Speech by Rep. John Mica (R-Florida), October 5, 2000

Speech by Rep. John Mica (R-Florida), October 5, 2000

ILLEGAL NARCOTICS (House of Representatives - October 05, 2000)

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The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Pease). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica) is recognized for 60 minutes.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to come to the floor this afternoon, and I hope to talk about the issue that I usually come on Tuesday to talk about but was preempted by the presidential debates on Tuesday night, that is, the problem of illegal narcotics and the damage that illegal narcotics have done across our land.

Mr. Speaker, I cannot help but come to the floor, though, preceding my colleagues who just spoke about some of the differences and the great balance that we have that may be undone here in this next election and some of the differences between the candidates on the issues.

I sat with many of my colleagues, Mr. Speaker, and watched the debates. There are some things I would have mentioned that were not mentioned. Governor Bush has not been part of the legislative process here. The governor was chief executive of the State of Texas.

Mr. Gore has been a Member of the other body, and the differences are very dramatic. He served a number of years as a Member of Congress and finally as a Member of the other body, and it was interesting.

Before I get into the drug portion of my talk this afternoon, I want to talk about some of the differences that are very distinct, the failure of the Vice President, when he was a Member of Congress, to ever come forth with a balanced budget; the failure of Mr. Gore to ever come forward with a proposal to secure Social Security. He is talking about a lockbox.

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The Republicans did a lockbox here. He is talking about paying down the deficit by 2012. We are talking about paying down the deficit sooner than that with the plan that we have.

There are things that he had an opportunity, but why did he not propose this? When the Democrats had control of both Houses of Congress, the Senate, by a wide margin, and this body here by a wide veto-proof margin, they could do basically anything they wanted to do. What did they do? He said, well, I cast the deciding vote for an economic policy.

Well, Mr. Speaker, his plan was to pass a deciding vote to increase taxes to the highest level they had. The plan that they brought to this floor of the House of Representatives in 1993 when they passed that huge tax increase projected, their projections were a $200 billion deficit this year. That would have been on top of raiding social security, which they had done decade after decade when they controlled this body.

What a farce, to have this side and one of the leaders of the other side come before the American people and tell them that he is going to solve the problem if he is given another chance.

He had a chance in the Congress, he had a chance when they controlled this place for 2 years with a wide, wide margin. What did they do? They taxed and they spent the largest tax increase.

Talk about energy policy, they do not have a clue of an energy policy. They have allowed the United States of America to be held hostage by ten dictators and by Middle East sheiks and others and allowed our reliance from around 50 percent on foreign oil to go now into the 56 percent and growing range. So we are held hostage. That is their policy.

What is amazing is that we are being held hostage by people in the Middle East, we who sent, under President Bush, our young men and women to die for them, and they cannot even negotiate an oil deal to give us a better rate on the per barrel oil price.

They do not have a clue of an energy policy. On our side of the aisle, we have all backed a domestic plan and tried to increase domestic production, tried to get alternative fuels. I have been up to the ANWR region of Alaska. The footprint that they had and the technology they had years ago when they took oil out of Prudhoe Bay, and even taking oil out of Prudhoe Bay, it is not the same technology today that it was 20 years ago. There is a very small imprint and footprint for oil production.

There is no reason why we have to be energy dependent. We can put a man on the moon. And there is no reason why we cannot devise technology for nuclear energy. Some countries produce much, much more of their energy supply by nuclear means. They do not want to talk about that, of course. But there is no reason why we cannot do away with nuclear waste and turn that actually into energy production. There is no reason why we should be held hostage. Under this administration, we have increased our dependency to foreign sources.

Those are some of the things that I noticed in the debate.

They talk about a tax cut and balancing the budget without hurting people. We heard the other side here, as we attempted to balance the budget. Balancing the budget is something they could have done for 40 years here. All they had to do was match the expenditures with the revenues. It is not a complicated thing. Most Americans do it every week. They have to limit their expenditures to what they take in.

We did that, and kicking and screaming and dragging some of our people through elections and calling them names and accusing them of all kinds of atrocities is unfair. They want to do that again with Mediscare, with scaring seniors about social security.

Stop and think. I have great respect for senior citizens all in my family that I know because they have been around a long time, and they are not fooled by those who will tell them that they bankrupted social security when they had control of the entire process. They were not only bankrupting the country in these huge deficit expenditures, but dipping into the social security trust fund, dipping into the Highway Trust Fund, dipping into the aviation trust fund, dipping into the Federal employees' trust fund.

Every one of these accounts they raided, until we were just about at our financial knees. Thank goodness a Republican majority, a new majority in the House and in the other body, came along to rescue that.

So now the folks from the other side that raided these funds, we restored the funds and took the abuse from them and were putting our Nation's finances in order, and they had the gall to go before the American people and tell them that they need another 4 years in the White House to solve these problems. They need control of the House and Senate.

Mr. Speaker, their history is tax and spend. Their

history. We passed legislation putting our financial House in order. We also passed a $1,000 tax credit for those people who have children in this country when they said we could not do it, that we could not do that. We passed a marriage penalty tax which was vetoed by those same folks that have taken control that want to deny tens and tens of millions of working men and women a little bit of money back in their pocket and not be penalized for being married.

Is that family-friendly? Is that helping working people? So I saw those debates, too. I am so glad my colleagues were here before me to reiterate some of the issues.

The question of education, for 40 years the other side has done nothing but bring power to Washington, as far as education. We heard in the debates that only 6 cents of every dollar comes from the Federal Government. We have a Department of Education with thousands of bureaucrats, most of them in Washington, D.C., 5,000, and many thousands of contract employees. They disguise the true number of employees. I will talk about Federal employees in just a moment.

But in education, we have 5,000, and within just a few miles of my voice in this Capitol there are 3,000 Department of Education Federal employees.

One time I took a student who was visiting here. We were on our way down to the White House. We drive from the Capitol to the White House and see all of these buildings, these massive buildings. He asked me, what do people do in those buildings? We passed the Department of Education. I told him, there are 3,000 Federal education employees just in Washington, D.C. I will tell you what they do, they administer hundreds of Federal education programs. We were up to 760 Federal education programs, all well-meaning, but all that required administration and overhead.

Not only do they require it in downtown Washington in those buildings, where they make $60,000 to $100,000, on average, and show me one teacher in my district that makes $60,000 to $100,000. I do not know of any. But they make it in those buildings here.

I will tell the Members what those people do in the Department of Education: They pass rules and regulations. They administer those 760 programs.

I have no problem with the Federal Government providing money to education. In fact, I guarantee Members, if we ask this question and people would answer, this would be the response. The question would be, if we were thinking about it, who would provide more funding for education, Republicans or Democrats? If we had an audience here, Mr. Speaker, of citizens sitting here, they would probably say the Democrats would.

That is wrong. The Democrats, when they had control, again, and when they were running these deficits, they put very little money into education and increases.

If we take the same period of time that we have had control of this House and we go back when they had control, we dramatically increased the funding and money available for education as a percentage compared to what they did, and put more money in student loans. The difference is that they put more money in administration. They put more emphasis on regulation. They want the control here in Washington, D.C., so that is why they not only require those 3,000 Federal employees here administering these programs, again, well-intended, but they require them in the regional offices.

Then, what is worse is they require them in the State capitals and down at the school boards until we get down to the poor teacher. The teacher is held captive by rules, regulations, by the mandates coming from Washington. I guarantee Members that if we had a President Gore, he would be the king of rules and regulations, and more control in Washington.

That is what the debate is about: Do we want Washington and the Federal Government to have more control, more power, more authority, or do we want the money that is hard earned by the taxpayers to go back to the taxpayers? That is the major question, the major difference, for the people who get their check at the end of the week and they look at the check and there is very little left.

I remember when my daughter graduated a couple of years ago from college. Her biggest shock was to get her first paycheck. She almost cried. She said, dad, I have hardly anything left, and she was not making that much money. But she was shocked, as every American worker is shocked, at the end of the week, how much they have left; at the end of the month, at the end of the year, how much they have left.

This is one of the best fundamental debates this Congress and this country has ever heard, because the debate is about where that money is going to end up and who controls that money: whether we control it, have it back in our pockets, or whether they send it to Washington and tell us how our school will be run,

whether they add more administrators in that Department of Education in Washington, whether they force more administrators at the regional level, whether they force more at the school level.

I served in the State legislature in Tallahassee, Florida, the capital, back in the seventies. If Members go to Tallahassee, Florida, there is a huge capitol building. I was there when they built it.

But the second biggest building in Tallahassee, Florida, is a skyscraper which is a Department of Education, a State Department of Education. That Department of Education grew to a huge bureaucracy, one, because of some of the rules and regulations and mandates that came out of Washington. Again, they only supply 6 cents on every dollar. The rest of the money comes from local property taxes, State sales tax and State fees and local money. But they pass down to the local level this huge bureaucracy, this red tape, so a teacher is held hostage in her classroom, so a principal cannot control the school, so the school board has to have hundreds and hundreds of mandated Federal employees carrying out Federal mandates.

That is where the education money goes. That is why this is a great and fundamental debate. If people want government to have more control, there is a very clear choice. If they want education mandated out of Washington, there is a very clear choice. If they want more regulations in education, there is a very clear choice.

Some of this is not rocket science. We know that children need basic education. Governor Bush, I heard his proposal for Head Start. What a great proposal. What he has done in Texas with his young people, if we could do that for our country, for our children, which are the poorest and most at-risk children in this country, they need basic education. They need to be able to read and write and do simple math. It is not complicated. My wife was an elementary schoolteacher, and this is some of the answer.

Let me tell the Members what they put in place. Even I tried to change it, and we cannot change the bureaucracy because they will veto it. This President will veto it.

With Head Start, a great program, I was involved in helping, when I went to the University of Florida some 40 years ago, before some of my colleagues here were even born, I was trying to help young people, particularly with an institution, with the University of Florida.

Here is a great education university next to a community in Gainesville that had many poor children who did not have an opportunity for education.

The Great Start concept is to take good resources, teaching resources, and to give those young people the ability to have a head start, to have access to education so that they have the basic skills so when they enter school they can do simple math, they can read.

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Governor Bush, and I hope will be President Bush, proposed that we convert Head Start into a reading program or at least an emphasis on reading and basic skills.

I have a good Head Start program in my local area, but we also have a Head Start program which I examined in my area. My Head Start program, the public one, is a great example of what we should not be doing with taxpayer money. One of the Head Start programs spends between $8,000 and $9,000 per year per student for a part-time program which is basically a glorified baby-sitting program. It has turned into a minority employment program so that the student who is coming out of a disadvantaged home is going into a disadvantaged program and not learning.

I examined the program, and the program had administrators, over 20 administrators in a program for around 400 students, 20 administrators earning between $16,000 and $60,000. The teachers, there was not one certified teacher in the program, not one certified teacher. The so-called teachers were making between $12,000 and $16,000. Is that a head start? That is a farce.

But if those children who are so disadvantaged had just a minimal opportunity to learn to read, to learn to do simple mathematics. Try to hire someone today who can do simple mathematics and read out there, it is very difficult.

One of my community college presidents told me that over half of the students entering community college in my area need remedial education. We have an education recession, and that is because they have taken the power to Washington with all of these mandates and regulations.

Do my colleagues know what they have done? They have failed. They have failed. A teacher cannot teach. A teacher goes into the classroom in many areas and is threatened with bodily harm. One of my district aid's wife is a teacher in one of the schools in central Florida and has been physically attacked.

There is not much the teacher can do. The teacher has lost control of the classroom. Why? Because of the liberal policies and left wing policies of well-intended people who have managed to take control away from parents, from teachers, from principals and local school administrators and amass them all here in Washington, D.C.

That is the clear choice that the American people are going to have: Do you want more power here in Washington over education? Do you want more mandates? Do you want more rules? Do you want the people who, for 40 years, have brought power and regulation to education and so encapsulated the regulation of education that a teacher cannot teach, a parent cannot discipline, that we cannot teach basics, that we have programs that were intended to give children a head start? What do they do? They keep them at the lowest common denominator.

We look at what Governor Bush did just with education in the State of Texas for his young people. These are the young people. If we fail them, ask any teacher what will happen, ask any principal what will happen. First, these will be the disruptive students in the classroom. Next, they will be the dropout students who used to be in the classroom and who are now roaming our streets and neighborhoods. They will be the social problems. These children will be the social problems because they cannot read, they cannot do mathematics.

As chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources, I have had the opportunity to sit in some of our prisons and some of our drug treatment programs and penal institutions and talked to young people and talked to also those older who were incarcerated behind bars, the lost souls of this country. A common denominator among almost all of them is that they failed in school. They did not succeed in school.

Of course many of them came from disruptive families, and they had substance abuse problems, and I will try to talk about that in the rest of my talk. But one of the basic problems with young people getting into trouble is the lack of education, lack of being able to compete in and participate in school and having basic educational skills.

So if for no other reason if on the basis of education, we turn over to the tax and spenders and the regulators and the mandators, this Congress and that White House, it would be a very sad day for America. It would be a very sad day for education in this country.

I talked a little bit about education bureaucrats. I do not advocate the necessary abolishment of the Department of Education. The Federal government can play a role. I do not know that we need 5,000 people or 3,000 people in Education. My God, we might have to have some of them go out and teach for a living and actually be in a classroom and stop regulating. We might have to take those dollars instead of the gobbledegook administration of them and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on administration and block grant that money.

We passed a simple proposal here to try to get 90 percent of Federal dollars into the classroom and to the teacher. To get a good teacher, one has to pay a good teacher. To have a student able to learn in a classroom, one wants the dollar to go there, not the dollar to go to Washington.

This is an unbelievable statistic. But under their plan, the Democrat plan, under what they have done for 40 years in bringing education and bureaucracy to Washington, almost 90 percent of Federal dollars go to everything but basic education. Our plan was to turn that around for teachers, for students to benefit.

Now, just take a few minutes. I would pray that the American people would take a few minutes, Mr. Speaker, and look at what is being proposed here and what has been done here to their schools, public schools.

I was educated in a public school. My wife was educated in a public school. My wife was a teacher in a public school. I think public schools are one of the best institutions this country has ever created. But they are managing to ruin them. That is why they go to charter schools. That is why they are proposing vouchers as an alternative, because they are failing.

So if we want them to fail more, we can regulate them more from Washington. If we want them to succeed, we can put parents and teachers in control. We can have that money come from here and be a partner with them, but let local parents and students and educators make the decisions. Let us take back the schools.

That is what I think Governor Bush is talking about, successful programs and education that teach basics. Basics. If one cannot read and write in this society or do simple math, how can one function? So that is a great difference. I am glad my colleagues were here to talk about it.

Before I talk about the drug situation, I have to talk about Federal employees. I heard the Vice President of the United States taking credit for, and I could almost cry when he did it, for reducing the size of the Federal bureaucracy, I think he said by more than 300,000 Federal employees.

Mr. Speaker, those 300,000 Federal employees were almost all Federal Defense employees. They have not met a bureaucrat that they do not like on this side of the aisle. They love to expand the size of government, and they have had a great deal of experience at it, whether it is the Department of Education.

They cut the Defense civilian employees, and almost every one of those cuts came out of those agencies. If one looks at it, EPA is bigger than it ever has been, the Department of Commerce. Then if we see any shrinkage, Mr. Speaker, do not let them fool us. Do not let the Vice President of the United States, who knows better, tell us that he has reduced the size of the Federal bureaucracy because it just is not so.

I will tell my colleagues, as chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Service, I will tell my colleagues where the bodies are buried. What they have done is they have contracted for employees. So we have millions and millions of Federal contract employees rather than Federal employees on the payroll.

So that is where some of these folks are. The only agency I know of that Bill Clinton cut when he came in, he reduced the Drug Czar's office from 120 to about 27. We have managed, fortunately, with General McAffrey and others to try to restore the viability of that office. But it has been a struggle. That is where they made their cuts.

That might be a good lead into the subject that I came to talk about that I usually talk about on Tuesday night but was preempted by the debates. I wanted to make a few points. It is very frustrating as a Member of Congress to have seen the folks who brought this country into fiscal disarray, who operated this Congress, this House of Representatives like a poorly run southern plantation with taxpayers subsidizing the Member's restaurant downstairs, with the House bank run as a piggy bank for anyone who wanted to write a check and bounce a check and have the taxpayers fund it, who wanted to see 17 people deliver ice, even though they instituted refrigerators here in the recent years, they still had 17 people spending three-quarters of a million dollars delivering ice the morning and afternoon, who ran this place like a poorly managed southern plantation is the only comparison I could give. The shoe shine operation was subsidized. The haircut was subsidized.

What did we do? We came in. We cut this committee staff by a third. I was sitting with a Member here, and I related this to the Member, a new Member of my side of the aisle. Republicans do not even recall what the Republicans have done in the Congress. We cut the committee staff by one-third. We cut the number of committees by one-third. We privatized the dining room and turned it over to a private operator. We no longer subsidize the barber shop, the shoe shine shop. They are

private vendors. We took out the printing office which was doing sweetheart deals for Members, and now you must compete with everyone.

Let me tell my colleagues one more that just galls me. They had disabled people that were blocking the Republican National Headquarters yesterday. I saw them, I guess it was, last night. I thought I would stop and talk to those people, but they did not want to hear the truth.

When I was a Member and came here as a minority member in 1993 when Bill Clinton took over, when the Democrats had control of the House of Representatives and the other body, I had visually disabled blinded people coming to visit me as a Member of Congress, and they bounced off the walls going down the halls. There were no accommodations for disabled.

I wrote the chairman of the Committee on House Administration, and I said, it is a disgrace that the House of Representatives does not live under the laws that we have. I came from the business sector, and the business sector was not allowed to ignore the law. Business people must go by the letter of the law, the Americans With Disabilities law. There is no reason why this Congress should not accommodate it, particularly the House of Representatives, the people's house.

Do my colleagues know what the Democrat chairman did? He ignored me. I wrote him again, and he ignored me. I wrote him again. They ignored the disabled. The disabled Americans who come to this Capitol, came to this Capitol when they controlled by wide margins the House of Representatives and the other body, and they ignored the disabled.

I begged them if they would please accommodate. These are good people. They deserve to have the law enforced as far as the House of Representatives, their people's house, even when they come to lobby or talk to or visit their Members of Congress. They ignored me.

One of the greatest satisfactions I had was, when we took over the House of Representatives, we passed the Congressional Accountability Act. We put the Congress, the House of Representatives under the same laws as the business people. One of the greatest days of satisfaction that I have ever had, and if I never serve another day in the House of Representatives, is when they put a plaque on my door, and it said John L. Mica; and underneath in braille, it had a braille reading for my constituents, so when they visited me they could be treated the same way they would in the private sector.

That was denied when they controlled this entire body by huge margins and could have done anything they wanted to do. That was denied the disabled in my district.

If one goes around the Capitol, and I am now on the Committee on House Administration, it is ironic how tables turn. The Committee on House Administration that would not even hear a minority member asking about helping the disabled, it is ironic. I now serve on that as one of the Speaker's designees on House Administration. Go around and see what we have done.

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This place was a disgrace, and we are still trying to get it so it is accessible to the disabled.

The fire alarms. We are still working to get them in order so it is a safe workplace even for the people who work here, which they ignored, as well as the access to people who are disabled.

But I am very proud of what we did. Every Member of the Republican side of the aisle can be very proud of what they did and of their legacy, not only as far as putting this country's financial house in order but in the area of putting the people's House in order. So, as Paul Harvey says, `That's the rest of the story,' or a little bit more of the story.

I guess they got my dander up between watching the debates and not hearing what should have been said. But we do need to continue the progress that we have made: keeping our financial house in order, helping Americans have a few more dollars in their pocket, working Americans, and helping people get off of government. I guess those who want a lot of control by government and want power in Washington, it is better to have people relying on them here in Washington. God only knows what JFK would be saying these days. He said, `Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.' The other side seems to think it is ask how much more Washington can do for you, and we will get your vote and your money. It is sort of sad, and I hope the American people pay attention to what is going on here.

As chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, I have a very small responsibility of all the responsibilities here. I do not have control over the budget. I am one vote out of 435. I do not have control over the appropriations process. But I do have responsibility to try to focus on our national drug policy, and for the past year and a half, as chairman, and since assuming that and leaving as chairman of the Subcommittee on Civil Service of the Committee on Government Reform, I have tried to do my best to deal with a problem which we inherited as a new majority.

The other side was convinced when they came in to office that we did not need a war on drugs, so they began systematically dismantling what was truly a war on drugs. Now, if we all think back to the administration of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, they instituted a number of policies, community-based policies, against narcotics. The First Lady led a `Just say no' effort. The President was engaged in this, we had a vice presidential task force, we had an Andean policy where we went after the drugs at their source. We brought in the military and the Coast Guard, not into arresting people but into drug surveillance; and we had an almost 50 percent decline in drug use in this country back from 1985 to 1990. I brought that chart up and showed it many times.

With the Clinton administration, the first thing they did was fire everybody, just about everybody, in the drug czar's office. They took the military out of the war on drugs. They stopped intelligence sharing with our allies, who were going after drug traffickers. And it is better to have them go after them than to spend our resources. They blocked aid to Colombia, and that is why we have a $1.3 billion aid package to Colombia because they very directly stopped aid and information sharing and any type of assistance going to Colombia.

Now Colombia has gone from practically having no production of heroin and no production of cocaine in 1993, this is the total supply of heroin produced in Colombia in 1993, this is a zero, I hope my colleagues can see this, this is a zero in 1993, and in 6 years of the Clinton-Gore lack of a drug policy, and an actually obstructive drug policy in Colombia, what they have managed to do is to have that come from zero production of heroin to being up to 75 percent of the world's supply. And most of that is coming into the United States from South America.

This is the most recent report I have had as the chairman. We know where the drugs are coming from. Heroin is coming from South America. We see it is at 65 percent of all the heroin. We know this and DEA knows this. They have supplied me with these figures because they can do a DNA signature analysis and almost tell the field that the heroin has come from. So we know that now in the Clinton-Gore administration, in 6, 7 years, they have managed to turn Colombia from producing zero to 65 percent of everything on the streets seized in the United States; 75 percent of the world's supply, as we see. These are DEA figures given to me.

The other huge increase we see is Mexico. From 1997 to 1998 they went from 14 to 17 percent, a 20 percent increase in the country that we gave trade assistance to; that we helped to secure their peso during their financial disaster. We loaned them money. We have given them the best trade benefits of probably any nation in the history of negotiation over trade. We gave them the best benefits. This administration certified Mexico as

cooperating; yet they increased by 20 percent in one year the production of heroin. They blocked any aid going to Colombia and turned it into the biggest producer.

So here are two of our problems: we know where it is coming from. It is coming across the border from Mexico. It is being produced, the last 6, 7, years, under the Clinton-Gore administration, in Colombia, where they denied aid; they denied assistance. And even several years ago, when we appropriated $300 million to go to Colombia, that money was bungled in getting delivery of goods and resources to Colombia to go after narcotics trafficking and also eradicating the narcotics production in that country.

We will hear next week from DEA and from GAO and others that have looked at this situation, and they will outline that `the gang that can't shoot straight' could not even get the aide that we appropriated more than 2 years ago to Colombia to try to get this situation under control. That scares me as far as the $1.3 billion we just appropriated. Even when it is appropriated, they cannot get it straight.

The same is true for another deadly drug, which is cocaine. In 1993, President Bush had gotten the production of cocaine almost under control. They went after the cartels. They had an Andean strategy. We have to remember, from a position of wimping out on the narcotics issue, which is sort of the trademark of this administration, back to what took place in 1989. President Bush found one government trafficking in illegal narcotics, primarily cocaine, and what did he do? He sent our troops in and they surrounded the house. If my colleagues will remember, those of us that followed this, they surrounded and captured Noriega. He was captured because he was dealing in drugs and drug trafficking, and that is what he was charged with. And then there is this administration that has turned its back on trying to stop the production.

This was a successful program. When we reduce drug use 50 percent from 1985 to 1992 in this country, when it is reduced by 50 percent, that is a successful program. But they will tell us that the war on drugs has failed. Their war on drugs has failed. Their war on drugs was a dismantling of any effort on drugs, and the evidence could not be more clear.

Now, finally we have gotten the President's attention. In 7 years, I believe the President mentioned the war on drugs eight times, just before the Colombian appropriation. When we do not have leadership from the top, when we do not have an effective strategy, when we take the military and surveillance out of the war on drugs, what do we have? We have a huge supply of drugs. That is why they are dying in Vermont, that is why they are dying in Oregon, that is why they are dying in my State, that is why they are dying in Baltimore, right down the street from here in Baltimore. `Drug Overdose Deaths Exceed Slayings,' this is a recent headline, September 15, in Baltimore. That means that there are more drug-related deaths than homicides.

This would be a horrible headline in any community. It has appeared in the headlines in my community. But the national media will not pay attention to this. We held a hearing a week ago on this, but in the United States of America, for the first time in the history of statistics, drug-induced deaths, drug-related deaths in the United States of America exceeded homicides. For the first time. They do not want that information out. The media would not cover it. God forbid anyone should think that they are not doing a great job. But when the drug czar and Donna Shalala held a conference several weeks ago that drug use among eighth graders had dropped slightly, they championed that like we had solved the whole problem.

I tell my colleagues, the problem is serious. Ask any parent, ask any young person. These are the headlines that we see: `High Schoolers Report More Drug Use.' Ask any high schooler, ask any parent, ask any single parent, any mother, any set of parents what one of their greatest fears is, and that is to have their child addicted to narcotics. Not only the problem of addiction, it is the problem of death. And now we have all kinds of drugs on the street.

We have a huge supply. We saw where some of the supply is coming from. I am not sure if the Speaker has an HDTV or how many of my colleagues here have an HDTV. Probably not too many. Some might say, well, what is an HDTV? And what does high definition television have to do with drugs? It is a simple economics equation. When there is a short supply and a high price, there is not the demand.

We have heroin, we have cocaine, we have methamphetamine, we have Ecstasy, we have all of these drugs flooding our streets; and the administration has dismantled any effort to go after the supply, to go after the producing countries, to stop drugs most cost effectively at their source. And that is why we have an incredible supply of heroin, that is why we have heroin overdose deaths. Not only do we have heroin overdose deaths, we also have on the streets of our country the most pure heroin and cocaine that our drug enforcement people have ever seen, and our young people are mixing it with alcohol and with other drugs, and they are dying like flies. That is why drug-related deaths, and many of them with our young people, now exceed homicides in the United States.

Now, some people would say that the answer is treatment. And I heard this Geraldo Rivera debate the other night with one of the pro-legalizers talking about this is just a health problem. This is just a health problem. We treat everybody and we will be fine.

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Well, they tried the health problem approach in Baltimore and they grew from a small number of addicts to somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 addicts. Of course, the population went from 900,000 to 600,000 because people left Baltimore. They had a mayor who had a liberalization policy, no enforcement policy. And what happened? Almost the same number of homicides every year. And we saw where now drug-induced deaths exceed homicide in Baltimore. That did not work and it does not work.

The alternative is zero tolerance. Rudy Giuliani did it in New York. He cut the murders from over 2,000 in a year when he took office to 600. Six hundred is about double what Baltimore had, and Baltimore has 600,000 population. And there are millions and millions in New York City. Rudy Giuliani, through a zero tolerance policy and going after drug dealers, cut all crime in New York City.

Walk through New York City and you will see the evidence of it by 58 percent. The seven major felony categories were cut by 58 percent. So it not only cut murders from 2,000 down to 600, it cut down all of the mayhem and the felonies. But this is treatment.

Now, they say we did not put enough money in treatment and we hear that from the other side. We put money in treatment, even under the Republicans, a 26 percent increase in treatment since 1995 funds. Every year we put money in treatment. And we see what has happened with interdiction, with international programs, when the other side, the Democrats, and under the Clinton-Gore policy cut the interdiction, cut the international source country programs.

We have a huge increase in drug use in almost every category in the United States because we have a huge supply coming in. And we can never treat enough people. So we will continue to put money into treatment. But do not let them fool you that this is a health problem that we can treat our way out of this. You cannot have a war or any kind of a conflict and only treat the wounded in battle.

And once someone is addicted to narcotics, our success rate in public programs is a 60/70 percent failure rate. Only a 20/30 percent success rate. And these people are repeat and repeat. Ask any parent who has an addicted young person. Ask any adult who has been addicted to narcotics. And it is the hardest thing in the world to treat these people.

If we follow the Baltimore model, we will have tens and tens of millions of people who are addicted. We cannot afford that. We have asked this administration to go after drug dealers. And the Clinton-Gore administration from 1992 to 1996, this is a chart that was supplied to us by the administration and all the statistics come from the administration, it is entitled Individual Defendants Prosecuted in Federal Courts in Drug Prosecutions 1992 to 1996, they cut the prosecution of going after drug offenders from 29,000 here to 26,000 in 1996. So when we got after them to go after drug dealers and drug offenders, and we are not talking about people with small amounts of possession, we are talking about people dealing in death and destruction in huge quantities trafficking in illegal narcotics, they dropped the prosecution.

And what happened is these are the headlines from the `Dallas Morning News': `Federal Drug Offenders Spending Less Time in Prison Study Finds.' We went after them, and we started to get the prosecutions up. And now we find in 2000 the drug offenders are spending less time in prison.

We cannot win with these folks. First they will not prosecute folks; and then when they prosecute them, we finally get them to prosecute them and they do not let them serve prison terms.

That is unfortunate. What is also unfortunate is our country is now being ravaged by not only heroin, not only by cocaine and other drugs of high purity and deadly levels, but we have a new plague across this country and that is the plague of Ecstasy and designer drugs.

We just had a young person at the University of Central Florida die from an overdose of designer drugs just the past few days. We have young people who are dying from Ecstasy. We had a hearing of our subcommittee in Atlanta and heard a father talk of his daughter who about 2 years ago took Ecstasy and went into convulsions. And for 2 years that family went through hell. The daughter was in a coma and finally died.

We have had hearings where we had fathers talk about their sons who have tried Ecstasy and did not get a second chance. They are part of those statistics of drug related deaths that exceed homicides.

One father from Orlando told me, `Mr. Mica, drug related deaths are homicides.'

But one of the great misconceptions young people have is that Ecstasy is a harmless drug, designer drugs you can take and feel good.

This is a brain scan provided to us by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, who does scientific studies. This is a brain scan of a normal brain. This is a brain that has dealt with Ecstasy. Ecstasy destroys the brain tissue and it creates a Parkinson's type disease almost in the brain, a destruction of the brain. This is a brain scan after use of Ecstasy.

The young people and adults of this country must realize that they have a dangerous commodity out there. And now some of it is mixed with all kinds of substances and used with other drugs and is deadly.

It is amazing how this stuff is packaged. This is not a little cottage industry. This has turned into a huge industry of deadly drugs in designer packages.

I do not know if we can focus on this, but they put all kinds of fancy designer labels on these drugs. This was provided to us by U.S. Customs Service, and that is what is out there. They try to make it attractive to our young people, and this is what our young people get is a brain, if they survive, that is damaged. And you do not repair this damage to the brain.

So right now we are facing an Ecstasy epidemic. We are facing it in California.

I see my colleague the gentleman from California (Mr. Ose) is here. We were in his district for a hearing. I might want to yield to the gentleman to comment about his perspective. Maybe he can relate, too, to the House part of this problem. The gentleman does a fantastic job working on the subcommittee but shares, as a father and a parent, my concern for what is happening with illegal narcotics.

Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from California (Mr. Ose).

[Page: H8914]
Mr. OSE. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Florida for yielding to me. And I do want to commend his efforts on the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources, on which I am honored to serve with him as chairman.

He has in fact been to my district for a hearing, and at that hearing we heard the traumatic tales of families whose very fiber was ripped from seam to seam from the abuse of drugs by folks who should know better.

I was hopeful, if I might, Mr. Speaker, if I could just have just a few moments to speak about, frankly, a fraudulent initiative on the California ballot that will contribute to a far more pronounced number of experiences than we have even today.

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield to the gentleman. I think we have about 4 minutes, but I think it is important that he gets this message out to our colleagues, the Speaker, and the American people.

Mr. OSE. Mr. Speaker, as my colleagues know, in California we have an interesting process called the initiative process. And on this year's ballot we have Prop 36, which is labeled Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act of 2000.

I have a copy of it here. And it is interesting. I have gone through and I have flagged the various parts of it that are so troublesome. This is about 4,500 words in total. And it is interesting, it is being marketed on the basis of treatment. It provides treatment to people, that if we approve this, Californians will receive treatment. But of its 4,500 words, only 383 of them speak directly within the initiative to providing treatment for people. So can you imagine that, less than a tenth of the words in this initiative.

Let me tell my colleagues that what this initiative really does is it imposes the wisdom of a criminal defense attorney, it interjects that into California statute under the guise of providing treatment for folks who need drug treatment.

There is nothing in here that provides treatment to Californians. It changes criminal statute to allow people who violate our laws as it relates to drug possession and use are treated, but it does not provide a single dollar for drug treatment to people who desperately need it.

And keep in mind that this is an initiative written by a criminal defense attorney. The initiative itself was funded by three people who do not even live in California. There is no medical analysis, no medical input to drafting this. It is a shameful fraud being, attempting to be perpetrated on the voters of California.

In fact, Mr. Speaker, just in the course of our committee hearings, the gentleman and I have heard time after time after time from medical professional after medical professional after medical professional that drug testing is an inherent and integral part of a successful drug treatment program. This initiative, the $120 million to be appropriated under this initiative, not a dime of it can be used for drug testing whatsoever. So the initiative eliminates the chance to use the most successful tool we have. I just want to make that clear.

I appreciate being able to come down here and visit with the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica).

Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Ose) for his comments, and I thank him for the leadership on our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

As we conclude, I again call to the attention of my colleagues, the Speaker, and the American people the need to be vigilant on the issue of illegal narcotics, not to make the mistake of the past, not to be fooled by the legalizers, but to make this country safe for our children and the next generation and stop the ravages of illegal narcotics. Because illegal drugs do destroy lives and do a great deal of damage to our society and our country and particularly to our families and young people.

END

As of October 11, 2000, this document was also available online at http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?r106:H05OC0-736: