I have three children: Jessica, who is 14; John, who is 10; and Lucas, 7. They are very important to me. I wanted to preserve for them the same opportunity I had while growing up in this free society. I wanted to preserve a future for them. However, when I look at the budget and our mounting Federal debt, and the obligations we have for the trust fund, like the Social Security trust fund, I get very concerned.
There are some schools of thought that think that this country may in fact be bankrupt, that our obligations actually exceed our assets, including all the ground that we have accumulated and highways and buildings. Mr. Speaker, I was very concerned about the future, and I think many others of us are. We want to see that we balance the budget.
As the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Neumann, has pointed out, we have made great strides to get the budget balanced and restore faith in our economy. However, it is also important that we do other things like preserve Medicare. In order to achieve those goals we are going to have to look with a close eye to the details of what has been going on inside Congress.
I have headed up, with a group of others and over 50 cosponsors, a bill that will eliminate the Department of Energy as a Cabinet-level position. We are not doing this just to put some type of a goal to achieve, we are doing this because we are concerned about the future. When I got home before July 4 for the in-district work period, I landed about 9:30 at Wichita, Kansas. I got out of the airplane, walked out of Midcontinental International Airport, my necktie blew over my shoulder, I knew I was in Kansas. At home I saw out in the wheat fields farmers that were combining at 10:30 at night, trying to get a few more bushels before the next rainstorm came through.
I thought about how hard they are working for their dollars, and that over half of their money goes to the government, by the time you add up State and local and Federal taxes, and taxes upon taxes, about half their income. I thought about the factory workers who work at Boeing, where I used to work, that works a little overtime so their kids can have something extra.
I saw my brother-in-law who had been working some overtime, he works at Boeing. he showed me his overtime check. Over half the money was going over to taxes for the Federal Government, and how he is struggling to provide a little extra for his kids, and most of it is going to the government because we have so much we are spending.
I think about the single mother who is working a
second shift trying to provide a future for her children. That is what balancing the budget is about. It is about that single mother who is working so hard, trying to preserve a future, just like I am for my children. She is trying to preserve a future for hers.
We are all off on the task of trying to balance the budget, and in doing that we are going to have to eliminate agencies, to quote Fred Smith from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He said, ``If we cannot eliminate the Department of Energy as a Cabinet-level position, we have no hope of downsizing government.'' If we have no hope of downsizing government, we have no hope to balance the budget and preserve the future for our kids.
Mr. Speaker, in looking at the details of the Department of Energy, I found out that we have been spending billions of dollars trying to create jobs, but actually we have failed at it. The government has not done a very good job. In fact, there is $293 million that has gone to eight large corporations.
In spending this money for them we have in effect given them corporate welfare. We have required that welfare reform comes to those who are truly in need, and they are going to have to work for their benefits and do a lot of things through block grants. Now it is time I think that we look at corporate welfare.
I just have eight big beneficiaries here that I have uncovered that have been receiving corporate welfare. Some, I think, are notable because they are spending less and less money on research and development and yet they are spending government money whenever possible.
One is Citicorp. They are a $250 billion corporation according to 94 revenues. Their profits were $3.4 billion. Yet, they required $10 million from the government to help them with research.
They are taking scientists off of their payroll and funding them with our tax dollars, even when they have $3.4 billion in revenues. Another company that I would like to talk about was IBM, $64.1 billion in revenues, and $3.0 billion in profits in 1994. Yet over the last 4 years, we have spent $58 million helping them with research. I think it is time we get a handle on this. All this by the way goes through the Department of Energy. That is how I uncovered it.
What we have been trying to do is create jobs and encourage the private sector. They say ``We have some success stories.'' They do not really name the factories or the individuals that have been successful. They usually talk about their CRDAs, cooperative research and development agreements, with companies. They have about 1,400 of those. How many jobs have they actually created?
Here is one they think is a success story. A guy up in Fairbanks, Alaska has come up with a self-composting toilet. We gave him $90,000, and we thought it was a great idea. We gave him that money in 1990. Since then he has sold 12, for $10,000 each. They declared that a success story.
We have another gentleman that used to work for the Los Alamos lab, but he had a good idea, so he went home and he wanted to create this software package that he could use as kind of electronic mail. He was going to sell it to a Japanese company.
Then he found out that his biggest competitor was the United States Government. The very people that he worked with in Los Alamos wanted to give away this software program to the same Japanese company that he was trying to sell it to. It is going to cost him $600,000 because we are giving away this money.
We have a lot of problems in the Department of
Energy, and I think it is time we start uncovering these. If we look at the way it has been run, as many parts of government, it cannot withstand the scrutiny of the public eye. It is time for us to look. It is time for us to work to balance the budget, to get rid of the waste, and preserve the future for our children.
Mr. EHRLICH. Mr. Speaker, I congratulate all my colleagues for the wonderful job they have done in bringing the true message about the budget and the fiscal problems we have in this country today to the American people.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today to engage my colleague, the gentleman from New Hampshire [Mr. Zeliff], the honorable chair of the Subcommittee on National Security of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, in a colloquy.
Mr. Chairman, I know we have a lot of things to talk about tonight. I know we have a lot of numbers, we have graphs to show the American public, but before we get into that I would like to thank you as your vice chairman on our subcommittee for the leadership you have shown with respect to what is in my mind the most important issue confronting this country today, the drug epidemic that drives so many of our social problems in our country.
Mr. Speaker, I know the gentleman brought some graphs and he has some opening remarks. What the gentleman does not know and what I had actually not planned on was a group of kids came to my office today from the Hickey school in Baltimore County, Maryland, troubled kids. These kids had made a wrong decision at some point in their life but now they are turning their lives around. They came to tell me about the fact they had chosen the right way. This was what in past days would have been referred to as a reform school, but we have privatized it and the vendor there is doing a good job.
Just out of curiosity, I asked every kid, there must have been a dozen kids in my office, ``How many of you abused drugs?'' Every one raised their hands. I asked them ``How many thought that drug abuse had led you down the wrong path?'' which ended them up at the Hickey school, and every one raised their hands. What a timely incident in my office today to be the predicate to our colloquy here tonight.
I really want to thank you for talking about this issue. We talked about so many different issues on this floor in the course of our campaigns, the first 6 months of the 104th Congress: drug abuse, prison construction, welfare reform, the budget deficit. However, in some way or another, every major issue in this country today, every major issue, is in some very direct way related to the drug epidemic that has hit this country, particularly in the last 15 years. I know you have some charts you want to share with us tonight. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from New Hampshire.
Mr. ZELIFF. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his leadership as a vice chair, and particularly his leadership within the committee that has made this such an important priority. We are dealing with Waco, a bunch of other things, but the most important thing we can possibly deal with is the drug war for America.
If we combine drugs and crime into one statistic, it has to be the most overriding issue of national importance to our national security. It is our hope within our committee that we are able to put this on the front burner again and start getting everybody to
take a leadership role. I think it is absolutely vital to the future of our country and to our kids.
You just reminded me of my trip to Framingham, MA, to a women's prison, the first time I have ever been inside a prison. That is pretty scary when you hear the closing of those doors.
We visited, Dr. Lee Brown, the President's drug czar, and myself, visited with some of those ladies in there, in their probably late thirties that were in for 7 or 8 or 9 times. They were in involving drug abuse. That is basically where they started going wrong, finally they have hit the bottom and are trying desperately to put their lives back together.
It is a tragic set of events, and what is happening right now, drug use is up in all age categories and drastically up. As these charts will show, you can just see, 17- to 18-year-olds, 15- to 16-year-olds, 13- to 14-years-olds, each category, and particularly I just broke it up into various administrations, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton.
We can just see the difference here where when we stop talking about leadership in drugs, we stop as a country talking about this in our living rooms, in the rotary clubs, in the chambers of commerce, and every day talking about just say no, like Nancy Reagan talked about in her leadership, when we stop doing it, we stop doing interdiction. You just see as we stopped on the chart of interdiction, we stopped putting resources into interdiction, drug use starts to go up. It coincided with our national policies.
We are desperately trying very hard to get the President to join us in this war. I hope he will. We talked to Bob Dole in the Senate and Newt Gingrich in the House. What we are hoping to do is through the efforts of our committee, get a nonpartisan across-the-board support group going where we take leadership roles.
We individually go across the States, across the country, and we go to our TV stations, our radio stations, give public service announcements. Let us start bringing this issue out front. It is very, very serious. I know the gentleman has some thoughts that he would like to add to that.
Mr. EHRLICH. Mr. Speaker, harking back to our visit from the former First Lady, Nancy Reagan, and her testimony before our committee, was it not interesting when she said she never thought ``Just say no'' would take off the way it did. I know you recall and we all recall Nancy Reagan just offhand, at some stop on her tour, on her anti-drug tour, talked about ``Just say no, it is wrong.'' It was funny, in a very cynical sense, because she became the target of some people in this country who like to make fun of ``Just say no.''
Mr. ZELIFF. Right, but she also became a role model for those people.
Mr. EHRLICH. Absolutely, absolutely, because there are some people in this country who had just given up. Nancy Reagan never said the entire strategy consists of ``Just say no.'' She never did. But for some, really on the cynical side of politics, she became a target of abuse. How unfortunate that a part of our total strategy must be ``Just say no,'' because there is a moral context to this whole argument. That is what we are trying to bring back as well.
Mr. ZELIFF. Mr. Speaker, I would ask the gentleman, if I can, do we not need to have the leadership of just saying no, role models, along with treatment programs, along with interdiction programs? Do we not need to combine all of these pieces together to have an effective package that will confront drug use in America?
Mr. EHRLICH. It is demand, it is treatment, it is source country, and it is interdiction zone, the transit zone. I know we are going to talk about that, those four elements more in the future. We have talked about this a great deal. As I have said earlier, I really commend your leadership on this, because there is no more important issue facing parents in this country today.
Like you, when I go to schools, particularly junior high schools and senior high schools, I search for something, anything, I can say to leave a message, to maybe just impact one kid. We have taken a trip recently down South, down to Florida, and talked to DEA, talked to Customs, talked to the Coast Guard, talked to Navy.
Mr. ZELIFF. People in the front lines.
Mr. EHRLICH. Right on the front lines, people truly putting themselves in harm's way for our country.
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One thing that I feel very positive about as a result of our trip and something that I intend to talk about a lot, on many occasions during my visits to schools, is the relationship between young American men and women being put in harm's way, many miles from home, and the demand for illegal substances in this country.
I really trotted this out recently at a high school in my district. I talked to the kids. Their eyes became wider when I said, you know, there's a relationship between a demand for cocaine at this school in Baltimore County, MD and deaths of American DEA agents in South America. There was a disconnect there. They never really thought about that relationship. But in our unending campaign to strike a responsive chord with the youth of this country in trying to get this message across, I think we have to be innovative. One way certainly is to draw that direct parallel, that direct line, between the demand for drugs in this country, which some people just laugh off, saying we cannot win the war, and the fact that we put DEA agents, FBI agents, CIA agents and Coast Guard personnel and Navy personnel and all these fine young men and women that we met in the course of our trip in harm's way. Making that connection in the minds of young people I think is certainly one very positive way we can get the message across.
Mr. ZELIFF. Another interesting thing, we visited on Saturday afternoon down there the folks that served on board the USS Mellon, the Coast Guard cutter that had a successful pickup on the high seas of some 5,000 pounds of marijuana. Each bale is $88,000. Just picture how that can influence people, how that can influence basic infrastructure in terms of the money value, how that can destroy economies, how that can destroy countries, how that can destroy people.
What it is doing to us is just a quiet cancer day by day. The amount of drugs that are coming up through Puerto Rico, because once it gets into Puerto Rico, it is just like a State, it goes straight into the United States. The amount of drugs coming out of Colombia and going right into Mexico, being dropped off in the middle of Mexico and then just transported across the border into the United States. Yes, demand is important.
Here is yesterday's Washington Post: U.S. Falling Far Short in Drug War, Global Criminal Groups Expand Production, Markets.
The United States and other developed countries are falling further behind in the war on drugs as criminal organizations in Latin America and Asia have increased production and become more sophisticated in distributing cocaine and heroin, according to recent U.S. intelligence reports.
We have got to wake up. If we don't we are going to be in serious trouble.
Mr. EHRLICH. I have some more recent statistics to back up, in fact, that story. If our purpose is to awaken the American public, hopefully colloquies like this will assist us in that goal. A 1994 University of Michigan study showed that 33 percent of all 8th graders, 40 percent of all 10th graders, and 50 percent of all 12th graders, high school seniors, have used some type of illicit drug.
Marijuana. Among eighth graders, twice as many have experimented with marijuana in 1993 as compared to 1991. Daily use by high school seniors in this country is up by 50 percent. The drug abuse warning network showed an 8 percent increase in drug-related emergency room visits in 1991 due to overdoses, suicide attempts, and drug-related diseases.
The numbers go on and on. I have many, many numbers here. Approximately 70 percent of the illegal drugs coming into our country today enter by land, in cargo trucks, in cars over the Mexican border, an issue we have talked about a great deal. Over half of all cocaine, 20 percent of all heroin, and 60 to 80 percent of foreign-grown marijuana available in the United States pass through or originates in Mexico. The demand in this country is so great.
We have talked a lot about putting more resources into the transit zone. The Clinton administration, as you know, has taken resources away from transit, put it into source country. The source country is part of the strategy, but the fact is the demand in this country drives this problem.
Mr. ZELIFF. Let me just add a couple of things to your very important comments.
Our third and fourth drug hearings which were held on June 27 and June 28 had testimony from the head of the DEA, head of U.S. Customs, head of the Coast Guard, President Clinton's interdiction coordinator and GAO investigators who revealed they have just completed, and this is GAO, a major study of
the Clinton administration's drug strategy in source countries.
Here is what we learned:
The head of the DEA, Administrator Constantine, admitted that our exploding drug use in this country which was falling until 3 years ago and the international drug cartels should be seen as the No. 1 national security threat. He ranked it above ballistic missiles for the impact on our Nation. Yet he admitted that it is not given that ranking by his own administration's National Security Council. He spoke from the heart and called this threat a time bomb.
What he is saying is that if you put crime and drugs together, the National Security Council should look at this threat as being the No. 1 issue facing our country.
The President's interdiction coordinator, Admiral Kramek, admitted that his office which is supposed to coordinate the Nation's whole drug interdiction effort has just 6 people and that the whole interdiction effort has been cut for 3 straight years. We got admissions from DEA, the President's interdiction coordinator and the head of U.S. Customs that Clinton's drug strategy is not fulfilling expectations.
I just hope and pray that we can all get this thing together and start putting this on the front burner.
Most important of all was the GAO bombshell dropped in the hearing. This is available to anybody that would like to have a copy. After investigating the drug strategy in source countries, including extensive interviews in Colombia and Mexico, they released a study that shows that the Clinton antidrug strategy in the source countries is very badly managed, poorly coordinated among agencies, and holds a low priority in key embassies including the United States embassy in Mexico, even though 70 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States comes in through Mexico, and that the Clinton administration's drug strategy in the source countries has serious accountability problems.
What we need to do together in a nonpartisan way, we need to declare war on this effort. We need to pool resources that are needed. Yes, we do have budget problems, but we need to place priorities. We need to beef up the interdiction effort. We need to declare this a No. 1 issue. We need to go after it in a serious way and win that war.
Mr. EHRLICH. Very well put. The numbers are indeed compelling. There is one last point I would like to make. You have cited the numbers. Our strategy obviously needs to change. But people always come up to me, particularly parents, and say, ``What can I do?'' We have talked about this a great deal in our private conversations. There is one thing that every single man and woman in this country can do, particularly those who enjoy leadership positions, not just Members of Congress, not just the President, not just Members of State legislatures, but Cub Scout troop leaders, Lions Club presidents, little league coaches. If anyone in this country is in a position of authority, I believe it is incumbent upon that person to renew our commitment to a coherent drug strategy in this country.
That means when you have a stage, whether you are addressing your Lions Club, your little league team, your neighbors, it does not matter the forum, venue is irrelevant. When you have the opportunity to talk, particularly to kids, we need to get the message across. It is incumbent upon every adult in this country to help our kids make the right decision. Because we all know, it only takes one night, one single occasion, to make the wrong decision and you can be dead.
Mr. ZELIFF. Right.
Mr. EHRLICH. We have wonderful parents in this country and most parents do a wonderful job. We have peer pressure in this country on the other side. But the fact is parents and coaches and politicians cannot go with kids when they go out on Friday night and they are with their friends. That is really the troublesome time. That is the time that these kids need to make the right decision. One bad decision out of a million could end them up on the wrong side of the street.
Mr. ZELIFF. I just want to add, again to all of the things you have just said very ably, I was with Dan Golden on Monday with astronaut David Lowe, and I also had Rick Seerfoss, the astronaut on a previous mission that was up in New Hampshire, we went and in 2\1/2\ days visited with 7500 kids. You talk about a 38-year-old colonel with 3 kids, an Eagle Scout, a role model that can talk about math and science and doing your homework and reaching out and doing the
things that we should be doing in an exciting way and how exciting life is in general and talking about his travels in space and some of the products that we have been able as a by-product of the space program, the space station, and all of this.
I asked Dan Golden on Monday morning if he would be willing to have the astronauts join us in our effort in terms of role models so that we can start talking about this in space as the next mission goes up. I hope that will be successful. We have just got to be able to reach out. We ought to think about doing drug testing for Members of Congress in terms of a volunteer effort, and then staffs, and then potentially maybe every person that gets a Government paycheck, because what is the big deal if we really want to do this, we have got to declare war on it and we have got to be prepared to win the war. We have got to just say that, hey, we have a choice. We can lose everything we have got in terms of the next generation, we can lose our country, we can lose, for example, in Puerto Rico, in those source countries, in Mexico, but the bottom line is we have got to start speaking out so that we curb demand.
Mr. EHRLICH. Roles models become role models because they set an example. I look forward to working with you and the members of our subcommittee in a bipartisan manner to reenergize the leadership in this society. As I said, not just the political leadership, the leadership in all respects as we again reemphasize the message that just saying no is the right thing. It is the right thing for your future.
Mr. ZELIFF. I publicly invite, on behalf of the committee, President Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Bob Dole to join us at the very top as we will support their efforts at the very top across this country as we fan out to every single State in this country, and hopefully we can get it back on the front burner.
Mr. EHRLICH. There is no more important thing that we are going to accomplish in the 104th Congress than to reenergize the people with respect to this issue. I thank the gentleman again for his leadership.
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