<DOC>
[109th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:29579.wais]
THE NATIONAL DRUG CONTROL BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2007
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE,
DRUG POLICY, AND HUMAN RESOURCES
of the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
FEBRUARY 16, 2006
__________
Serial No. 109-168
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
index.html
http://www.house.gov/reform
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
29-579 WASHINGTON : 2006
_____________________________________________________________________________
For Sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; (202) 512ÿ091800
Fax: (202) 512ÿ092250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402ÿ090001
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
DAN BURTON, Indiana TOM LANTOS, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
JOHN L. MICA, Florida PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
CHRIS CANNON, Utah WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri
JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee DIANE E. WATSON, California
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts
MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland
DARRELL E. ISSA, California LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
JON C. PORTER, Nevada C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
KENNY MARCHANT, Texas BRIAN HIGGINS, New York
LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina Columbia
CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania ------
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JEAN SCHMIDT, Ohio (Independent)
------ ------
David Marin, Staff Director
Rob Borden, Parliamentarian/Senior Counsel
Teresa Austin, Chief Clerk
Phil Barnett, Minority Chief of Staff/Chief Counsel
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana, Chairman
PATRICK T. McHenry, North Carolina ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
DAN BURTON, Indiana BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JOHN L. MICA, Florida DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota DIANE E. WATSON, California
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
CHRIS CANNON, Utah C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland
CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of
VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina Columbia
Ex Officio
TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
Marc Wheat, Staff Director
Nicholas Coleman, Professional Staff Member and Counsel
Malia Holst, Clerk
Tony Haywood, Minority Counsel
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on February 16, 2006................................ 1
Statement of:
Walters, John P., Director, Office of National Drug Control
Policy, Executive Office of the President.................. 13
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Indiana, prepared statement of.................... 5
Walters, John P., Director, Office of National Drug Control
Policy, Executive Office of the President, prepared
statement of............................................... 17
THE NATIONAL DRUG CONTROL BUDGET FOR FISCAL YEAR 2007
----------
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2006
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and
Human Resources,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 2:03 p.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mark Souder
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Souder, McHenry, Mica, Foxx,
Cummings, Davis, and Norton.
Staff present: Marc Wheat, staff director and chief
counsel; Nicholas Coleman and Dennis Kilcoyne, professional
staff members and counsels; Malia Holst, clerk; Tony Haywood,
minority counsel; and Teresa Coufal, minority assistant clerk.
Mr. Souder. The subcommittee will come to order. Good
afternoon. Thank you for coming.
I should note at the beginning here how pleased we are that
the President's personal commitment to roll back the scourge of
drug abuse in this country is indicated by his four references
to it in the State of the Union address. As he stated, we have
seen a 19-percent decline in reported drug abuse among the
Nation's high school students since he took office, and this
can certainly be traced, to no small extent, to the drug
control commitment of Congress and the President over years of
diligent work.
Leading the administration's drug control effort is the
Office of National Drug Control Policy [ONDCP]. Congress
created this office to act as the President's principal advisor
on drug control policy and program oversight and to lead the
Nation's effort to combat the use, production, and distribution
of illegal drugs and all their negative consequences.
However, we Members of Congress find ourselves growing
increasingly alarmed with some of the proposals for drug
control made by the President's appointees and sanctioned by
ONDCP. The administration's just-released budget request for
drug control has only fueled our fears.
To begin, we are deeply disturbed and surprised that the
budget proposal categorizes drug control as a ``non-Homeland
Security'' mission. This flatly contradicts the statute that
established the Department of Homeland Security. Did the ONDCP
see this coming? And did they fight it?
We just had another discussion in the Speaker's office
about this potentially devastating change in budgeting because
this could impact us far beyond in how we count the drug
budget.
Next, what are we to make of the substantial reductions in
assistance to State and local law enforcement agencies? The
administration proposes the complete elimination of the Edward
Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program, which sustains
vital drug investigations at the State and local level. The
President's appointees also seek the elimination of the
Counterdrug Technology Assessment Center's [CTAC] Technology
Transfer Program, which helps to develop cutting-edge
technologies for State and local law enforcement. And they
propose to set in motion a radical, yet mostly undefined
restructuring of the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas
[HIDTA] program into an apparently more Federalized, top-down
program controlled by Washington.
At first glance, these proposals seem to simply reflect a
proper concern with excessive Federal subsidization of local
law enforcement. But while pursuing this national drug control
strategy, can we forget that it is the State and local agencies
that make 95 percent of all drug arrests and provide
indispensable access to intelligence, investigative leads, and
resources that Federal agencies simply must have? If the
administration seeks to continue the positive trends in drug
control, is this the time to be scaling back aid to and
cooperation with State and local law enforcement?
We are especially puzzled, too, by the administration's
lack of a strategy to combat the abuse of methamphetamine.
Though we were encouraged by the administration's release of a
Synthetic Drugs Action Plan in October 2004, followed by an
interim report in April 2005, we are still waiting for a final
report with concrete recommendations. Why is this? And why did
the administration provide no help to Congress when it was
considering the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act that is now
a part of the PATRIOT Act? In fact, the State Department tried
to knock out critical parts of this bill, while the New York
Times reported that the FDA was working behind the scenes to
block it.
Why did the Department of Health and Human Services, even
as Congress was drafting the anti-meth bill, provide money and
personnel to a meth conference where a keynote address was
entitled, ``We Don't Need a `War' on Methamphetamine?'' And
why, if stopping meth is a serious goal, is the administration
attacking programs like the Byrne grants and HIDTA? Are we
wrong to be dissatisfied? Shouldn't we expect a broader and
more effective anti-meth strategy than that?
Next, we have serious questions about the administration's
real commitment to drug use prevention programs. ONDCP's just-
released ``National Drug Control Strategy'' again lists
prevention--stopping abuse before it starts--as one of these
pillars of drug control, together with treatment and
enforcement. Yet the administration's budget requests even
fewer dollars for prevention than last year.
For instance, the budget request calls for the outright
elimination of the State grants portion of the Safe and Drug-
Free Schools program, which is the largest prevention program
we have. And we know that there have been problems with
accountability and performance measurement, but ONDCP has never
proposed any reforms or even alternative programs. Why not fire
the incumbent bureaucrats and reform the program rather than
kill the program? Why throw the baby out with the bath water?
ONDCP did propose and implement serious and effective
reforms to the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign over the
last few years. The recent reductions in student drug abuse
vindicate those reforms. Yet every year, this administration
has reduced its request for the campaign. This year, the
administration is finally asking for $20 million more than
Congress appropriated, but that only gets us back to where the
campaign was 2 years ago. To be a truly effective national
medica campaign, it must be national in scope. That requires
more than just administrative reform; it requires adequate
funding. Where are the dollars for that in this budget?
Other prevention programs--including the Drug-Free
Communities program--are also flat-lined or cut in this budget.
How can the administration claim prevention is one-third of its
drug control strategy when prevention programs constitute
merely one-tenth of its drug control budget? While the raw
dollar amount is not the sole measure of commitment, when it
gets that low, shouldn't we worry?
Perhaps the most alarming problem is in the area of transit
zone interdiction assets. This is especially true of Maritime
Patrol Aircraft [MPA]. Among these, the most important are the
P-3 airplanes, which have high operational capabilities and a
broad array of sensors used in detecting and tracking drug
smugglers. These aircraft are old and need repair. The Defense
Department has already pulled its P-3s from drug interdiction
use, leaving only the Customs and Border Protection P-3s in the
``transit zone.'' Those Customs and Border Protection airplanes
won't be able to carry out this mission indefinitely without
either an overhaul or a replacement aircraft.
So why, then, does the administration propose to terminate
the service life extension program, mandated by Congress for
the P-3s, and spend all of the CBP Air's procurement funds on
the small helicopters for the Border Patrol? These helicopters
may be fine for nabbing illegal immigrants, but how can they
replace the P-3s over the open water in the Caribbean and the
eastern Pacific?
In fact, the only MPA improvements we see in the proposed
budget are for the Coast Guard's C-130's, which even the Coast
Guard says cannot do the same job as the P-3s. In short, where
is the plan to repair or replace the P-3s? Within a few years,
won't we be blind at sea when trying to find the drug
traffickers?
I have worked on the drug issue long enough to have
witnessed what happens with drug abuse when the commitment to
prevent it flags. This is the kind of effort that requires
staying relentlessly on the offensive. This means no relaxing
of our efforts when certain trends are positive and no
passivity in the face of pressure to divert funds and assets to
other priorities or agencies. In short, while we have seen some
progress in recent years, we cannot help but be concerned that
the progress we see may have plateaued on top of a
disintegrating anti-drug infrastructure. Atrophy seems to be
setting in, and when drug use begins to spike again, will the
Federal Government be able to punch back? Based on funding and
leadership decisions being made today, how can we not be
concerned?
These are serious questions that Congress needs to ask as
it starts to work on the annual appropriations bills. I would
like to thank ONDCP Director John Walters for joining us once
again today to help answer these questions. I am looking
forward to your testimony and to an extended discussion of drug
control issues today.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.001
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.002
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.003
Mr. Souder. I would also like here in my opening statement
to pay special tribute to Nick Coleman. Today is the last day
that Nick will be on our staff. He has been counsel to the
subcommittee. Monday morning he starts work as Assistant U.S.
Attorney for the District of Columbia. Nick started working for
the subcommittee in the summer of 2001, about a year and a half
before Director Walters was confirmed as head of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy. In his tenure for
the subcommittee, he was responsible for a path-breaking
report, ``Federal Law Enforcement at the Borders and Ports of
Entry: Challenges and Solutions,'' the first type of report
like this that was ever done in Government Reform, and
certainly out of our subcommittee. It is still used as an
oversight checklist for making improvements on border security.
His legislative accomplishments include the reauthorization
legislation for ONDCP in this Congress, which is finally
starting to move, and the prior Congress, as well as the Combat
Methamphetamine Epidemic Act, which we expect will become law
next month as Congress comes back. It looks like it is going to
move through the Senate this week as part of the PATRIOT Act
reauthorization. Nick's advice and imaginative solutions to
difficult problems have been a great help to me and my
colleagues, and we are grateful for his nearly 5 years of
service, and we all wish him well as he continues in a position
of trust and public service.
Thank you very much.
Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. I want to
start off by thanking Nick Coleman for his service. We who sit
in the Congress so often are the ones who get our names written
in the Washington Post and we are the ones on Fox and CNN. But
it is people like Nick that make us look good. But, more
importantly, it is people like Nick who provide us with the
kind of information and thoughts and ideas to do the things
that we do. And so it is interesting to note, Mr. Chairman,
that he now moves on to another high calling, being as an
attorney, I think one of the finest things and most important
things an attorney can do is serve as an Assistant U.S.
Attorney. A very important job, only the best of the best
qualify, so I congratulate you and I thank you.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding today's hearing to
examine the President's proposed drug budget for fiscal year
2007 and the 2006 National Drug Control Strategy. This hearing
provides an important opportunity to hear from the Director of
the National Drug Control Policy and the President's principal
advisor on drug policy matters concerning the rationale behind
the President's budgetary decisions in this very critical area.
As we speak, drug abuse remains the Nation's No. 1 health
problem, and the destructive impact of drug use, addiction, and
a violent illegal drug economy continues to be felt in
neighborhoods and schools throughout our Nation.
Again, we face the prospect of more than 20,000 American
lives being taken by illegal drugs. Over the past year, the
explosive growth of methamphetamine has captured national
attention as the destructive impact of this devastating drug
takes its toll on abusers, families of abusers, the social
fabric of communities where it is used and manufactured, the
land and property destroyed by clandestine meth labs, and the
law enforcement and social service agencies forced to grapple
with these consequences.
Meanwhile, in cities like my own of Baltimore, more
traditional killers like heroin and crack cocaine continue to
stifle potential, steal lives, and erode the quality of life
for entire communities.
The President's 2006 strategy hails significant declines in
overall drug use by youth, as reported by the University of
Michigan's Monitoring the Future survey. This is very
encouraging news for which the administration is entitled to
accept some credit. But we need to consider this sliver of
progress in context.
First of all, what the overall decrease reflects is a
reduction in the use of marijuana, the most widely used drug of
abuse among youth and adults. Use of other more harmful drugs
by both youth and adults has remained constant and in some
cases has increased. Looking at the bigger picture, the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's
National Survey on Drug Use and Health indicates that in the
year 2004, an estimated 19.1 million Americans age 12 or older
were current illicit drug users, meaning they had used an
illicit drug during the month prior to the survey interview.
This estimate represents 7.9 percent of the population age 12
years old or older. The overall rate of current illicit drug
use among persons age 12 or older in 2004 was similar to the
rate in 2003 and 2002.
Among young adults between the ages of 18 and 25, there
were no changes in past month use of any drugs between 2003 and
2004, although there were slight declines between 2002 and 2004
for marijuana and hallucinogenics.
For adults age 26 and older, rates of lifetime, past year,
and past month illicit drug use for adults age 26 or older were
unchanged between 2003 and 2004. Clearly, more progress needs
to be made, and our National Drug Control Strategy should focus
squarely on making that progress.
We continue to be faced with a shameful gap between the
number of people needing and seeking treatment and the number
of people receiving treatment. SAMHSA tells us that in 2003 the
estimated number of persons age 12 or older needing treatment
for an alcohol or illicit drug problem was 22.2 million, 9.3
percent of our total population. An estimated 1.9 million of
these people, 8.8 percent of the total population and 8.5
percent of the people who needed treatment, received treatment
at a specialty facility. Thus, there were 20.3 million persons
who needed but did not receive treatment at a specialty
substance abuse facility in 2003.
As we approach the important task of ensuring that there is
adequate Federal support for programs to reduce illegal drug
use and the myriad social and economic problems that stem from
it, I think it is safe to say that we again have our work cut
out for us. Unfortunately, Mr. Chairman, the budget we are
considering today does not make the task any easier.
The President last week presented to Congress a budget that
continues a disappointing and accelerating trend toward
decreased emphasis on domestic demand reduction and law
enforcement efforts as compared to supply reduction efforts and
beyond our borders. This is not what we were led to expect from
this administration. It is what the drug czar assured us would
not happen on his watch when as a nominee he responded to the
concerns about this commitment to demand reduction.
In 2002, President Bush issued his administration's first
National Drug Control Strategy, citing it as a blueprint for a
``balanced'' approach to drug control. The three pillars of
stopping drug use before it starts, healing America's drug
users, and disrupting the market for illegal drugs were cast as
co-equal elements of a comprehensive strategy that emphasized
accountability and proven performance. The 2006 strategy
repeats this mantra.
But looking back over the past several years, and
especially since the President's re-election in 2004, the
administration's use of the language ``a balance'' has taken on
more the hollow ring of lip service than the tenor of
conviction.
In fiscal year 2001, the Federal Government spent 47
percent and 53 percent for demand reduction and supply
reduction, respectively. The President's request for fiscal
year 2006 proposed just 39 percent for demand reduction and 61
percent for supply reduction. In the coming fiscal year, the
President proposes to devote merely 35.5 percent to demand
reduction and 64.5 percent to supply reduction.
If the President's budget is enacted, approximately 11
percent of the fiscal year 2007 drug budget will support
prevention programs--a 2-percent decline from the fiscal year
2006 enacted level.
To make matters worse, it is not at all clear that the
President's budget decisions have been driven by evidence of
program effectiveness. Instead, it appears this administration
simply has a pronounced and increasing bias in favor of
fighting the drug war primarily through supply reduction
efforts, and even highly effective domestic enforcement
programs like the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas program
are targeted for decreases, if not extinction.
The unfortunate reality is that the President's budget
request will again force Congress to make some very difficult
choices. Last year, Congress largely rejected the President's
proposed decimation of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools State
grants and Byrne Justice Assistance grants and COPS Meth Hot
Spots as well as the vexing decision to cut HIDTA by more than
half and move it to the Justice Department where it would face
an uncertain future. But restoring funding for those programs
meant cutting other programs, including the drug court program,
which is one that I strongly support.
The administration's less than vigorous advocacy for
ONDCP's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign meant that
program, too, lost funding, despite its supposedly strategic
location in the Office of the Drug Czar.
Mr. Chairman, I think it is absolutely vital that we
fortify and not diminish our commitment to expanding our
children's exposure to effective drug prevention and education
in school, in the community, and in the media. It is equally
vital that we support initiatives to close the persistent
treatment gaps that I described just a moment ago. We know from
numerous studies that treatment is effective in reducing not
just drug consumption but also associated joblessness, property
crime violence, illness, and risky health behaviors--precisely
the things that cause individual lives to crumble and the
fabric of entire communities to unravel.
Regrettably, I have to say that I believe the President's
efforts to date have focused more on expanding the range of
providers who can provide treatment than on ensuring that
treatment is available for all who need and seek it. The
administration stresses the importance of consumer choice with
its voucher initiative, but without access, there can be no
choice other than to feed an untreated addiction.
It is apparent now that we have failed to provide
sufficient support for programs that will bring the benefits of
treatment to individuals and communities in need. When we
consider that SAMHSA data shows no change between 2002 and 2004
in the number of persons classified as drug-dependent or in the
percentage of the population receiving substance abuse
treatment, I think we have to conclude that we need to do
better. I regret to say that it is far from clear to me that
the President's budget proposal puts us on a better course.
That said, today's hearing, Mr. Chairman, gives us an
important opportunity to hear directly from the President's
principal advisor for drug policy matters. It is important that
we understand both the rationale and the ramifications of the
President's budgetary decisions before determining whether to
enact the President's drug control budget. The 2006 strategy
for the first time claims that supply reduction efforts have
forced the purity of South American cocaine to drop while the
price has increased. If this is true and if the administration
is correct in hailing this is the beginning of a long-term
trend, then there may be something to be said for continuing
our international counternarcotics investment, although not at
the expense of reducing domestic demand. In any case, this is
an important claim that we should examine closely and very
carefully.
To close, Mr. Chairman, it will be up to the appropriators
in the House and Senate to make the final decision on what drug
programs are funded and at what level. But as members of the
only subcommittee in the House with plenary oversight
jurisdiction of the Federal drug control policy and agencies,
we have an important role to play in making sure that the
ramifications of the President's proposal are well understood.
I commend you for the proactive approach you have taken in
leading this subcommittee in that effort, and I pledge to
continue working with you on a bipartisan basis to help ensure
our Nation's drug control policy adequately and effectively
addresses the needs of this great Nation.
And with that, Mr. Chairman, I thank you and I yield back.
Mr. Souder. Congresswoman Foxx.
Ms. Foxx. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for
holding the hearing and for your strong dedication to reducing
drug use in our country.
We are quite concerned with drug use, especially
methamphetamine, in the 5th District in North Carolina, and I
share the concerns you expressed in your opening statement. I
look forward to learning more in this hearing and future
meetings as to how we can effectively reduce the incidence of
illegal drug use.
Thank you.
Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and let me
also express appreciation to you for holding this hearing. I
also want to commend both you and Mr. Cummings for the
tremendous leadership that you both provide in this direction.
Also, I was pleased to look at the priorities for the
coming year relative to stopping drug use before it starts
through education and community action, healing America's drug
users by getting treatment resources where they are needed, and
disrupting the market for illegal drugs by attacking the
economic bases of the drug trade.
I am particularly interested in priority No. 2 as I have
been engaged a great deal with the number of people who believe
that if we could provide treatment for individuals when they
need it, when they indicate that they are ready for it, when
they are desirous of having it, that this is the most desirous
and most effective form of treatment that there is. So I look
forward as we continue to push for what I call treatment on
demand, which really means that resources must be made
available so that individuals don't have to go through long
periods of waiting, so that there is not the unavailability of
programs and beds.
I also want to commend you, Director, for the proactive
stance that you have taken. I know that I have come into
contact with you in many places throughout the country, and you
are indeed carrying the message, and I look forward to this
hearing and a very productive year of fighting the spread of
drugs in our country and throughout the world.
Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Mr. Mica, do you have any opening statement?
Mr. Mica. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for
holding this hearing to review some of the proposals from the
administration and the Director of the Office of Drug Control
Policy.
I have reviewed a number of the proposed changes, and some
of them sort of a continuation of trying to eliminate some of
the bureaucracy, the duplication, the administrative costs and
overhead in some of these programs, which I think is a very
worthwhile endeavor by the Director. Sometimes these are not
popular, and when you have done things for years in sort of a
rote manner, everyone gets accustomed to them and a lot of
feathers get ruffled and people have questions.
I do have some questions about some of the proposed
changes. I think this will be a good opportunity to air them. I
think the Director has done an outstanding job in finding new
approaches, and many of them, as you could see just from the
statistics, have been successful, and he is to be commended in
that regard.
I continue to be concerned about our ability to change
programs to deal with changing times and the changing new
challenges that substance abuse unfortunately we find change
from designer drugs--heroin, crack, meth--to whatever the next
challenge is, and we have to stay ahead of that.
So I look forward to his testimony and his comments on the
specifics he proposes.
I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Souder. Mr McHenry.
Mr. McHenry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding these
hearings. I certainly appreciate it. And I appreciate the drug
czar being here.
You know, I think the key from my district is early warning
and detection of rising trends. That will help in combating the
widespread use of drugs among certain populations and in
certain regions and identify the new trends among drugs.
The meth epidemic has been one of the largest issues that I
am dealing with in my district in western North Carolina, and
the spread of meth from the West all the way to western North
Carolina is a very large cause for concern both in terms of the
health risks to society at large and to law enforcement agents
that are trying to bust these meth labs, to the cost to
communities, to the overall impact on the lives of those
addicts. And so, you know, I think there are a number of pilot
programs that you spoke about last year. I would like to hear
the ongoing status of that, and I look forward to your comments
on that, because we have an opportunity here to clamp down on
this meth epidemic early. And we made huge blunders in the
past, going to past decades, on new drugs that were created,
and the Federal Government did not react fast enough, did not
enable law enforcement to root out the growing epidemic; and
instead of catching it at the beginning, we are now paying a
price, an ongoing price, as a Government and as a people.
And so I certainly appreciate you being here. I look
forward to your comments, and I appreciate your leadership and
hard work to protect our families, our children, and our
country.
Thank you.
Mr. Souder. Thank you.
I ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative
days to submit written statements and questions for the hearing
record and that any answers to written questions provided by
the witness also be included in the record. Without objection,
it is so ordered.
I also ask unanimous consent that all exhibits, documents,
and other materials referred to by Members and the witnesses
may be included in the hearing record and that all Members be
permitted to revise and extend their remarks. Without
objection, it is so ordered.
Our first and only panel today is composed of the Honorable
John Walters, Director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy.
Director Walters, would you please stand for the oath?
[Witness sworn.]
Mr. Souder. Once again, thank you for coming today. I
appreciate our ongoing dialog, this being the most formal part
of the ongoing dialog, and I look forward to hearing your
testimony.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN P. WALTERS, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF NATIONAL
DRUG CONTROL POLICY, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT
Mr. Walters. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Cummings, Mr. Davis, Ms. Foxx, Mr. Mica, and Mr. McHenry. I
appreciate your comments.
If there isn't any objection, I will ask that my prepared
statement be put in the record, I will offer a brief summary,
and then I will be happy to take your questions and touch on
some of the subjects that you raised in opening comments.
I am obviously pleased to be before you today in support of
the fiscal year 2007 national drug control budget and the 2006
strategy. I appreciate this committee's longstanding support
for the President's National Drug Control Strategy, and I am
pleased to report to you today that through our work together,
we have seen a 19-percent reduction in teenage drug use since
the year 2000. As you know, the way drug use, the way substance
abuse of all types start in this country is with our kids. If
we maintain reductions in that area, the path toward addiction
will be less, and we are trying in this strategy to address
both prevention and treatment, as I will touch on.
With Congress' support, the President's fiscal year 2007
drug budget and its key programs, such as the National Youth
Anti-Drug Media Campaign and the Andean Counterdrug Initiative,
the President's 5-year goal of reducing youth drug use 25
percent we believe can be accomplished. Again, my written
testimony discusses many of these programs in detail. Let me
just offer an overview of the budget and just several points.
The President's fiscal year 2007 budget provides
significant resources for overall reductions in use. In total,
the drug budget for the 2007 fiscal year is $12.7 billion, an
increase of $109.1 million, or 1 percent, over fiscal year 2006
enacted. That is the enacted level of $12.5 billion.
In a time when we are trying to control domestic spending
to maintain economic growth, where most of the programs are
lodged is in domestic discretionary spending, as you know, in
this budget we have increased our level and maintained
effective programs, we believe, in the proposals that we have
made.
The budget highlights I would concentrate on are programs
that we know work in the budgets of the Departments of Health
and Human Services, Education, Justice, and ONDCP.
The Department of Health and Human Services proposes $98.2
million for the Access to Recovery program, to level-fund that
program but to extend its capability to help reform the
treatment system to reach more people. I agree with Ranking
Member Cummings. The problem we have is we need to reach more
people, and part of that is not just when they want to come,
but because we know that substance abuse involves a disease
that includes denial, we need to help to reach them, and we
have tried to have a number of efforts to do that as well.
This budget will also continue research on methamphetamine
addiction by proposing $41.6 million in the National Institute
on Drug Abuse to develop ways to better treat methamphetamine
addiction.
We will be giving youth another way to say no to drugs as
well. The Department of Education proposes $15 million for
student drug testing, a $4.6 million increase over the fiscal
year 2006 level. As this committee knows, this is a measure
which cannot be used to punish, must be used to help get those
who are found beginning their drug use to stop and to get those
who have serious problems with substance abuse the treatment
they need in a confidential manner. It allows us to use the
public health measures that have changed the face of childhood
disease in many other dimensions and bring them to this
disease.
According to a study done by the National Institute of
Justice, within 1 year of drug court graduation, only 16.4
percent of drug court graduates have been rearrested or charged
with a felony offense. We are proposing to increase that
program. We are disappointed that Congress has not met the
request for the last several years. We believe it is the right
thing to do. Many jurisdictions do. Drug courts are growing
dramatically. They need to grow more. The need is greater than
the capacity here. It is an important adjunct to what we are
doing on treatment and law enforcement.
At ONDCP, the budget, as was pointed out, proposes $120
million for the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. It increases
$21 million over the fiscal year 2006 funding level. Chairman
Souder and this committee have been very supportive of the
campaign, and I look forward to working with you that this year
we make sure the campaign gets the money requested.
Funding for supply reduction in the Departments of Homeland
Security, Justice, State, Treasury, and Defense will support
operations targeted on the economic basis of the drug trade,
domestic and international sources of illegal drugs, and
trafficking groups to and within the United States. The drug
control budget remains committed to our allies in the Western
Hemisphere. The State Department proposes $721.5 million for
the Andean Counterdrug Initiative. The State Department also
proposes $297.4 million for providing Afghan counterdrug
support. This is an increase of $151.7 million to assist
Afghanistan by supporting drug enforcement and interdiction
programs, public diplomacy, drug demand reduction, and drug
control capacity building in their judicial sector.
Drug traffickers are finding new ways to bring products to
our country, and we must also try to stop those. The Department
of Homeland Security has announced the Secure Border
Initiative. A part of that proposal, $152.4 million for Custom
and Border Protection, will be a part of our drug control
effort.
We have also made one change referred to in your opening
remarks in the budget. We proposed the movement of the High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program this year again to the
Department of Justice. We have maintained funding at the base
level of the program. The program remains as is, and recently
the Attorney General and myself sent a letter to the chairman
stating our intention to maintain the structure of the program
as it currently exists. But, again, we believe it can be more
effectively integrated into our overall law enforcement efforts
by being in a law enforcement agency and better integrate, not
denigrate, the cooperation between State and local law
enforcement.
In conclusion, I would like to take an opportunity to do
something we do not do enough in Government, and that is to
thank the people who are our partners, who actually are the
ones who do the work in this area. There are a few of them here
today. I would like to recognize one who is not here, Judge
Karen Freeman-Wilson, who is chief executive officer of the
National Association of Drug Court Professionals. She had
intended to be here but has been hospitalized, and I am sure
that all of our thoughts and prayers go for her quick recovery.
But she has been a dynamic leader in helping to train and
expand the reach of drug courts.
I would also like to recognize who is here: Carrie Garnett,
executive director of the Drug-Free Community Coalition, One
Voice for Volusia County. Carrie's coalition is also featured
in this year's Drug Control Strategy; also, Dr. Jennifer Smith,
Program Director for the Illinois Screening Brief Inventory and
Referral to Treatment program; Christina Steffner, principal of
Hackettown High School and a recipient of the student drug-
testing grant; Charles Garland, Acting U.S. Interdiction
Coordinator; and Roy Bostock of the Partnership for Drug-Free
America. He wasn't able to make it today, but Kristi Rowe of
PDFA is here with us, of course, our private sector partner in
the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign.
These are a small number of the people and the people that
they lead and work with who help fewer kids use drugs, help
take those who are involved and get them back into a healthier
life, and to take those who have suffered or those who wish to
victimize others and stop them. I don't do that. Most of us in
Washington don't do that. The best we can do is to be good
partners in helping them do their job better, and I wanted to
recognize them because they are the face behind the budget,
behind the policy, behind the forces that are making this
country safer and our children safer. On behalf of the many
people they represent, I thought it would be important, and I
am sure you join me in thanking them and recognizing that they
are the backbone of where we are going to go from here. But we
could not ask for better partners.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be happy to take questions.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Walters follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.004
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.005
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.006
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.007
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.008
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.009
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.010
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.011
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.012
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.013
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.014
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.015
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.016
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.017
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.018
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.019
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.020
Mr. Souder. Thank you, and we certainly do agree with
honoring and respecting both the individuals here and them as
representatives of the whole groups of people in similar
communities and organizations, because it is at the front lines
where the battle is occurring, just like in the war on
terrorism and everything else. It is a battle, block by block,
street by street, person by person. It is not some kind of
hypothetical. We may provide some air cover, but it has to be
won heart by heart, and thank you all for your efforts.
What I think I would like to do that is a little different
is clearly, depending on the questioning today, I want to do
some extended detailed questioning on HIDTA, but we have been
arguing about the HIDTA change and, quite frankly, my
understanding is it is still absolutely 100 percent unanimous
that every HIDTA director opposes this. At a press conference
the other day, I think six or seven U.S. Senators said it will
not happen, including Senators Hatch and DeWine and Biden. In
the House, the key players on both sides have said it is not
going to happen. I would like to probe it further, but I
basically view that as a dead deal and an unnecessary war that
has been brought on by the administration. Instead of helping,
it is getting the anti-drug community counter being able to
work together.
But I have a couple of particular questions. I would like
to group these. I raise some in the broader sense, but I would
like to hear your response at the beginning here, and then we
can move through. And if you want to just take like a note
reminder of each one--honestly this is not a suck-up point. You
have a brilliant memory, and you can do fine in here. But I am
going to come at a couple of them that one or two may be a
little bit of a curve.
Mr. Walters. Short-term memory, you know what that is a
sign of, but go ahead.
Mr. Souder. In prevention, which is one of your pillars,
this is the 5th straight year you have certified funding as a
decline, and it is the only area in the entire drug budget that
has been a decline. If you could address that question.
The second one relates to--you mentioned Mr. Garland, the
acting USIC coordinator. How much of ONDCP's budget request
would go toward the USIC position? And what does it pay for?
That is a more technical question.
A third more technical question is: We were very disturbed,
as we are trying to move the ONDCP reauthorization bill, that
based on contacts, it is our understanding that you had
supported the Dawson Family Community Protection Act that Mr.
Cummings introduced and I have sponsored with him and that all
indications are you had expressed support, yet your staff told
another congressional committee that you oppose that provision
or have concerns about it, and I wonder if you still support
that provision and would withdraw that opposition to
specifically the Judiciary Committee.
And then, fourth--and I am just baffled about where that
came from, that the fourth thing is that in the Homeland
Security, we were blindsided with this huge category change.
Chairman Lungren, myself, Republicans and Democrats are
furious, as is the leadership, because this--doesn't this
affect the Coast Guard--that is what we first thought--but
taking the narcotics outside of the Homeland Security mission,
which is in direct contradiction to the law creating Homeland
Security. It was an organic definition that narcotics were a
part of Homeland Security. It separates out the part of the
budget and in the out-years the budget for Homeland Security
goes up and for non-Homeland Security things in the Coast Guard
and elsewhere goes down.
Did you certify that? Who proposed this change? Did your
staff review this? Have you looked at the Coast Guard
interdiction budget? How does this work in the different
agencies? Because you are supposed to be our protector. It
shouldn't be caught in doing some staff oversight, and I would
like to know what you know about the track history and also
your office's response to that.
So I think that was four good start questions.
Mr. Walters. I will take them in order. Let me start with
the general premise. Maybe we have a different view of what I
am supposed to do. You are the authorizers. I actually have to
try to carry that out. I do not view my job as being a defender
of dollars. I am defending results, and I try to apply dollars
against where I think we can get results. And obviously we all
want to use dollars effectively. In some of these areas, we do
not have a good and effective vehicle, and so then it is my job
to make the tough decision about where we can provide dollars.
I also have to make judgments, as well as other parts of the
executive branch, about what dollars we actually think we can
get. In a tight budget environment, we are trying to propose
things that we think are reasonable and we have a reasonable
likelihood of being able to secure. We have not always been
successful in critical areas, as you know as well as I. And so
we are trying to also be prudent in where we act within some
level of judgment.
On overall prevention, again, if all you want to look at is
the investigation we are making work, I will point out that not
in a decade has teenage drug use gone down as much as it has in
the last 4 years. The only thing that matters in my judgment
is: Is the drug problem getting smaller in the United States?
Twice the budget that has things going level or up is a waste,
no matter how well intentioned it is. And if we can do it more
efficiently, I will do it more efficiently.
Now, I am aware we cannot make bricks without straw, but,
again, I would point out that I think anybody who has worked at
this for a long period of time--Mr. Cummings referred to the
initial signs we are seeing of the availability of heroin and
cocaine in the United States, the first time in many, many
years, constricting. We talked about teenage drug use. We
obviously need to work on the area of treatment of addicts and
levels of adult drug use.
But I think if you look across the board and look at the
forest, it has been a long time since as many indicators on
supply and demand have been going in the right direction. I
fully agree with the statements that several of you made. Our
problem is follow-through. We need to be able to follow
through. But if we are going to be able to follow through in
this environment, where we are not going to have unlimited
discretionary spending, we must make hard choices.
Now, we will disagree on some of those. I regret that
sometimes the disagreement with us and people on the outside
seems to suggest motive and character flaws. I believe that is
not helpful to anybody. But I will say that the hard part of
this is to say what is working and make an argument for it even
when you know people do not want to hear it because you need to
try to see if that argument can begin to have traction. We do
not win all arguments, but I think my job is not to be popular.
My job is to try to help make the drug problem smaller. That is
what I understand it to be. I have no intention of running for
office. I have no intention of being a celebrity after this. I
want to go back to my private life. But while I am here, I am
willing to make every tough decision and be responsible for it.
And I do not expect to win every one of those arguments, but I
will not be scared away from making them. I think the last
couple years have shown that, if I needed to.
On the prevention side, we disagree about the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools program. I have worked with you for a while
on this. I was at the Department of Education during the Reagan
administration when the precursor of this program first came
into being. I actually walked the regs through for the first
awards of this.
The program has become a very large block grant program
that does many things, some good things some places, some, as
you have pointed out, wasteful and unaccountable things in
others. We have tried to work with other committees of
jurisdiction here. We have tried to work with appropriators.
There is not a consensus to change the ``flexibility,'' which
also creates problems, we think, of management. In a tight
budget environment, I do not believe it makes the necessary
contribution to justify the funding request.
I recognize Congress disagreed with us last year. I
recognize it may disagree with us this year. Its arguments did
not convince me that the program is not in an accountable form,
or the administration. We, therefore, called it as we saw it.
We are trying to get this year the money for a program that
we do think works and I know you think works, which is the
Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Unfortunately, the cuts that
Congress made to our request last year and the year before and
the year before that and the year before that have this program
at a level now where we cannot do 12-month-a-year programming
for parents. We have to cut out the ads for specific targeted
minority groups and special populations because we do not have
the resources to create and to target that. We are still trying
to maintain weight on young people because it is working, and
the evaluation and the consequences of the surveys we see show
that those messages are working and driving down drug use.
We for this year, for the first time, asked for more than
Congress gave us because we think the cuts are extremely unwise
and detrimental. I know you have helped try to work on this,
and the rest of your colleagues up here said no. I ask you to
make another run with us at the battle because we need this
money.
On the USIC position, I don't know exactly how many dollars
Mr. Garland gets paid or his permanent successor will get paid.
But part of what we have been able to do in----
Mr. Souder. In ONDCP dollars.
Mr. Walters. In ONDCP dollars? We have in the past--I will
have to get you the precise number. We have provided some money
for some so-called blue force analysts, I believe, that are a
part of that office.
Mr. Souder. It is funded through ONDCP?
Mr. Walters. No, I don't--well, again, I want to be clear,
and let me provide a written statement for the record so I do
not have any confusion about this. But as you know, there was
an employee in my office that was double-hatted in the earlier
version of this as the USIC coordinator. We, I believe,
continue to pay his salary, but that was a unique situation of
that individual. But we will give you where the salary comes
from and where has come from in detail.
But this is very critical, we believe, to allowing us to
continue the effort to make intelligence and interdiction work.
And I don't think it is a trivial matter because what you see
in the drug strategy is historic seizures that are helping to
change the availability of drugs on the street. Why does that
make a difference? Because when there are less drugs, more
people who have addiction will seek treatment, seek
detoxification. It will be expensive. There is a barrier to
price here as well for people coming into the market. For
heroin and, more importantly, for cocaine that still is
ravaging parts of our country, as I don't need to tell the
members of this committee, this is a change that we can really
hopefully be able to drive with the unique opportunities we
have both in Latin America and in interdiction technology.
So USIC is an important part of what we do and has
provided, with the other agencies--Homeland Security, Defense,
and Justice--unique power to this. Before, it was we don't
really make much difference, we kind of have a cost of doing
business. Today we break the ability of the business
potentially with the follow-through we hope to be able to
continue in this program.
I will go back and double-check. It is hard for me to
respond when somebody says they heard somebody else say I said
this. I will be happy to go back and check and see if somebody
has, without my knowing it, changed the support for the Dawson
Family Protection Act.
Mr. Souder. Actually, there was a memo of four objections
to our ONDCP reauthorization from your office, and it listed
this as one of them.
Mr. Walters. OK. I wasn't aware of this in advance. I will
go back and check, and we will make sure we get this
straightened out.
In terms of the Department of Homeland Security, I will
confess I am not able to tell you whether we have read the law.
You have been more involved in writing the law than I have, but
I also am aware that sometimes Congress and the executive
branch have a different view of how the law is read through,
you know, no knavishness but through some different idea or
principle. So I cannot comment on that.
What I can comment on is this budget maintains support for
DHS agencies to make critical contributions, domestic
interdiction and foreign. It will sustain and extend the
progress we have made, in my judgment. It will--and the budgets
that are there, no matter what you classify this part of
Homeland Security, those budgets are important and critical,
but I believe they will sustain the effort that we need to
have----
Mr. Souder. The bottom line is you don't care where it is
classified.
Mr. Walters. Well, I care whether we follow the law always,
but----
Mr. Souder. Yes, that is----
Mr. Walters. But I care most of all----
Mr. Souder. You don't see it as significant that they would
pull it out from Homeland Security.
Mr. Walters. I understand that there are expectations of
increase in budgets that are categorized Homeland Security. It
does not prevent us from having increases in budgets that are
not categorized Homeland Security. I recognize there is an
implicit view that these will be secondary priorities.
But I would say in the budgets that I looked at and worked
on and worked with OMB and Homeland Security on, we made sure
the money for necessary functions is there. And, in addition, I
have met with the CBP Acting Director and the new head of the
Air Wing, and they made commitments to me to maintain at last
year's level or above. Long-range maritime patrol aircraft is
one of the critical items that I know you are concerned about.
Mr. Souder. Before yielding to Mr. Cummings, I just want to
make a couple of brief comments.
First off, you can't have it both ways. You can't, on the
one hand, say what we're doing currently has lowered drug
abuse, and then say that what we are doing currently didn't
lower drug abuse. In other words, Safe and Drug-Free Schools
has continued to be funded in spite of the administration
trying to wipe it out. The Byrne grants continue to be funded
in spite of the administration trying to wipe them out. The
HIDTA program didn't change in spite of the administration's
efforts to move it, and the Meth Hot Spots program was not
wiped out in spite of the administration's efforts to do it.
Some of the credit, at least some of the credit here--may be
because your budget was rejected, not your budget accepted. We
have a difference of opinion on that, but it is not kind of
automatic evidence that your strategy worked, because we did
not follow the strategy.
The one thing that I will agree on is the National Ad
Campaign did contribute to moving the numbers in the high
schools. But so may have Safe and Drug-Free Schools and
everything. The things work in combination. You just measured
the Ad Campaign as one of the ways to test attitudes, but
attitudes are not the only thing that impacts getting caught.
Some law enforcement increase, knowing that they are there,
improved treatment programs, what other things came into the
community, changed cultural values. You full well know from
your extensive writings and experience the Ad Campaign is
merely one thing.
Now, to the Ad Campaign, there is not going to be an
increase of funds until you show some flexibility to work with
methamphetamine attack. The Congress would have plussed it up.
We can't do it without some cooperation here. You have heard in
opening statements, you have heard repeatedly from Congress,
they want to see a clear methamphetamine strategy, and that
includes in the National Ad Campaign. And your dollars are not
going to go up until you start to reflect a little bit--yes,
you are not running for office. I understand you are not
running for office. But you know what? We are listening to the
grass roots and what they are hearing, and you are not
listening to your own grass roots and your own agency in
addition to people who basically had this come up from the
grass roots to us, who are saying, ``We have a problem in our
communities. We want you to address it, and we want to see that
you understand it, partly in the National Ad Campaign.''
Marijuana is the gateway drug. You know that we have worked
together in trying to battle marijuana, but we cannot sustain
the National Ad Campaign without some help and some changes
here, and it is not because I certainly don't work for George
Soros, these other Members here don't work for George Soros.
Yes, he does not like the marijuana campaign. I am willing to
fight him. But we are not--I am just telling you flat out. We
are not going to make it unless there are some adjustments in
that.
I am also just disappointed, quite frankly, that the
creation of your office was to be an advocate to make sure that
we had a stability of understanding the battle in the war on
drugs, and that includes when the Department of Homeland
Security was created, they sucked in more people that were
critical in that battle--the Border Patrol, the Customs, the
Coast Guard. And unless we are ever vigilant all the time, they
are going to be diverted, just like the FBI does from time to
time, into whatever the current crisis is. And as I pointed out
in my opening statement, if we lose P-3s and get little
helicopters and all of a sudden they are doing immigration
stuff, we will pick up some drugs with it, but we are not going
to get the 100-ton loads, we are going to get the backpack
loads. And we are going to get it kind of as an accident of
other things we are doing on the border. And you have to become
more engaged even though it is hard. At the Cabinet table, you
are not Chertoff and you are not Gonzales, and we all
understand that. But we created a separate Cabinet position to
kind of be the lone complainer at the table: Remember
narcotics? Remember narcotics? You change this thing, and it
could hurt narcotics. That is a big part of your job, is a
bully pulpit, not only outside but inside the administration.
And that is some of the frustration on something like the
Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Walters. Let me just respond to two points you raised.
On the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and methamphetamine,
while overall teenage drug use is down 19 percent, teenage
methamphetamine use is down 36 percent.
Mr. Souder. Do you know what we understand? That the
methamphetamine problem has never been and is not a youth
thing. That is not an answer.
Mr. Walters. Well, then, my only question back to you is,
since you write the authorization for these things, why write
an authorization that has the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign
that makes it limited in what I can do? I have made ads. We
have cooperated and we have released those ads last November,
and we are trying to provide those in more areas.
Second, on the issue of interdiction, yes, believe me, I
understand the need to be vigilant. I understand the tendency
for a number of things to put--not willful ignorance of this,
but just the fact that there are so many pressures on this--my
office exists because we could not create a Department of Drug
Control when this was considered in the late 1980's. There were
too many far-flung agencies to pull those units out of the
Department of Defense or HHS or Education and put them all into
one department.
And so my office operates as a kind of overall management
structure like an OMB and a policy organization office for drug
control to make sure that the individual Cabinet offices and
agencies make the parts fit together, even when those parts in
their own view of their own department are not as high a
priority as they are for the overall anti-drug effort.
What I am taking issue with is we have not failed on that.
Every year the number of seizures have hit a new historic
level, a significantly higher new historic level, because we
have the system working, because people like Mr. Garland,
because people like the Coast Guard Commandant, because people
in the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice are
making this work, under difficult conditions, as you know. You
have visited some of these sites. And it is not true, in my
judgment--I recognize you may have a different one--that we
have a threat of those assets falling away. I know there has
been a dispute about this, but I also think we need to sit down
and go through that dispute carefully.
Put up the slide about long-range Maritime Patrol Aircraft,
because that has been an issue that I have spent a lot of time
talking to Members and others about as a result of the GAO
report. That report, I believe, is somewhat confusing. I won't
say what the cause of that is.
These are the levels of Maritime Patrol Aircraft. It is
true that the mix of particular kinds of aircraft--C-130's, P-
3s, United Kingdom Nimrods--has changed. The reason it has
changed is because, as you know, with the P-3 we developed an
unexpected, in the Navy P-3s, mechanical problem in the super-
structure of the aircraft, which has limited their life.
Through a lot of hard work, the other agencies, including our
foreign allies, have supplied additional aircraft to meet that
need. That is why we have over 250 metric tons of cocaine that
did not get to the streets in the United States last year
through these efforts.
Now, do we have to be vigilant? Are we concerned? Are we
stretched in these environments? If the threat level for
homeland security went up, would we pull P-3s from DHS back to
Air Cap over our major cities? Yes, we would, and that would be
the responsible thing to do.
But with the exigencies that we can control, we believe we
have the ability to maintain the effort within the boundaries
of both responsible budgeting and responsible drug control. And
it is not because people are not paying attention around the
Cabinet table. They are making serious efforts. I meet
regularly with my Cabinet colleagues. I meet regularly with the
Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security to make
sure issues between these agencies work. I meet regularly both
with members of key agencies of this Government, outside of
Washington and inside of Washington, and foreign governments to
make sure these work. And a lot of other people do, too. It is
not just me. You and some of your colleagues have helped to
meet with foreign leaders and work with others to make this
work.
All I would urge you is in the effort to try to make sure
that it works and to make sure that we continue with the
progress, not to become so critical of things that are working,
because that does not help those people that do the job.
Mr. Souder. With all due respect, don't make me laugh. With
all due respect, that chart, anybody who goes out in the
field--and Mr. Mica and I have dealt with this for years. What
has increasingly happened here is you on your watch and this
administration's watch, because we haven't replaced those
assets and because as we didn't get new P-3s, as the Defense
Department pulled out, we pushed the cycling up, that doesn't
count down time. It doesn't count the extra push what they are
telling us on the ground. These things are going to fall apart.
The next President is going to have a fallen-apart interdiction
effort because you haven't put in the budgets or pushed in the
budgets for a proper replacement pattern as we age out many
time Vietnam era and other type things, and we have pushed them
to the limits. They are dangerous to get up in. We would not
certify them for our regular military. Our drug guys are
stitching this stuff together to try to keep them in the air,
to try to keep these planes working. And you are telling me
that because they have stitched them together, that is a
strategy for air interdiction? And that even then they get out
there and they have to pull back because somebody thinks
something may be coming into a harbor because they are multi-
tasked. And then the Department of Homeland Security,
furthermore, in this year's budget is going to yank those out--
which I pointed out in my statement--that you are putting up in
the chart which are already deteriorating type things.
This is just really frustrating. You did give us a
suggestion that maybe we will change the name of the Anti-Drug
Youth Campaign and tie your hands a little bit if we are going
to fund this, we will just--because I just am exasperated.
Anyway, I need to yield to Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. You responded twice. I had the statement. I
need to yield to Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. Oh, I am sorry. I thought----
Mr. Mica. May I submit my questions for the record and if
the Director would respond to those.
Mr. Souder. Yes.
Mr. Mica. I am not able to stay. And I am sorry to
interrupt the love fest, but I----
Mr. Souder. We can laugh.
Mr. Mica. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Souder. Thank you.
Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much.
Director, I am glad to have you back, and I just want to
ask a few questions.
Former Representative Bill Gray in a speech not long ago
was talking about the Congressional Black Caucus, and he was
saying--he said the words, he said, ``You may not win every
battle, but you set the trend.'' And I have thought about those
words quite a bit, and particularly with some of the things
that you have said just this afternoon when you said that you
do not necessarily expect the budget priorities the way you
have laid them out necessarily to go into effect, but you are
trying to, I guess, set a--cause, I guess, the Congress to
think and maybe at some point we will drift toward where you
are. Is that a fair statement? I mean, I don't want to put
words in your mouth, but I just----
Mr. Walters. Well, I want to be clear. If I could get the
budget in the form it is requested, I would like it in the form
it is requested.
Mr. Cummings. I understand that.
Mr. Walters. But I respect the obvious prerogative of
Congress and other people that have different views about where
we might put priorities or levels of funding, sure.
Mr. Cummings. And on that level, Mr. Souder and I just the
other day had occasion to go into the Convention Center and to
be with the CADCA people. And I got to tell you that--and I
know Mr. Souder will agree with me. Those are some of the--and
I am sure you agree with me. Those are some of the most caring,
courageous, unselfish people that I have ever met. As a matter
of fact, a lot of them took their--came to Washington on their
own money because they simply wanted to make a difference.
I just want you to help explain to us what is happening
with the whole drug-free communities program. There seems to be
at least a reduction, I think, in the funding for the training
portion, which I think makes a lot of sense--I mean, it does
not make any sense to reduce it, but I am just trying to figure
out what is the thinking when we have people who want to--you
know, people--as you well know, people feel so trapped in their
neighborhoods and they are figuring this saying, look, you
know, I will volunteer, I will be the guinea pig, I will go out
there, I will put my money on the line, I will put my efforts
on the line; Government, just help me a little bit, if you
could just help me a little bit, we will try to do the rest
because we are Americans, and we believe in the all-American
way. We know Government cannot do everything.
But it just seems to me that those are the kinds of
programs--and I have heard you talk before, and the implication
was that, well, we have--they are nice little programs for us
lawmakers, it makes our constituents feel good. I am not trying
to put words in your mouth, but it is not about that. It is
about empowering people so that they can--you know, they are
not asking for the big Government funds. I mean, this is not a
lot of money. When you consider all that they do to prevent
drugs from coming into, you know, their neighborhoods and
whatever.
And so I just want to know what is the thinking on the
Drug-Free Communities, what you are doing with that, and how do
we at the same time make sure that we, first of all, encourage
folks to continue to try to take control of their neighborhoods
and make sure that their families stay off of drugs. When we
talk about--you know, there has been this whole issue of morals
and they say that the Democrats lost the election because of
morals, immoral concerns and all this kind of thing. But, you
know, I am convinced that argument goes to--and Mr. Souder and
I saw this when we dealt with the whole steroid question.
People want their children to grow up in a safe and healthy
environment. That is what a lot of this is all about, I mean,
if you really think about it.
So here we have these people who are saying, you know, I am
going to do my part. But are we doing all our part to take some
of their tax dollars and then allow them to do the little
things that they do so that--and those tax dollars, it seems to
me that it is a phenomenal leverage of our tax dollars.
I am just wondering if we--do you believe that in this
budget we are doing all that we can to help them? And if we are
not, why aren't we?
Mr. Walters. Thanks for that. I appreciate your raising
this because I think over the last year, one area of painful
conflict for me has been some of the issues around the Safe and
Drug-Free Schools program over the last year.
Let me be clear. I like this program. I support this
program. I supported an earlier version of this program, which
we created when I served in the President's father's
administration in this office that was modeled on the original
grant program by Robert Wood Johnson, the Fighting Back
program. We created the first version of this that was
subsequently made in the current form in my office.
While I have been here, the President has kept his
commitment to double funding for this program, and we have
doubled the number of community coalitions while I have been
here to over 700.
On the first part, the issue you made about the institute,
yes, these are $100,000 grants a year, as you know, renewable
for up to 5 years, and individual coalitions can then apply for
another 5 years of funding. They are a small amount of money,
and it is not about, I agree with you, whether it helps, you
know, as much as--you know, we are not averse to helping
elected officials show that they are representing their
community and bringing people back part of their tax dollar to
help them. That is not what it is about. It is about the fact
that most of the money we spend and you appropriate, of course,
goes for treatment and prevention and law enforcement that is
done at the local community level. We know that a balanced
strategy is not just something we put in the White House
report. It has to be implemented in communities. And this
allows community leaders to come together, many of which do not
naturally associate. It is not just the police, it is not just
the public health members, it is not just the educators, it is
not just the Government officials. It also requires private
citizens, and it allows them a small amount of money to
hopefully take the resources that they are contributing and we
are contributing and make them have maximum effect. That is
enormously important, and we are trying to support that.
On the issue of the institute per se, this was added, as
you may know, a couple years ago as a training feature. The
organization you mentioned said we seek this, we can fund it,
and you give us startup money, and we will get private money
and keep it going. That is not what has happened. The task has
been to continue to fund it and to fund it with another $1
million.
Now, is training a beneficial and leverageable thing? Yes.
But in this case, remember, what I am making a decision about
is $1 million is 10 community coalitions. Now, given the fact
that it is started up, there was a commitment to raise private
money. I think there is support here for this. I think that
tradeoff is something we ought to give to 10 more communities.
I recognize other people will differ. I recognize CADCA has a
different view. But, again, given what happened here, I think
that makes sense. And it is not detrimental to community
coalitions. In fact, it increases the number of actual
coalitions. We fund mentoring coalitions that also help train
other coalitions here. So we are not killing the transmission
of knowledge. We are trying to make it as effective with the
dollars we have.
Again, as you may know--and as I know other members of the
committee do; I have talked to both of you in a separate
meeting. There has been some concern about at the field's
request we moved the administration of this program from the
Department of Justice Juvenile Justice Office to HHS, the
Prevention Office of SAMHSA. In the course of that, we were
asked by SAMHSA to review the existing transferred applications
to make sure that they were abiding by the original grant for
the purposes of their taking responsibility for administration.
That was not a chairman review. It was an eligibility review.
In the course of that, of roughly 600 applicants, 62 were
found not to be in compliance and were not continued in their
funding. We have offered, as I have made to both of you,
technical assistance to allow them to come back in and compete
to be successful. We are now in the process of again writing
each applicant with the specific reasons why they failed, allow
them to come back and comment on that. If we made mistakes in
the review process, given the investment we have made and the
good work of people, we will fix those mistakes.
Nonetheless, there has been a view of some that what I
consider to be good stewardship of public money is outrageous
and unacceptable. I don't think that is true. I regret that
there have been those kinds of feelings formed by people.
Again, you have a lot of experience. We have talked about this.
A 10-percent failure rate among grass-roots startups in these
kinds of environments is an enormously low failure rate, and we
would like it to be zero. And we will work to provide technical
assistance to get all these started up. But the vigor and the
animosity that has been created I regret because I think it
creates a fight among the family, and the family works better
when we are all moving ahead.
Mr. Cummings. I just will tell you, I had a chance to meet
with a lot of those folks after we spoke, and, you know, it
just--they are the kind of people who you just want to--you
want to hold them by the hand and say, ``I am going to walk
this road with you.'' And I guess my biggest fear is that when
I think about the money that we spend for all kinds of stuff--
and I am not going to get into all of that, but we spend a lot
of money for a lot of things in this country. And when I have
people that are willing to volunteer to deal with something
like drugs--and some of them have programs that could possibly
bring them harm. I mean, just--I mean, when you start messing
with drug reduction--dependency reduction and things of that
nature, you start--you can get into some very bad situations. I
guess, for the life of me, if anything, I would be one trying
to make sure that even if CADCA wasn't able to do what they
said they were going to do in the time when donations from
charitable kind of groups, you know, going down because of
Katrina and probably a whole lot of other things, it just seems
to me that we could step up to the plate a little bit better,
that is all.
Let's talk about methamphetamines. You were just talking to
the chairman, and I think you said that there was a reduction
in methamphetamine use among young people? Is that what you
said?
Mr. Walters. Yes.
Mr. Cummings. One of the things that was so interesting,
and I think Mr. Souder will testify to this, is that when we--a
few years ago, this subcommittee, we didn't get a whole lot of
attention. People said poor Souder and Mica and Cummings, you
know, this subcommittee that deals with this negative issue,
drugs--you know. And then suddenly methamphetamines came along
and we became the most popular people in town because it was
discovered that methamphetamines are in communities. They are
not in the inner cities, they are on the farm, they are in the
Midwest, West Coast. People who never even thought about us--I
am talking about Members of Congress--now, how can I help you,
you know, can you help me get a methamphetamine bill through,
and all this.
I guess my point is, you know, you have a situation where--
and I want you to just talk about this a little bit--the
administration is proposing $25 million for methamphetamine
treatment, treatment grants using some kind of voucher system.
Is that right?
Mr. Walters. It is part of what people can--they can use
other treatment money for methamphetamine treatment. We are
trying to do some targeted initiatives both with NIDA to
improve treatment for methamphetamines, but part of the
access--the 14 States and one Native organization that received
the 15 first Access to Recovery Treatment Expansion Grants,
some of those, like Missouri, have focused, where they have had
methamphetamine problems, the expansion of capacity on
methamphetamine. So there is flexibility here for application.
And of course the larger block grant can be used as needed in
States, based on the situation they find themselves in.
Mr. Cummings. And so--but there are a finite set of
treatment approaches, is that right, for methamphetamine?
Mr. Walters. Yeah. One other area here--I mean, this is not
unlike some of the discussion we saw earlier about crack, that,
you know, it is not treatable. Well, it is treatable. And we
have people that are in recovery, we have courts that are using
techniques with treatment for drug courts here, and we have
treatments that work. Now, it is a horrible drug--there is no
more horrible drug--and it is devastating to people. It is not
easy, as it is with other drugs, including heroin, as you know,
and cocaine, crack, and others, to get off methamphetamine. But
it is not true that people have to be hopeless.
Mr. Cummings. Well, you know, that is one of the things
that concerned me. I mean, all the testimony that we have
heard, and we have heard testimony from a whole lot of folks
with regard to this drug. And I was just thinking, if you give
somebody a voucher, you have finite approaches to treatment--
and what I know about the meth addict--I am just wondering, is
that a good idea when these folks--assuming they have troubles
making decisions anyway. Do you follow what I am saying? Is it
good to just say, OK, here is a voucher, you go and shop this,
I mean, and this guy just--you have heard some of the things
that meth addicts do. I am just wondering. I mean, what is the
thinking behind that?
Mr. Walters. I think maybe that is a misimpression that the
word ``voucher'' has created. This isn't like ``Here's a slip,
go find treatment.'' It gives, essentially, a reimbursement
commitment for an individual, who then can choose the kind of
treatment provider. Most of the States that have implemented
this now have a case manager. I think the goal of the program
was both to increase access, but also to allow the support of
recovery services.
As you know, recovery is a longer process than just the
time you spend in an inpatient or outpatient treatment
situation. And the success rate of treatment can be based very
clearly on can we get you back into housing, can we get you
into education, and other support services; can we get you in
job training, did we get family support for this? What the
program allows is also an expansion of support and flexibility
in that support, but it also usually includes in the States
that have done this a case manager that helps the individual
receiving services to put those services together.
You are right, people are addicted. They are impaired. They
have trouble putting their lives together. In fact, you could
say that addiction is about your life falling apart. So what
this does, for the first time, is, in some cases, some States
are going to find--are reporting to us--as they put it all
together, it gets more expensive. It is also more effective.
And it is more capable of utilizing capacities in the community
that are there, that are not frequently tapped.
So what we see this as doing is allowing people who are
addicted to enjoy the same kind of situation that most
Americans receive their health care under. You get identified
as needing services, you have an insurance company or a
provider who is going to provide services for wherever you are
referred suitable for your condition, and we are going to pay
them for the services they provide at a reasonable rate.
So all this does is--it doesn't say, in some cases, to an
addict, you have one choice; we're funding this center here,
which may be doing a great job, but it also may be a long way
from where you are, it may not be the right place for you,
there may be other places that could help you and other
services in support of that place that it would help optimize
your recovery. We are trying to capture what the field has
shown us is needed to optimize success rates and to allow that
to be a part of the way we provide funding.
That is why we are excited about what we think is possible
here, not because it is simply trying to fund a certain kind or
it has tried to have people walk around for the sake of saying,
oh, we're for vouchers, if you like vouchers you will like
this. It provides a kind of reimbursement process that allows
case management, follow-on services, tracking, and the ability
then for the maximum application of what we know works.
Mr. Cummings. This is my last question, because I know we
are going to get to Mr. Mica.
At the CADCA conference the other day, they had this
question that they wanted answered. And the question was what
is the perception on Capitol Hill about treatment
effectiveness? And they wanted to know what is it that they
could do to convince the administration that more money was
needed for treatment. Understand, a lot of those people
probably come in contact with folks who need treatment and they
know--and they, basically, they are the choir. They see
treatment they believe, for the most part, that it works. They
know that people slip back and, you know, they get that piece.
But they are in those communities where they don't have always
the access to treatment that they need, but yet still they have
to live around this person who is now a ghost of who they used
to be. They are lying, stealing, robbing, and what have you.
So, I mean, what is your perception of treatment that you
believe is working? And how are your beliefs manifested in this
budget? In other words, how do you take your beliefs, whatever
they are, and how are they prioritized in this budget?
Mr. Walters. I don't think there is any question that
treatment works. And I would say the best response to those
people who have questions about that is, you know, go to the
graduation of a drug court or a treatment center, or talk to
some of the millions of Americans who are walking around in
recovery. I don't think we need to debate this anymore. I
recognize there are also people who had a particular family
situation where a family member has been wracked with this for
a long time. We know it is not a victimless activity. It makes
everybody--and there are people who have lost hope. I have met
those people in Government and out, where they know it is not
politically correct to say treatment doesn't work, but they
believe it because they have been suffering so much.
But that is not the common reality. And I don't think
anybody that has a family member, even if he had a tough time,
is going to say, well, my next family member that has a
problem, I am not going to do anything for. We want treatment.
We want effective treatment, we want it early.
But what this also--this budget and this policy--reflects
is, I think our view--and we have learned this from the field;
it is not me--we need to thicken what we consider to be
treatment and intervention. We know that people start getting
in trouble before they are 10 years addicted. They start
getting in trouble when they are teens. So we are starting to
strengthen prevention and intervention--community coalitions,
the Media Campaign, other programs. We are also trying to do
interventions through student drug testing, to use the tool
that lets us connect the dots between addiction-is-a-disease
and the way we detect other disease and allow us to bring the
care we know will work at an early stage when we know we can
optimize results.
Also, we are supporting intervention in public health
system. We know that people who begin to and have substance
abuse problems are more likely to get diseases, be in
accidents, be victims of violence and perpetrators of violence.
We don't screen effectively in our health system. We want that
to be a greater part of it, and we are asking for more money in
that to build into--and we have gotten through this effort
major certification organizations to look at whether or not to
certify shock trauma centers on the basis of they screen
everybody that comes in, so that we can refer people to
appropriate levels of intervention and services and cutoff the
path of destruction more effectively, as we have done with
those diseases.
In addition, we have asked for an expansion, as I said, of
drug courts. It is extremely disappointing for me that, after
asking for year after year for more money, that we end up with
less than $10 million. We are asking for $60 million more
because this is a great investment. The Federal Government,
again, starts up drug courts and allows communities to continue
them. They save money on incarceration, they save lives, cycles
of crime. The people who--you have been there, you know. The
people who are involved in this on the judicial side, on the
prosecutorial side, on the public health side--not to mention
the clients--think this is a Godsend.
It is growing. But we could make it go faster. And the
faster we make it go--again, the slide about interdiction. What
pulls those drugs into this country? One essential thing:
addicted users in the United States. Ten percent, 15 percent of
the heaviest users consume 60 to 80 percent of the drugs. The
drug trade in the United States depends on addicts and is
continuing to crush addicts with the volume of addiction. If we
pull those addicts out, every one of those people is worth tens
of non-addicted users because of the quantities involved, the
dollars involved, not to mention the destruction in our
communities.
So, yeah, what we want to do is thicken intervention. You
mentioned how many untreated people there are. The other reason
to thicken intervention is, as you know and we have talked
about, this is a disease that involves denial. You don't say I
have an attack of appendicitis and I have come to get help. I
am candid about my symptoms and I do what I am told. When you
confront many people that have this--and every family has been
touched by it--they get angry: No I don't; mind your own
business; leave me alone. We have to do it anyway. And when
institutions do that, whether they are criminal justice,
whether they are health, whether they are education, whether
they are workplace and employment, whether they are in schools,
we have a chance of changing. We know how to do this. We are
impatient to move it forward.
And I will tell you, one of my other concerns--we are
talking about dollars here. I will be happy to work with any of
you all the time up here to work with appropriators to convince
them to put these dollars in. Because I think on the drug
courts, you know, we sought $200 million when we proposed
Access to Recovery, and a lot of you tried to help us. We got
$100 million. We have implemented it. We would like to continue
to use the innovations that it has shown to broaden out and
reform for more people the treatment system so that it can be
as effective as we know the current understanding allows it to
be.
So, yeah, I think this does reflect not my view, but, as
you travel and as you look at it, what people who are doing the
work tell us will optimize it. Now, can we put more resources
in? Sure, we could put more resources in. But I have a problem
with the absorptive capacity of the Government to accept the
proposed resources that we have had here. And frankly, it is
hard for me to make recommendations for moneys after Congress
has said we don't want to appropriate at that level. Because
there are many other demands in education and health for, you
know, senior citizens and other demands that are here. And I
think the question comes down, as it does to you, when you
can't get a consensus on something, why don't we try to fund
the things there is consensus on that are still important and
valuable.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much. Perhaps you can give me
a written response to this issue of girls. There was a recent
report that I heard about girls using drugs at an alarming
rate, much faster than--I mean, in other words, the numbers are
going up for our girls, and I just--maybe you can answer that
while you are answering somebody else's questions. But that is
something that certainly concerns us, because I don't want us
to move--you know, have this happening, and we are so busy
looking at the total picture that we don't look at our girls.
Mr. Walters. Right. It is historic. In short, as the
indications are there, the pie size of the number of teens
using drugs has gotten smaller for girls and boys. The slice
that is girls has grown to levels that it hasn't since we have
been measuring it. They are equal to boys in using overall
drugs and in alcohol use; they are greater than boys in using
marijuana since 2002; and they are greater than boys in using
cigarettes and abusing prescription drugs. We tried to give a
wake-up call--got to pay attention to girls. Girls use for
different reasons. We are trying to use our Media Campaign to
make sure we test messages, as we have been over the last
several years, that work for girls and boys. And we're trying
to alert parents: Don't just worry about the boys, you have to
worry about the girls and you have to take on board the reasons
that they use. We will give you the information.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Mica.
Mr. Mica. Thank you.
Thank you, Director Walters, also for recognizing some of
those that have made a difference in our communities and across
the country in this difficult substance abuse effort. In
particular, I appreciate your pointing out and recognizing
effectiveness of a drug-free community coalition like we have
represented here with One Voice for Valusia. These folks, not
Congress, where the Office always makes a difference; it is
those community efforts. I have a couple of questions about
those efforts as I conclude my questions.
I have been playing dual secretaries--we have Chertoff
across the hall. It was kind of interesting to hear Chairman
Souder talking about some of the things that were done with the
creation of Homeland Security. We got into the same discussion
next door, the efficiency of 177,000, 20-some agencies being
put together and trying to operate. It is quite a challenge.
But we identified over there, before I came over here, one
of the problems. I identified it as Congress. Congress created
that.
One of the issues that I wanted to lead into that we are
having a problem with is HIDTA. And I know you are running into
another brick wall. Maybe you like bashing your head against
that brick wall--it feels good when you are done. But other
than that, the proposal sounds like it is sort of DOA again. I
have already been lobbied very effectively on the issue, but it
still remains a challenge. Congress created HIDTAs to put
Federal resources in targeted areas where we had serious drug
problems and combine it with other local and State resources.
How many HIDTAs do we now have?
Mr. Walters. Twenty-eight.
Mr. Mica. And how long have most of those been in
existence? When was the last one created, do you recall? Most
of them are--have been around for some time.
Mr. Walters. I think the last one was created in 2000. I
will double-check that. But most----
Mr. Mica. Approximately 2000.
Mr. Walters. There were five original HIDTAs in----
Mr. Mica. How many have we eliminated?
Mr. Walters. I am not aware that a single one has been
eliminated.
Mr. Mica. It is very hard, you know, when Congress--and I
think you read the list of all--there is a list of opponents to
doing anything. Maybe we need a BRAC commission for HIDTAs. Not
that they aren't good and not that we don't need them, but
again, it is very frustrating. And now the--it is a quarter of
a billion dollars, approximately, on them. Not targeted. I got
mine. I had to get mine--you know the story, I was on the wrong
side of the political aisle and Clinton wouldn't do it. We had
people die, young people in particular dying in the streets of
central Florida, and no one would do anything about it.
McCaffrey was the drug czar. He could have created one, but the
others got theirs, I wasn't getting mine, I wasn't up. So I put
mine in legislation.
And then I remember the call from the press, ``Mr. Mica,
you have just been identified by Senator McCain as having a
pork project, a bad earmark and disgraceful performance.'' I
called John McCain and read him the riot act. What had happened
over in the Senate, they added two more HIDTAs for God knows
where, and they are still there, that really weren't needed.
And John did give me a letter of, I guess--what is it when the
pope grants you a pardon? Indulgence. I got an indulgence from
him.
But I still have my HIDTA. Mostly they are getting the same
amount.
So I recognize the problem, and they have mounted a great
campaign. Maybe you ought to look at something else, maybe some
compromise, John, to try to move some of this money around. I
mean, many of them are still doing a good job, but that wasn't
the purpose. Is that basically correct?
Mr. Walters. Yeah, I think many of them are doing a good
job. Unfortunately, in the proposals that we have tried to make
to reflect the capitalizing on that good job, the view has been
taken that we are against the program. Again, I was over when
the first five were designated in the President's father's
administration. I think this could be useful. But the problem
is that it has to be focused.
Mr. Mica. Do you have the power to move any of that, or is
it still targeted to each one? I mean, you should increase your
security, because these people are hopping mad that you might
take their HIDTA money away or move it somewhere else.
Mr. Souder. Mr. Mica? In 2003, we proposed giving him
authority to reallocate, and ONDCP opposed being given that
authority.
Mr. Mica. Do you have that authority?
Mr. Souder. No, he opposed it.
Mr. Mica. You opposed it?
Mr. Walters. Well----
Mr. Mica. Would you now--I mean, you are not going to get
what you asked for, so that--I mean, I propose this again as
one solution.
Just think about it. But again, I can tell you, around here
218 votes beats the best argument you can possibly come up
with.
Mr. Walters. Well, let me just ask the two of you. I know
you can't represent the whole Congress; you are part of it. I
do have the authority, as I understand it, to designate and de-
designate counties in HIDTAs. What do you think would be the
result if I actually said, oh, I won't de-designate whole
HIDTAs; I will de-designate counties where drug use appears to
be down, or where the problem doesn't seem to be as severe? And
I de-designated, say, 50 counties of the program, which has
many, many counties, as you know, all over the country.
Mr. Mica. Well, my opinion is----
Mr. Walters. What do you think would be----
Mr. Mica. I think we should give him the authority to do a
tough evaluation of the effectiveness of the programs and then
move the money around. That would be my opinion. And I would
support that proposal. Then you do it, you will be even
probably more unpopular than you are right now, but somebody
has to do it. And obviously, Congress isn't going to do it.
Mr. Souder. We have several things here. First off, the
appropriators have asked you, and you have the opportunity at
any time to propose to them, how you think the money ought to
be reallocated. And they have an open invitation. We tried to
make that change in law on reallocation. We also, in the
current ONDCP bill, give you more flexibility to do that. And
as you know, I was willing, and we were trying to work out some
kind of compromise on this national focus in the HIDTAs to try
to make sure that they didn't all go to State and local. It
became partly complicated, which I didn't fully understand at
the time, because many of the newer counties, like in Oklahoma,
in the north Dallas, in the Missouri HIDTA, were meth HIDTAs.
And since we didn't have a national strategy on meth, and their
biggest problem was meth and at the local level they wanted to
do that, well, we had some disconnects.
So part of this has been a battle over meth. I think your
question is a fair one. What would happen if you actually did
try to do something?
Now, the question is--I think it would be very difficult.
The counter-question to that is, why?
In other words, it isn't enough to say, oh, this is just a
pork project and each Member of Congress is defending it. What
we are saying is the local law enforcement in charge of
narcotics come to us and say this is the most effective program
that we have. They are saying the same thing on Byrne Grants. I
don't have a HIDTA. I didn't offer to do a HIDTA and I said,
no, I don't need a HIDTA. We have the Byrne Grants, drug task
force, that is what my community wanted to do more. Not
everybody has a HIDTA.
And I have had my concerns here and there, but the bottom
line is this. The reason it would be hard politically to change
it isn't because there is some kind of graft or pork or this
kind of stuff, it is because local law enforcement has found
this to be an effective tool of leveraging, as we have had
multiple people come up to us and tell us that as they are
squeezed at their local level. The Phoenix Police Department,
for example, gives three people to the Southwest Border HIDTA,
and he said that if there isn't HIDTA funding, he will pull his
out. And without the Federal dollars, they won't do this.
And so that pressure is hard here because this is a popular
Federal program. It is not a popular Federal program among a
few people, it is popular at the grass roots overwhelmingly,
and they were early on responding to meth. And that is why it
is hard to change and why there is an increasing demand. It is
one of the only areas in narcotics where there is an increasing
demand for it. And what we have right now is this incongruous
situation where the people who have been leading the efforts
for years to buildup your office, to fight narcotics, who get
most of our drug support are just really upset because you have
not exercised your authority to even make a proposal of where
it should go.
Last year, and I am more than willing to ask you again this
year--is there any HIDTA that you think should be decertified?
Is there any HIDTA that you think isn't doing well? You and
then the Justice Department say that they can be more effective
with OCDETF. I asked Paul McNulty the other day and I asked you
last year, OK, which one? How aren't they being effective?
Don't just tell me, oh, we think we can be. How aren't they
being effective? Because if you can't give us one example of a
HIDTA that doesn't work, one example of what isn't effective
that could be more effective; if you can't show us a single
reason for the change, of course Congress is going to oppose a
change.
Mr. Mica. Reclaiming my time.
You see the problem. Now, I would--it is very difficult. I
got them, I want to keep them. You know, to paraphrase the
President, we have an addiction to Federal money. And these
people have all gotten hooked on it. Somebody has some other
Federal money and you pull the plug, maybe it is like a little
bit with an addict, we have to work out a program for
withdrawal. Maybe there are a lot more addicts someplace else
that need attention, but we have ourselves in a dilemma here
and we need to find a--again, the current proposal, as I said,
is DOA.
Let me jump from that, and hopefully, something productive
can come from this discussion.
Last year, we talked about moving some of the media dollars
around a little bit. And I know you have limited media dollars.
But we talked about the Media Campaign not following some of
the problems that Cummings was interested in because of this
new emergence of females sort of leading some of the addiction
problems.
But I saw where you have responded and you have an online
campaign for, what is it, 14 to 16. But we are finding even
more and more people of all ages get their information from
online. I can get all my drug recipes online and concoct meth
and everything else. But there is not a lot in other
categories. Maybe with a few bucks we could get online some--
and again, I know you have some limited, but just a suggestion
to take back.
Mr. Walters. Well----
Mr. Mica. One of the other things--I just throw that as a
suggestion. You don't have to respond.
Mica's last suggestion for the day: In dealing--again, I
inherited in the last 36 months a different district than I had
the previous 10 years. I had fairly sophisticated communities
that could--we could write the best damn grants in the world
and get them approved, and I would back them up and we would
send little letters in and that money would flow in. But I find
in my experience with the poor districts, where I have drug
problems that make everything else pale, the addiction and
criminal justice problems, is the lack of sophistication to
even put a grant together. Now I am finding a lack of moving
forward. I mean, to put a grant together--and you know what I
am talking about--we had to bring in people from three other
entities to even try to meet the requirements.
So you are probably getting the best and most sophisticated
and putting our money to those who know how to operate this,
but you have folks here who don't have that capability.
Then the second part is even actually running, for example,
a community drug-free program. And I am seeing the same thing
here. They don't even have the resources to put that kind of a
program together.
In any event, I am rethinking some of what we are doing
there as leaving people who need the attention the most, who
are least capable. They are going to be, probably, the people
that score some of the lowest scores in those traditional
applications and then sort of flub the dub, and they are the
people that need some kind of help.
So I think that is something else we need to take another
look at.
Mr. Walters. I agree with you in a couple of dimensions
there. One, we have put into place efforts to do outreach and
technical assistance to areas that have more limited resources.
We also give a priority for those areas that have economic
disadvantage, rural, urban, Native American tribal areas. And I
am pleased to say that in the Safe and Drug-Free Schools
program, for example, 40 percent of those awards go to
disadvantaged areas. So that is partly working.
But I also agree with you that we need better ability to
track where the problem is.
Can I ask you to put up the meth chart, No. 8? I want to
give you an example of what we are trying to do. This has
methamphetamine, but you could use cocaine or marijuana or
opioids.
We are now getting information from the largest workplace
drug tester in the country. No identifying individual
information, but millions of tests a month, down to three-digit
Zip Code, which is what you see there. Some of these areas that
are less populous, the three-digit Zip Code is of course
bigger. But that, in short, for calendar year 2005 is the
methamphetamine problem in the United States. You will see how
the darker areas are the more intense rates of positivity. It
tracks with what you see in the newspaper, of course, States
that you see mentioned.
But even within individual States, it is extremely
concentrated in some areas. What we are trying to do is to work
with the community coalitions, with our friends in Justice and
HIDTA and other places--and I like HIDTA. Let me just say that
because I think it has gotten lost here. Not every part of it,
and I think there are going to obviously be some changes, but I
like what we are doing here. What we are trying to do is to
blend the kind of intelligence we try to use to be effective in
the war on terror. Because we have a problem that is not
everywhere, it is not equal everywhere, and by hosing water
everywhere, we don't put the fire out where it is. And we
certainly don't put it out where it is very intense.
So what we are trying to do is provide a way to move this
information and other information like it directly to the
people that have to work--in State government that are our
partners, national government--so that we can also then say,
look, why aren't we driving treatment resources in these areas
where this exists? Why aren't we better targeting drug courts
or community coalitions into these areas where it exists? Can
we actually program now, effectively, the response to where the
problem is in a more localized fashion?
In fact, in these States, if you--actually, we ran this
data. The positivity rates in these States--and, for example,
the small toxic lab data. If you run small toxic lab data for
the overall States, the change for a 2-year period, and you run
it against the Uniform Crime Reports measures of violent and
property crime, they don't correlate beyond .3--which is not a
correlation. Why? Not because meth doesn't cause a great deal
of violent property crime, not because it isn't extremely
intense where it is; it is just so focused in States that in
some cases that focus is not causing an overall trend in the
State.
So if we are going to deal with it, we need to localize.
And I think that is an issue for getting to disadvantaged
communities, getting to communities that are broken because of
the magnitude of the drug problem. But I also think it is a
matter of how we begin to use law enforcement to cutoff either
access or production of drugs so that the supply and demand
parts can work.
That is what I think is an example of how we want to move
dynamic change into HIDTA, into drug courts, into Media
Campaign programming, is that we can begin to tie some things
together through these data sources and through responding to
them.
Mr. Mica. Now, for the record, in closing, Mr. Chairman, I
would like the Office of National Drug Control Policy to
provide an overlay where we have the current HIDTAs on that
map, just for the record. I think that would be interesting to
see.
Thank you, Mr. Walters. Carry on. But I would advise
getting more personal security.
Mr. Walters. Can I respond to one other thing? On the Media
Campaign suggestion you made, which is a very good one, we have
been trying to watch this, we have tried to use some of our
money to track this--we have moved more of the messaging online
because the kids are not necessarily watching conventional
television or even cable television. They are online, and
through the help of the best people we have working with us in
advertising, we have moved more appropriate messages online and
tied this.
Also, with respect to girls, we have learned that girls
have different motives, we have tried to use, as you know, a
new branding of the youth antidrug campaign, called Above the
Influence, to get at both the aspirational and the feelings
that many young people, both boys and girls--particularly
girls--say they feel pressure as young people, adolescence is a
difficult time; they use drugs or they get caught up in drugs
because they feel pressures to conform. We are trying to
reinforce those sentiments generally, and we hope the campaign
will help play into that research as well.
Mr. Mica. My point, too, is not just that category--and you
have done a good job there--is looking at other categories. And
again, I know you have limited resources, but maybe with a
little creativity we could get more online for different
categories.
Mr. Walters. Oh, I would be happy to look at and work with
you, if you want to look at expansion. All I would say is, all
the research we say is we have to maintain the weight.
Remember, as this goes down, the remaining group is harder. So
if you want to talk about letting it take your eye off the
ball, if we want to expand it, that is fine, but there have to
be more dollars. We have to have more dollars to hit the
current target audience, in our judgment and the judgment of
the partnership and others that we work with, and we have to be
able to put the--if you are going to talk about expansion, we
have to be able not to throw out the base as we move on to
other areas.
Mr. Souder. One of our fundamental disagreements here is I
understand why you have the strategy you have--marijuana is the
base drug, it is going to show more evenness across the
country. But partly both in--just as background, this is partly
marketing and advertising, and that you also have to be able to
capture people's attention, it is the kind of intensity of
watching an ad, the uniqueness of it. Trends go. Our message
isn't about a particular drug, our message is illegal drugs are
bad. And if you are in a curve in the country where there is an
intense interest in meth, even in an area where it is not
hypothetically, or Oxycontin comes up, the novelty of that and
the focus and how it gets covered in CSI and Law & Order and
other types of things means that the basic message is narcotics
are bad, and underneath it marijuana and often drugs and
alcohol are the gateway. But if you keep the same message over
and over again, it wears out and your intensity. It isn't that
you don't change certain kinds of premises, or even the
marijuana questions.
I had some police people in from Noble County, Drug-Free
Noble County, this past week. They reported the first THC
between 40 and 50 percent in Indiana. It is the seventh--could
you leave the chart up there on meth? I have some technical
questions on that.
But in the fundamental with this, that you have to show
some movement. And if you don't, the Members of Congress are
reflecting not just, yes, there is opposition on the marijuana
campaign, but it isn't meeting where the demands are.
But let me ask a couple of questions about that chart, and
it would relate to other drugs as well.
How old is the data? How timely is that data?
Mr. Walters. I believe it is a--as it says there, it is a
consolidation of calendar year 2005.
Mr. Souder. So these are tests that occurred in 2005, or
data that was given to you in 2005 from tests earlier?
Mr. Walters. It is data from, I believe, tests in 2005. I
will check to make sure I am stating that correctly. And it is
positivity rates among those tests.
The data is available monthly, but in order to have
sufficient cell size in all the Zip Codes, it is generally
amalgamated.
Mr. Souder. And do you lay that over with emergency room,
lab seizures, and so on?
Mr. Walters. We are beginning to be able to do that, yes,
sir.
Mr. Souder. Because I would say any particular piece of
data will suggest something slightly different. This is also a
reflection of how many drug tests you have. For example, in a
rural county you are going to have fewer people doing drug
tests; therefore, if you find a little bit of meth, it is going
to be darker brown. You have bigger tests--I mean, I took
multiple courses in statistical analysis. There are some
fundamental questions there, because, for example, what I can
do is look at my whole thing and go, man, is that wrong, that
there is some total disconnect with emergency rooms, law busts.
The brown is not in the places where the law enforcement
problems are, where the school problems are, where the
treatment problems are.
And the other thing, I look at that map, is, man, I have
been wrong, meth is a national problem, I thought it was a
regional problem. It is more intense in the rural areas, but
this stuff has moved into Florida. We hadn't thought that meth
was down in Florida to that extent. We didn't know it was up in
New England to that extent. Man, meth is a national problem.
And that we have been buying that the intense brown, it is just
that it is more intense in those areas and it is a newer drug
there, and those Members of Congress are going crazy.
And the other thing is, how does this map relate to the
2004 map and the 2003? My premise has been that the areas that
were kind of orange moved to lighter brown, then moved to
darker brown, and we have seen a steady progression of this.
And this is a drug that you can in fact get ahead of because
this is one we can sell and we can use that as a gateway to do
the others. And I have been trying to make that message and I
think Congress is doing that. So instead of it being in the
National Media Campaign, you have had more or less a rump Ad
Campaign startup, which I believe was up to $6 million this
last year targeted specifically to meth, that is totally
outside, based on individual Members' ability to convince
people to write that in, just like meth hot spots is coming up
as a separate earmarked program because there has not been a
coordinated strategy that is responding to the fact that map is
dramatically changing. That is a great thing that we should
have had a long time ago.
So first off, I compliment you on doing drug testing
because it is something that is being done on a regular basis.
So are drug courts. So are child protection questions. So are
emergency rooms. And as we get better data, we can move that
and then look at how is it changing. And instead of reacting,
try to get ahead of it. And I would argue that a blended
strategy--and I just said ``basic''--I don't think you are
going to get--I mean, I have been trying to sell this ad
program, too. And what I know is when we went to the floor with
an amendment to put money into meth in the National Ad
Campaign, which, by the way, wasn't ruled out of order, so I
assume it would have been allowable--that it had overwhelming
bipartisan support and we were able to increase the Ad
Campaign. But when it came back out, then the Ad Campaign went
back down. And that there are some practical tradeoffs here.
I would also argue that I don't know how many kids use
meth. In my opinion, it tends to be weight loss, more like an
amphetamine, or tends to be adult-oriented but kids get caught
up in it. At the same time, I don't believe the current survey
structure is going to find kids who are using meth anyway. In
many cases, they aren't in school, their parents are
disorganized, they are almost zero percent likely to return any
kind of questionnaire. It is arguably the most dysfunctional
unit of Government--or unit of drug use to try to test. They
are worried somebody is going to smell their drug lab. If I was
a person doing a survey, I would be--as a postman, I might be
afraid to deliver, let alone try to hand-deliver something. Or
in school. It is a much harder population even than heroin and
cocaine to try to get in your survey anyway.
And we certainly can't make policy on how we are dealing
with meth based on the fact that it dropped from 1.3 percent to
.9 percent, which is statistically irrelevant in the change
anyway because it is too small a sample size to--probably the
variation is at least 5 to 7 percent statistical variation when
you get down to that few people inside of a category.
But the bottom line is we are still splitting hairs here
because I don't think that this is the target problem on meth.
Mr. Walters. Well, again, let me just go back. First of
all, the number that you cited in that survey is statistically
significant--not all the changes are--but even at that small
cell size. But the point is, I agree young people are not the
major using population for meth. It is young adults. And we
target those people as well. But again, if you show here--what
you are seeing in the press that I think is reflected in the
data we have--can you show me the----
Mr. Souder. By the way, can I ask a fundamental question?
Maybe your staff knows. Were there 1,000 people in this survey
or 100,000?
Mr. Walters. I believe there is about 70,000. Oh, 49,000 in
the Monitoring the Future survey.
Mr. Souder. So 49,000 means that there were 490 meth cases
that basically dropped to about 410 meth cases, something on
that order.
Mr. Walters. Yeah, I would have to check the cell size.
Mr. Souder. I would argue----
Mr. Walters. And I don't do these surveys. We rely on
statisticians that do that.
Mr. Souder. Well, that statistical differential is greater
than 5 to 7, which is what you normally measure.
Mr. Walters. Well, again, I am not----
Mr. Souder. It is significant, because you made that as a
pivotal point in your statement.
Mr. Walters. No, I----
Mr. Souder. And also in your comment that it had dropped.
And what I am arguing is a statistical variation even of 3,
when you only have a point-4 or 5 differential, means that it
could be 4 percent, which would be 4 times higher. That your
standard deviation on a sample size that small----
Mr. Walters. Again, I don't run the numbers. I rely on the
statisticians who do. In this case, they are not Government,
they are under contract at the University of Michigan. They
have been doing this since the mid-1970's. They tell us what is
statistically significant over the period of time. The change
can be smaller over a longer period of time to be significant
as I have seen it in the past. But these are not my numbers.
These are numbers by the people who have been doing this for
well over 20 years.
What I wanted to say is, on the larger population of meth
users, which I think is an important issue here--No. 7. What we
have seen in the larger household survey, which you referred to
earlier, that has been going on for awhile, we have made
efforts to try to capture some of these individuals. These are
not a census. They give us relative sizes. I agree with you,
these are hard things to survey.
But what we have here are those who are age 12 and above in
household survey. The numbers for the comparable years, the
survey structure, as you know, has been changed. It has been
made automated. We have now to maintain a sample size and
integrity, paid individuals for participating--that causes some
change in the survey. We have, at my direction, changed the
placement of the meth question for the next year to make it
more prominent, to make sure that we are not underreporting
because of where it may be in the survey. I did that after I
took the survey. The results were not part of the national
sample, but I insisted on seeing how these instruments work and
asked that, particularly with meth, that we try to make it more
a prominent part.
So we will adjust this estimate, probably, up some. It
won't be a perfect census, but it is a relative measure, as it
has been over years of looking at the issue of cocaine and
heroin and other drugs, a relative probable suggestion of
trends and relative magnitudes among the other drugs. What you
see here is the troubling dimension of meth, I think.
On the overall, we haven't had much of a change in the
aggregate number of meth users. But each year for the last 3
years, the number of people addicted has increased by 50
percent. The smaller portion of those individuals, as you see
in red, are those whose primary addiction is to meth. The
larger portion, also increasing by 50 percent per year, are
those who have a primary addiction to another drug and are also
using meth.
So what we have is an increasing overall portion of the
overall users of meth who are addicted. The need for treatment,
the burdens you have seen yourself and heard in the press--
emergency rooms, treatment facilities being burdened here--are
exactly what we see in these national numbers. But again, I
point out, as from the other map, that is not going to be
uniformly displayed across all counties in all places at all
times. It is going to be where the drug is concentrated.
The earlier charts show workplace tests. Probably most of
those tests, positive tests, are not people who are addicted.
Some of them may be, but they are probably coming in because
they are detected using but they are not yet addicted.
This figure gives us a slice through that shows us
something about those who are the heavy or most addicted users.
What we obviously want to try to do is array that data as well
across individual geographic spaces and populations so that we
can see where there are concentrations. We do get reports from
drug courts, we do get reports from HIDTA. We do get price and
purity and availability data. We do get data also from other
surveys--the User Risk Behavior Survey as well as others--some
of which have city, urban, sometimes non-urban concentrations.
Our goal is not just to kind of have numbers about things,
but the problem that you face and we face is how do we make
sure we are driving the resources to where they belong. As
Congressman Mica said, we have poor areas that don't apply for
grants. They are too much under fire to apply for grants. It is
our job, if we are going to make a difference, to be proactive
and to be there and try to make sure the programs are where
they need to be, and to tell you when programs are working. I
take your point. We want to focus law enforcement resources as
well, and HIDTA resources here. We have instituted, as you
know, the first comprehensive implementation of an evaluation
process for HIDTA. We will begin to have those results. We are
asking them to program against those results. We are asking
them to be accountable.
But you also know that the pressure that we get in the
appropriations process, a markup of this committee, is not to
reduce HIDTA counties. I have a lot of friction with Members of
the House and Senate because they want to add counties. Now,
sometimes they want to add counties where we should add
counties, I think, from the data. Sometimes they want to add
counties because they have people who are working hard and want
additional resources and will put them to good use. I
understand that. But our job is also to say, well, is want
identical with the best deliver of limited resources? Sometimes
it is not. And I recognize that those are the decisions that we
are trusted to make. So we do the best we can here.
But I don't see much language in the appropriation bill
telling me to reduce HIDTA counties. What I see is directions
to add. And the problem with that is not that we won't try to
do this responsibly, it is that when you add it, what am I
going to have to do? You know what the program has done--it has
cut money, as a portion, to some of the major original HIDTA
areas that are cities and towns that still have major problems,
and arguably have greater problems. That the spread of the
program without additional dollars--and even though Congress
has appropriated different amounts than the administration, it
has not expanded the program.
Mr. Souder. But even using your own kind of model of
measurement--that we have added HIDTA counties, we have added
HIDTAs, and the drug use has gone down 5 straight years--it
must be working.
Mr. Walters. That is not my model. I mean, the sun came up
every day, too, and I don't think the sunrise caused drug use
to go down. It is not a matter of proximity, it is a matter of
can we demonstrate that these programs have had a particular
effect on the problem. Drug-Free Communities. We are asking the
Drug-Free Communities program to institute measures of
effectiveness that include, first and foremost, are you driving
down drug use? It is not so easy to measure in a community-wide
effort. But if the program is not doing that, it is not doing
its job. We are trying to do that with accountability in the
treatment program.
Now, you raise the issue of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. The
problem that I have is--and we have talked together. I know you
are on my side on this. So, I mean, we are arguing as if we are
at opposite, and we are not--I think. There is no consensus to
put that kind of accountability in the block grant program,
because it is supposed to be a block grant. It is not supposed
to be just a drug prevention program. And people do not want to
change the authorities to do drug-free. I understand that. But
under this environment, as we have looked at it--I recognize
other people have different views--those millions of dollars
are better used elsewhere, given what they----
Mr. Souder. Here--and I have one more thing and I will see
if Mr. Cummings has that.
Our problem here is not that I don't think it is as
effective as it should be. I don't believe it should be zeroed
out because I believe it is one of the only prevention programs
we have that, I believe, had between 20 and 30 different
amendments in the Education Committee last time, on Safe and
Drug-Free Schools, to try to tighten it, to cut allowable uses,
to tighten it up, that they had to have an antidrug message if
they did an after-school program. At one point I got so
frustrated I offered an amendment that education itself be one
of the allowable uses, because I am sure that would reduce drug
use.
In other words, is this an antidrug program or not?
``Safe'' got added in. School violence, the time we did it last
time, Columbine happened around that same time. We are about to
start hearings again, not only here but in the Education
Committee. That is going to be one of my primary things: let's
figure out how to make it work. Getting rid of prevention
programs, when it is one of the major legs, is not a solution.
Drug testing is part of it, but it is not just drug testing. I
believe that even if these programs aren't as effective as they
should be, they, plus the community coalitions, plus the
National Ad Campaign, plus the arrests, mean we have a net
reduction in drug use, that there is a holistic, interactive
relationship when you get different teen groups, no matter what
the antidrug program is in the school, and it is very hard to
measure, but it is a backup behind the National Ad Campaign
working with the community antidrug efforts with testing behind
it, and that we need to make it more effective. You don't just
say let's zero it out.
That has been my argument. It is a nuance of the same
argument, but the same. We can't just take it over and knock it
out.
Now, we have a major difference here on methamphetamine.
And we can sit here and argue some of these numbers, but here
is some of the mistrust in Congress. ONDCP seems intent on
disproving what everybody else in the country is seeing, that
methamphetamine is an epidemic, in that you continue to come up
with numbers that I believe illustrate my point, and I don't
understand the lack of understanding with this. In other words,
first off, I don't know if I agree with that chart. And I
believe you were correct in interpreting that chart of
intensity, and that is part of what we have happening in
emergency rooms.
But there is another phenomenon that happens. Because
States have been implementing pseudoephedrine control with no
help from the Federal Government or guidance on this. As States
have been implementing this, labs and some of this drops. Then
new people come in. Then as we implement our Federal law, it is
likely to still stay relatively flat, or have a slight decline,
because of what we did, not because of any help out of ONDCP or
the Federal Government, the executive branch. And that what we
are seeing here is new people come on board.
And I believe, first off, your data is wrong. I believe
that the Association of Counties reflects that. I believe that
when you mix a whole bunch of things together, you will find
that the casual use is up as well as the codependency use, and
definitely the intensity use is up. But partly, when we go
after the meth epidemic in individual States, we defeat it.
Unlike some of our others where we try to control it and get it
down, meth is one where we can go from 200 labs in an area down
to 20. And that then crystal meth comes in behind, which is
going to be--is this crystal meth or labs, or both? I assume
both.
Mr. Walters. That is both.
Mr. Souder. And that the other thing is this chart is going
to change internally. And if you can't get a sophistication of
what is happening, that this goes in one regional area, it gets
intense, the community responds; then it goes in another area,
it gets intense, the community responds. It looks like it is
flat when it is not. It is Jello moving around that could have
been defeated. And now it is going to move as we get control of
pseudoephedrine--opposed by HHS--get control of international
standards, which was opposed by the Department of State and, in
effect, the executive branch sitting aside, other than Attorney
General Gonzales and the DEA, watching us do this.
Yeah, we have kept it flat. We have been going at it like
crazy with meth hot spots, with HIDTAs developing it, trying to
do regional efforts. The Partnership for a Drug-Free America
has some ads, but they are doing it outside the Ad Campaign. So
if that is true that it is relatively flat, it is because State
and locals have been fighting like crazy to do this, with a
little bit of help--and we are jumping in.
And I still don't believe that is ultimately going to be
flat because now crystal meth is going to come in and suck up
the demand with a more potent and cheaper drug behind it and be
able to cut out, potentially, some of the Colombians and other
dealers because of being able to basically get this through
Mexico with legal drugs.
Now, we are working at that. I know we have talked on the
phone. I know you understand the India-China problem, that you
are becoming engaged on this as it moves toward crystal meth.
And I believe it will be then more of a traditional battle. But
the frustration you are hearing out of Congress when you
release figures like that, it is like ``this isn't a big
problem,'' when people are battling their heads off to get
control of this.
Mr. Walters. Mr. Chairman----
Mr. Souder. And you are saying it is not a national
problem. It is a national problem. It is a national--39 States
where this is their biggest problem, and you are telling me it
is not a national problem.
Mr. Walters. Mr. Chairman, I didn't say it wasn't a
national problem.
Mr. Souder. You said it was regionalized and localized,
even within States.
Mr. Walters. I said the intensity of the problem is
extremely localized based on the data I see. I can only tell
you what I have as the available information to me that comes
from credible sources. I cannot report something that I don't
have a credible source for. I did not say this was not a
serious problem. I believe I said this is as serious and
harmful a drug as there is. I believe that the good news here
is that, yes, States have been passing pseudoephedrine controls
as well as carrying out enforcement. They have been doing more
treatment, some of it with the President's Access to Recovery
money in some States.
Under the management of my office, the HIDTA program has
more initiatives on meth than any other single drug, I believe,
over the last several years. We have not been avoiding the
problem of meth. We have controlled what was first, as you
know, the diversion of pseudoephedrine and ephedrine from
industrial-size quantities in the United States for super-labs.
There was then importation from Canada, and our law enforcement
at the national level worked with the Canadian RCMP to shut
that down. We have had remarkable success, it looks like,
through State and through enforcement action more broadly on
small toxic labs, which helps us on toxic waste sites, on drug-
endangered children, on danger to first responders. And we hope
that will also change some of the availability here.
We are also now working with, and I met with, the Chinese
Ambassador a week ago. We are meeting with the other major
supplier countries of Germany and India. There is a conference
in Hong Kong. And we are working to cutoff the supplies that
have now been in combination and single ephedrine and
pseudoephedrine products coming into Mexico where this is
coming, so we addressed that issue as well. We are
systematically attacking both the supply and demand for meth.
I think one of the great things on our side is, frankly,
that the media does not glamorize meth. I mean, unlike the
early days of the cocaine epidemic and some of the times a
marijuana and some of the talk in the entertainment business
about ecstasy, which was the great threat when I took office in
2001 that was coming for our children, we have, I think, a real
depiction of the dangers of meth, which help us generally in
making a better understanding of the risk to young people and
young adults and adults generally.
So again, we are not there yet, but we are not failing to
pay attention. We are not failing to take steps that are making
systematic efforts. And I would say last, on the general point
of what we oppose, what we don't oppose, we support the Combat
Meth Act as an administration. Send it, we will sign it.
Mr. Souder. We like leadership, I know. I appreciate that
you never opposed it. And you informed me early on----
Mr. Walters. The President will sign it when Congress
passes it, the sooner the better. November would have been
better than December, February is better than March.
Mr. Souder. Well, the President, for the record, has not
vetoed any bill. The question is leadership. And the fact is
that different agencies inside the Federal Government, inside
the executive branch, were opposing the bill.
Mr. Walters. But I have been up consistently with Members
of Congress----
Mr. Souder. You have not opposed this.
Mr. Walters [continuing]. And I have said send us the bill,
send us the bill in a variety of the earlier forms. The one
thing I have worked with Members on is said I do not want a
floor on the ability of States to operate precisely because
State regulation is making a difference. And we don't want to
cutoff States that want to have heavier regulation. Congress
has accommodated that. And I think the sooner we get this, as
you pointed out, the data I arrayed, we have creep into States
that now don't see this as a major problem. The law will allow
us to give protection to some of those States. And the good
thing is we have a tool that works on the localized production
of meth. We want to use it.
Mr. Souder. Ms. Norton.
Ms. Norton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin by indicating that there are some very
important points of agreement that I would like to note. I
looked through several of the charts. I have a very serious
question about the chart that you and Mr. Souder were talking
about. I am reluctant to get into it, but I have a meth
question and a question about that chart.
This is a wonderful chart. This is a chart about the drug
courts. And this administration has consistently asked for an
increase in drug courts. You did so last year, and it took the
Congress to knock that down. It is such an important prevention
device, and you have not been deterred, apparently, by being
cut by the Congress. And if you are really talking about
preventions, if you talk about carrots and sticks, if you are
talking about tough love, a very good place to begin is with
drug courts. You have to scare the bejeezus out of them,
really.
And I must tell you, being brought before a judge that is
on a drug court has proved a very effective way to do it. I
can't tell you how many lives you have saved, economic and
actual lives you have saved by sticking with the drug court
notion which, you know, took off. It was in experimental phases
we can see, in the late 1980's and 1990's, just kept taking
off, and I encourage you to continue to do that no matter what
the Congress does.
I also am in strong agreement with your priorities--
stopping drug use before it starts, then you go to healing drug
users and then disrupting the markets. It seems to me that is
the right order of priority.
One of the reasons I so favor your first priority, starting
before it stops, goes back to something I think Mr. Souder has
heard me say in this committee. Those of us who aren't
addicted, let us say, to cigarettes or to drugs don't have a
real appreciation, I guess, of what real addiction is about.
But everyone has something that they wish they could give up.
And for me, you know, it is sweets. So I can't imagine, given
how difficult it is for me to push aside my sweet tooth, what
it must be to be truly addicted to a harmful substance,
particularly since we know now addiction to alcohol, to drugs
has some compulsion factors that we are still trying to
understand. So getting it early could not be more important.
And it seems to me it is the most important thing we could do.
I am not one of those who--I am a great admirer of the
multitude of programs to get people off drugs. You see, I don't
believe it. I really don't believe by sitting down and talking
to somebody or--I believe you can get people off of it and then
they go back on it. We all understand what that kind of
recidivism is about. We don't understand--I mean, if you talk
about smoking, people who smoke, whatever those things they--
you know, they put on them all the time. I mean, you know, I
just think we have to begin to--science is going to help us on
this.
So until then, you say, hey, look, just get it before it
starts. I would like you to reconcile that with a very small
portion of the budget to be spent on prevention. Just, as I
understand it, 11 percent of your projected budget you ask for
prevention programs. And I was so disappointed that represented
a 2 percent decline from your fiscal year 2006 levels. I
understand there is a tiny increase overall, but the last place
I would have expected an administration who has focused
relentlessly on drug courts to take from would be the already
small part of the budget that goes to prevention, the best
chance we have on drug addiction in this country, in my
judgment.
Mr. Walters. Yes, thank you, Congresswoman. We have tried
to focus, as we talked earlier, on what we think are the
programs at our disposal that work. And one of the areas that
causes the array to look the way it does is--we have just been
talking about this--that we have a disagreement over whether
the outputs from the Safe and Drug-Free Schools program, the
larger prevention program in the Department of Education,
because it is limited in its focus on drug prevention, is an
effective way to target that money. I wish it was. We have
tried to work with this before. The chairman and I have worked
on this, and I have worked with others, to try to build some
accountability into that program. And I am not saying there
aren't people who are using that money for good things. I have
gone around the country, too, and I know there are.
But the issue is not whether out of hundreds of millions of
dollars a few people are doing a good thing or some are, I
think the proper management and demand in this environment for
sustained funding is that the program itself can show that it
can generate results. Drug courts do that. The Media Campaign,
we believe, does that. The community coalitions campaign, we
believe, does that. The HIDTA program, I believe, produces
results. Again, we have been back and forth about the HIDTA
program, but the fact of the matter is in this budget, as you
have seen, the administration has taken, again, some pretty
hard decisions about revenue sharing with State and local law
enforcement, some of which are not going to be popular and may
not even be sustained.
In this budget, we have proposed level funding for the
HIDTA program. But on the prevention side, what we are trying
to do is support those avenues that we think will make a
difference. And in a competitive environment where, as you know
as well as I do, you have to make these decisions and provide
support for education programs, for health programs, for job
programs, and for others, what we have tried to do is maintain
those that will show they can drive the prevention forward in a
direction it has been going and follow through, and we have not
been able to request money for programs that are not as
effective.
Ms. Norton. Do you do control studies on these programs?
How do you know what is effective and what is not effective
unless you are doing control studies?
Mr. Walters. Well, they are required by the laws passed by
Congress to have performance measures and release those
performance measures as a part of what they submit to the
Congress and what they submit to OMB.
And look, here is the real problem, I think, with the Safe
and Drug-Free Schools program. It is conceptually not intended
to create specific results. It is intended to be a block grant.
It is intended to have money which is not specifically
directed, but for a range of activities to be deployed as State
and local officials see fit within the parameters of that
program. The problem is, in an environment we have like drug
courts, where you have a certain number of individuals going
in, a certain number of individuals going out, where we have a
Media Campaign where we are measuring attitude changes on the
target audience, where we a community coalition campaign that
is measuring declines in drug use----
Ms. Norton. Mr. Walters, you have a convert on that. You
are talking to somebody that doesn't believe in these people
saying, you know, we have cured X number of people and so
forth. But what you haven't convinced me about is that there
are not a sufficient number of programs that in fact have
undisputed results that should be funded. And indeed--Let me
tell you the difficulty. People see the administration as
eliminating programs in order to cut budgets. I think you would
have had a better chance, it seems to me, of convincing people
like me who are with you with all these programs, shucks, in a
school system, you--you, School System, figure out where your
folks--I am all for local control. You know, I argue that all
the time, for very good reasons.
But the only way I would do it, of course, would be to say,
look, School Systems, we have looked at programs tried in
representative school systems; you are in a big school system,
you are in a rural school system, you can choose one of these
programs. But you sure can take this money, you know, and give
it to, you know, X, Y--Ballou High School, you can have this,
Wilson, you can have your share. You wouldn't be able to do
that. That is something I would support.
The notion, though, of cutting prevention programs because
there are not enough good programs out here, that is very
much--given the priority you put on prevention, that is very
hard for me to accept. Because you have the right priority. You
have not put your money where your mouth is.
Let me go on to my second question.
Mr. Souder. Will the gentlelady yield to that point, to
kind of--I just want to add one thing that I have been
brainstorming that has not been developed. For example, one of
the problems is, by driving it to the individual school, often
they don't have enough money to do something, so therefore they
couldn't afford this type of program. But we could do that by
who we drive the dollars down to. If instead of--a lot of my
school districts have just one high school in it. If you did,
not to the Governor but to some sort of coalition, whether it
is a county or a four-county area or different things, and
then, like you do with CTAC, where there are certain allowable
things--you don't allow police departments to just come in and
say this is what we want, you say these are the things that
work in narcotics. And then you review that and say in this
size school, this type of thing works. And then for the type of
area that this area is representing, if it is a cluster of
rural districts, you say what tends to work in rural districts,
what are some national models, and this is pooled between those
schools, much like what we do in drug-free Indiana, much like
we do with some of the community antidrug coalitions.
There are creative ways that we can work with this other
than have it be just run out of Washington, but Washington
could give some guidance. And the question is, how can we make
this program more effective because it is one of our only
prevention things. It is in the school and it serves to back up
the National Ad Campaign.
Mr. Walters. Just one suggestion here from my own
experience, but--this is not obviously an administration
suggestion in the budget. First of all, it is a lot of--keep in
mind, I want to emphasize one point you made and make one
comment. It is a lot of money, but when it gets down to
individual schools, it is not a lot of money. So part of the
problem with this program is one of the demands of
effectiveness, you are right, if you are going to be fair, when
you get down to where the rubber meets the road, it is, like,
``I'm supposed to do what with this?''
So the issue is can we focus it. These block grants, I
don't need to tell you, there is enormous controversy within
the Congress about changing the formula. So it is not so easy
to say, well, OK, then just focus it. But second, the minimum
thing, I would say, as we are trying to do with community
coalitions and we are trying to do with others: measure drug
use in the school every year so people know what is happening
and they can measure whether the efforts combined are working
there or not. That has not ever been a requirement of this
program. So when you are trying to say, well, how do we have
accountability, if you don't have accountability against that
measure, what do measure and it makes any difference that you
know is going to be connected to making the problem smaller?
Ms. Norton. Thank you.
Let me go on to a very serious question I had. You are a
professional in this field, are you not?
Mr. Walters. Well--my hesitancy is I am not sure there is a
professional drug czar, but----
Ms. Norton. No, I am talking about what you have been doing
for 4 years.
Mr. Walters. I mean, I have worked in this policy issue in
Washington for a while, yes.
Ms. Norton. The reason I ask this is because I have a very
serious question. The most important issue for me as a Member
of Congress and an African American really isn't anything that
finds its solution in a piece of legislation, although
legislation is, like almost everything, a part of what we can
do. It has to do with the decline and fall of family life in
the United States and particularly in the African American
community. I have joined with a good friend of mine on the
other side of the aisle in the Senate, Sam Brownback, with whom
I cannot have more thoroughgoing disagreement on something he
is doing in the District of Columbia called Marriage
Development Accounts, because I am so concerned about it, the
notion that marriage has gone out of style, as it were. I hate
to use it that way. You have White children being born to
never-married mothers, you have twice that African American
children. Anybody who thinks that you can raise children that
way, it seems to me, hasn't gone into communities where mostly
mothers are trying to raise children on their own. So I have
very, very serious concerns here.
So when we look to the various causes, they are
multitudinous--some internal, some historic. They are very
large. And there is no pathway into solving this problem.
But I have to ask you, Mr. Walters, about one cause that is
explicit. And I want to ask you very frankly what your view is
and if you think this policy should continue. That is the
policy that began in panic after crack was introduced in
society in the early l990's and crime went up so badly, and we
developed a difference in the treatment of crack cocaine and
powdered cocaine. Democrats and Republicans both embraced this
difference not understanding what I am sure were unintended
consequences. Well, the consequences were the low-level drug
dealers, mostly people from the poorest communities, got caught
up, while the guys on top, the ones you want to go at in
Priority No. 3, Disrupting the Markets, were left to continue
to plow drugs back in the poorest communities in the United
States.
What is the effect on marriage when somebody gets a felony
record, and most of these drugs types are people who were
dealing--very little in the way of violent crime. Jails are
full of these nonviolent drug-addicted dealers. You finally get
out with a felony conviction, you know, and it is written on
your forehead. And if you happen to be African American, it is
written on your Black forehead. It was bad enough being Black
if you came out of a poor community, but now the word
``felony'' is over that.
Well, people will have children. African American women
know how to control children in various ways, from abortion to
birth control, so they have one perhaps, no more than two.
Their birth rate is not much different than the birth rate of
White women. But the whole notion of marrying the father has
very much disappeared, because in a real sense you marry
somebody who is--disproportionate numbers of whom have either
been to jail and have a felony record or are hustling--that is
not in your jurisdiction; it has to do with unemployment, the
rest of it--are hustling and, God knows, on their way to jail.
Even though a pregnancy occurs, the family will say do not
marry him. In your generation and mine, of course, the family
said the opposite--give the child a name even if you don't stay
with him. Or whatever. The way to look at such a man, ripe for
such a charge or with such a charge, is that he is
unmarriageable, he is not deemed to have the capacity to become
productive in the society.
So if you are looking for various things, and you see I am
looking for everything I can find--that is why Sam Brownback
and I are working on Marriage Development Accounts to make
marriage attractive again because part of the problem is, of
course, that people wonder whether they want to take on
financial responsibilities of marriage. It encourages savings
and it rewards saving. But I don't see how one can overlook
crack and powdered cocaine.
If one wanted to overlook it or consider that this is
Eleanor Norton, Black woman in Congress, then I would have to,
lawyer that I am, cite you to perhaps precedents that are more
persuasive--like Supreme Court Justices, beginning with Justice
Rehnquist or Justice Kennedy. For a Justice to speak out, as
they have, against the guidelines that result in this
disparity, saying, as they have, that rank injustice has been
done. And for us over here to kind of ignore it and keep going
willy-nilly while a whole generation of Black people are
condemned now to losing the family culture, and a whole
generation of Black children are being raised with no father,
and a whole generation of Black women, including middle-class
Black women, find such a disproportion between the number of
marriageable people without records, even if they are not
already in the middle class, marriageable Black men and
marriageable Black women, so that there is a whole generation
of Black women who will never be married.
Now, I cannot tell you that you have or I have the answers
to such a complex problem, but I can tell you one thing, that
disparity, which sweeps up boys and men without economic
opportunity in the poorest Black communities is one cause. It
is a cause. If a woman makes a mistake, she is making another
mistake to marry this man, and these children are left without
a parent. And I have to ask you in your professional judgment,
whether you think it is time to at least take another look at
the disparity between the sentences for powder cocaine and the
sentences for crack cocaine.
Mr. Walters. This has been, obviously, a concern almost
since the differential in sentencing was enacted. Of course,
the original reason was that people were trying to protect
people in the Black community. I was here during the Reagan
administration. I worked with Charlie Rangel, and you and
others here on this that were outraged that on top of the other
burdens that Black inner city Americans bear. Someone had
designed an incredibly addictive and destructive drug, I mean,
similar with what we talk about with meth. If you change the
drug, you would be talking about crack if you talked about the
inner city instead of rural western United States.
I do think that, obviously, the goal here was to say if we
had harsh penalties that really put people away, we would stop
this cancer from eating one generation after another.
Ms. Norton. And you and I agree these are thoroughly
unintended consequences. But one has to be a fool to see
unintended consequences and say, ``Let's keep on doing what
we're doing.'' What do you want to do, wipe out any prospect
for African Americans? Is 70 percent born to--not enough? What
will be enough? Will 80 percent turn this around? Have we not
reached the point where everybody ought to take a hard look at
this, even if they are not prepared to make a judgment on it.
Mr. Walters. And I think the other part of this is that the
adjustments that have been made still leave some disparity
here, as you point out. I mean the effort to create a bypass a
number of years ago if you were not a repeat offender, if you
didn't have a gun, there was a bypass created in the Federal
law. Of course, the Federal law also is--it is used in some
jurisdictions, but not in all jurisdictions. Washington is
somewhat unique in that regard.
It seems to me that the real----
Ms. Norton. Most jurisdictions in their own criminal law
don't have the guidelines that the Federal law has, and the DA
will sometimes pass off to the Feds, really go get them, so I
understand that. It is interesting that the States haven't
followed suit with what the Federal Government has done.
Mr. Walters. I agree with you that there is--I think that
reflects the difference about what is the proportionate level
of punishment, which is always going to happen in
jurisdictions, and it partly is going to be based on threat, it
is partly going to be based on individual judgments.
To get to the thrust of your question, of course, the
Federal law also does not actually involve a large number of
the offenders. If this were the only thing that were pulling
in--I am not trivializing its contribution, but it is a small
part of it. Obviously, the underlying issue is substance abuse,
and we have let substance abuse particularly impact cities. I
mean I have been here a long time and I have said before, if
what is happening to the inner cities--permit me to leave meth
aside for 1 minute, and rural America in our debate--if what is
even happening today with crack and powder cocaine, were
happening not in downtown Washington or Baltimore, but in Chevy
Chase, D.C. or Maryland, our response would be different.
We would not allow open-air drug markets in those areas.
Why? Because they are poisoning the people who live there. They
are taking their dollars from much less to begin with, and
turning them into an asset against economic opportunity and
education and safety and health. They're spreading blood-borne
diseases. They are turning people's families into hollow
shells. I agree with you.
I think that the key here is that we can look at the
proportion of enforcement, but we have to--I visited a re-entry
program in New Jersey within the last week--we have to first
bring people back and use what we have in helping young men
learn how to be parents that are coming out of the
institutions. We have too many there to forget them. And there
are programs that work here and we are funding them, and we
need to have more resources to fund those re-entry programs.
We also want to start at the beginning, I think, and that
is why I am proud that 40 percent of our community coalition
dollars go to disadvantaged communities. We worked with Mr.
Cummings on trying to make sure that this gets to more places.
I believe we ought to have more of these community organization
funds in the D.C. area. And I have asked my staff, and we have
tried to work with people in the D.C. metropolitan area to
build more of these capacities. But I agree with you, the
problem also is that what we allow is young males, White and
Black, particularly African-American males, to get into trouble
too far before we pay attention.
I tell people--and I know that there's resistance to this
and I have talked to others--if you want to also stop this--and
I am not begging the question about the distinction--but if you
really want to stop young men starting this, it is time to
connect the dots on public health measures and do drug testing.
We are working with the city of Detroit today to bring drug
testing to what is considered to be the worst school in
Detroit. Why? Because they have talked about this and
understand once you get over it, it is not going to be used as
punishment. It is going to be used as an enormously powerful
prevention tool, and it is going to be used to get people help
early before they are in the juvenile justice system.
There is a lot of sensitivity. Can we do this? Is it really
going to be run that way or is it going to be run a different
way? If we can do that in Detroit, I believe we can show this
can be done in a whole range of settings.
And what does it also do? It shows those kids who are at
risk that we have programs for, you know, bringing adults into
their lives when the family structure falls apart. We don't
connect them soon enough. The testing shows you also which kids
are going to bring a gun to school, which kids are going to be
truant, which kids are on the path to poor academic
performance. It allows us to wrap those services around, and
doesn't allow us an excuse to say, well, we didn't know what
was going to happen until he got in a fight or until he got
arrested.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Walters, I couldn't agree with you more. I
have my own Commission on Black Men and Boys. I mean, here I am
a card-carrying feminist, and I could not agree with you more.
I have to ask you very directly as a professional in this
field, not speaking for the administration, do you believe it
is time to take a second look at the disparity between crack
cocaine and powdered cocaine, either as a matter of fairness,
as Supreme Court Justices have said in a number of speeches, or
as a matter of policy on other counts, or do you support the
present disparity?
Mr. Walters. I don't think--I can't separate myself from my
position, so I can't--my opinions are not just my opinions in
this job, and I understand that. I think we are always willing
to work. We have been working with Senator Sessions in the
Senate and others about looking at--if there is going to be a
review of the law here, what it could be.
At this point I will tell you that, from my experience
looking at this, the relative number of individuals that are
brought into the crack mandatory minimum--because that is what
we are really talking about--is fairly small, and it is partly
smaller because the Federal Government is not generally
focusing enforcement at that level.
In addition, you have to separate those who have pled down
from a more serious charge to get to the ones you want to talk
about, which are those who are charged largely because they are
not a serious offender. The bypass has removed some of those
individuals. I do think though that the issue here is it is
symbolic now, and I think that is really what we are talking
about because a number of individuals is really relatively
small. I can get the number for the record.
It is known to have a disproportionate effect, and the
issue, is, why should that be? Again, it has not stopped
Congress from passing a mandatory minimum, as you probably
know, for meth that has its pattern on the crack mandatory
minimum. That will also be a racially disproportionate
enforcement mechanism. Now, again, the argument here though
that we have had, and that I have had, and I know you have
probably had if you talk about this, is when you change the
penalty to be less severe on the offender--and I recognize the
offender also masks children, wives, families--but the
offender, what are you doing to the victim, the person who they
are making a living off of poisoning? Sometimes they are also
poisoning themselves, but what I have heard from people I have
talked to in the Black community when this comes up, who
sometimes oppose it--not everybody and I think there is a
pretty broad consensus this should be changed in the African-
American community of people I talk to--but there are people
who are in that community who say, ``Who speaks for us? Who
speaks for saying that these people are doing something really
wrong, given the power of crack and what we know.''
Ms. Norton. I will tell you who speaks for them, the people
they elect, and I can tell you that the Congressional Black
Caucus, speaking for them--and if they don't like what we are
saying, they know how to tell us--are hearing these are killing
our families, this is killing our community.
Could I have one more, ask one more question on meth and I
am interested in knowing about its possible crossover effects.
I don't quite understand why it is being contained. I
understood something about the big city incubator for heroin,
for example. I don't understand meth and what we might do to
prevent its spread. I particularly wondered about this chart,
and I must say it is very clever. It was the other chart that
was up there, and I think Mr. Souder was dealing off of that
chart. This is a chart that is designed to show that the number
of meth users are going down, because it combines the meth
users with other drug dependencies, if most drug users didn't
get there by being on something else. That is kind of drug
abuse 101. Most people don't jump into the bad drugs like
heroin, cocaine or meth without going through the pathways. It
can be anything from marijuana to alcohol and up. If you looked
at these people--and I take it there is no illicit drug
dependence abuse--it should have said ``except for meth.''
Then, of course, you can look, and the numbers go down.
I don't understand that way scientifically of looking at
drug use because I don't understand it to comport with how drug
dealers in fact get to hard drugs independent, and then somehow
you factor in all these things.
My other question was related. I saw a television program--
maybe others saw it--recently. It was the most fascinating
thing I have ever seen--maybe it was the program, maybe it was
a little slip--that showed that meth addiction, severity of
addiction, went up and down according to almost absolutely
correlated to purity. And thus, they suggested that if you
looked at purity, you would know when addiction--and then they
put the two lines together, and I have never seen anything like
it. So my question is, why talk about drug addiction in this
way, when our common knowledge is that is not what addiction is
all about. We have to assume people are multi-addicted, and
does it really help us get rid of addiction to look at it that
way?
And the second is, is purity the thing to look at when we
look at meth, and is meth going to come to the big cities any
time soon?
Mr. Walters. First, I apologize if the chart is not clear.
What it is designed to show is not that meth is not serious.
What it is designed to show you is our ability to measure,
through the largest national survey we have, meth use. While it
has been constant over the three comparable years of the
survey, that within that constancy for population age 12 and
above, every year the number of addicted people among the meth
users has increased by 50 percent. The red bar--I am sorry that
is not in color--the red bar is those whose primary addiction
is meth. The blue bar is those who have a primary addiction to
something else and also use meth. Both of those are increasing
at a rate of 50 percent per year, while the total number of all
meth users, addicted and non-addicted, has remained constant.
This has become, not unlike--if you have seen similar data
for heroin--the conversion rate from first use to dependency is
extremely rapid, and in fact, for heroin at different times in
the past, the number of addicted users exceeds the number of
non-addicted users, because we have had longitudinal studies
that show if use heroin 10 times, you have a 50 percent
probability of becoming addicted to it because it is that
addictive. Methamphetamine is showing some of those similar
properties here, and it helps also to explain why while you
could have rates of use that may not change, that nonetheless
put enormous strains on the treatment system, it is not--
fortunately, there is not enormous number of new users coming
on board. In fact, that proportion of the overall user
population is shrinking.
The problem is, the consequences for addiction are
increasing at 50 percent per year. We need treatment resources
here.
And also on the point you made, which is very important,
people are coming to meth from--I have met people who say they
started with meth, and I don't doubt some have, but generally
speaking, they are coming to meth from using other drugs. What
that means--Mr. Souder's and my earlier conversation about the
Media Campaign, that is a different prevention problem for us.
We can't run a prevention campaign saying, ``Look, we know you
abuse alcohol and marijuana, but don't use meth.'' That is not
a very powerful Ad Campaign. And we certainly have the news
media talking about meth in a way that is very powerful.
So we are trying to look at prevention strategies and
intervention strategies that work, given the different
phenomenon of this problem. It is serious, and I think on the
issue of cities, yes, we are very worried it could come to
cities. Why? It already has done that in the Southwest,
certainly Los Angeles area. And second, as you see in the drug
strategy--and we have a chart but I won't bother to put it up
now--the number of small toxic labs that we have all been
concerned about or should be concerned about because of the
consequences of the environment for children and others is
going down. The remaining source that is now becoming bigger,
is crystal meth being made in Mexico and distributed by the
same organizations that are bringing, in some case, cocaine and
heroin and marijuana. They have marketing outlets in our
cities. They have the capacity to go nationwide very rapidly.
That is why we are working with the Mexican Government to
control the precursor chemicals that are now being focused in
Mexico to distribute this. That is why we are also looking, in
addition to local law enforcement against small toxic labs,
task forces that will deal with these organizations as we have
with cocaine and heroin, that are international. That is why I
met with the Mexican ambassador this morning, to talk about how
we can strengthen those cross-border operations, as well as the
efforts we are making to cutoff--we have cutoff significantly
the precursors necessary to make meth from Canada, from within
the United States, and the amount of production is declining
over-the-counter drugs as a result of regulation, which we want
to follow through on.
But the issue now, and the danger for our cities, is if we
aren't successful on the Mexican produced, organization
distributed meth, you will have meth as a bigger problem in
major cities if the patterns were to continue.
Now, we don't entirely understand this, because there is a
tendency for these drugs, like a disease, to spread as an
epidemiological phenomenon. They don't come from nowhere. They
come from contact of one person that is involved to the people
around them. So there can be pockets of intensity. There can be
limits, but that is why I talked about the need to localize
this, especially in the early stages. If we are going to wait
until that is--Mr. Cummings mentioned there is 19 million
Americans who use an illegal drug once a month or more
frequently. Fortunately, by a comparative measure, which is not
a census, this is about 600,000, 700,000. If we want to wait
for this to be 3 million, we will have a meth problem of
gigantic proportions. Our goal is----
Ms. Norton. It is going to depend a lot on the price of
crystal meth.
Mr. Walters. Purity and price, yes. I believe that what you
saw and what you cited is a critical matter because that
reflects availability. Those changes up and down though, I
think the suggestion--I saw just a transcript of the Frontline
program--the suggestion was that the drug traffickers are
manipulating the purity. We don't have perfect knowledge of
this, but I think the actual--if you look over time there, what
is actually manipulating the purity is the effectiveness of
enforcement in cutting off pseudoephedrine to major labs in
California that were run by organizations, the ability to
control some of the pseudoephedrine at the State level, that in
fact, it is a consequence of the law enforcement and
regulatory----
Ms. Norton. If that is the case, how come it goes up and
down?
Mr. Walters. Well, because what happened was, first of all,
you had large production by organizations largely focused in
California when pseudoephedrine was available inside the United
States. We cutoff that source of large bulk supply. There was a
downturn. Then it came from Canada. They established routes
through pharmaceutical firms in Canada. We worked through it at
the RCMP to cut that off. Then the enormous explosion of small
toxic laboratories occurred from over-the-counter production.
That was lower purity, but more availability. That has been--it
has dropped over the last year by about 50 percent.
Ms. Norton. So when you say it is purity and--I mean the
purity lines were converged absolutely. I am going to ask you
to go back and have somebody do a study to prove what you are
talking about, law enforcement.
Mr. Walters. Sure.
Ms. Norton. But are you saying purity was not a factor or--
--
Mr. Walters. No, purity was a factor.
Ms. Norton [continuing]. Was an additional factor?
Mr. Walters. No. I was saying the cause of the purity--
again, we don't know this perfectly, and I don't want to
overstate this--the cause of the purity change I believe was
suggested to be manipulation by drug traffickers. There may be
some effort to adjust this, but generally speaking, they are
producing what they can produce with the picture that is put on
them.
Ms. Norton. But they may have pressure to produce more to
get to more users. Wouldn't they be inclined to dilute what
they got?
Mr. Walters. Well, they may not be able to produce as pure
a product when their precursor chemicals they need to produce
it are not as available, yes. That is what I am saying. And
when they have to use smaller lab sites--again, this is a
dangerous drug. The purer it is, the more dangerous it is. Does
the change in purity reflect manipulation by the bad guys, or
does the change in purity reflect the progress of the good
guys?
Ms. Norton. I appreciate what you are saying, Mr. Walters,
because you are approaching it scientifically and you are
talking about hypotheses. I wonder if you are in a position,
the drug czar is in a position to put out an RFP so we can find
out what in fact produces this, and pinpoint, so that we know
more then perhaps about how to stop it.
Mr. Walters. We are trying to look at that internally. We
will be happy to share those results with you.
Mr. Souder. Also, there is more purity if an area is
crystal meth as opposed to mom and pop labs, because they don't
achieve the same purity level. So depending on the mix of the
meth, you get a different--so, let's say in Oklahoma--part of
this is going away, so let's say in Oklahoma they are doing mom
and pop labs. They do the pseudoephedrine law that purity was
lower. We shut down the mom and pop labs. They move to crystal
meth. The purity goes up so the addiction goes up. Then you
bust a big distribution network, which has a lag effect. The
Canadian bust he is talking about at Windsor and Detroit, we
think took out at that point 40 percent of the raw
pseudoephedrine for a period of time in the United States. Then
it found another way to come in.
But the problem, when we talk about meth, is that there is
two types of meth going on in the country, and the urban threat
is crystal meth, although we are starting to see some labs. But
it is not just a rural phenomena, and you repeated that here,
and that you clarified. Phoenix has it. Los Angeles has it.
Minneapolis has it. And there was an early myth that because
right now crack is still the choice in most major cities and
African-American areas. But in Minneapolis, at our hearing in
St. Paul and the Minneapolis side, one neighborhood gang in the
African-American community switched from crack to meth, and all
of a sudden, 20 percent from a standing start of zero, 20
percent in I think it was 3 months of the people who were
addicted--I believe it was a Drug Court measurement--in the
African-American community, were meth predominantly, because--
and that city was, I believe, 5 to 10 percent, and it showed
that it could be a crack epidemic if the distribution network
changes.
And I believe the disservice that you are continuing to do
is to act like it has flat-lined, when in fact, this is a
rolling phenomena.
In my district, Elkhart and Fort Wayne, the two biggest
cities, don't have any meth or minimal. Elkhart is starting to
get some, because crack is still the drug of choice. But as it
moves and we get control out here in the mom and pop labs, and
the crystal meth comes back in, all of a sudden--and so the
line is changing, and the reason we have a flat line and the
reason we are going to see purity go up in America, could be,
is that the bill we are about to pass in the Combat Meth Act,
is going to regulate pseudoephedrine at a Federal level.
Now, that means the mom and pop labs are going to be
scrambling as to how to deal with this. The net effect of that
is, is crystal meth is going to jump short term. But we also
put international precursor controls in, and agree we can do
that, and get control of the Southwest border, they will have
to water it down and blend it in order to do it.
So you have to have multiple different strategies. But to
understand that, you have to understand the risk of the drug.
I thank you for your patience. I know this is kind of our
Valentine's Day gift to you, and you love this every year, to
come up here, but we appreciate the thoroughness and the
ability to talk this through.
I personally believe that the disparity is wrong in
cocaine, but I believe we need tougher penalties on powder. The
drug of choice of Whites should not be less severe than for the
drug of choice that is more likely to be African-American.
Those are just tilt area, but to the degree your statistics are
right, I think what Senator Sessions is looking at is, OK, if
we take this down, do we also increase the powder? And I
thought it was a good discussion, but I would have a slightly
different resolution to it.
But I thank you for your testimony. We will continue to, I
am sure, try to refine as we move through, and particularly,
since I believe Safe and Drug-Free Schools is still likely to
stay there, and as we move into the next thing of how to
creatively try to address this huge prevention program,
including the drug testing.
With that, the subcommittee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 5:03 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
[Additional information submitted for the hearing record
follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.021
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.022
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.023
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.024
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.025
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.026
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.027
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.028
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.029
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.030
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.031
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.032
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.033
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.034
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.035
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.036
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.037
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.038
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.039
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.040
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.041
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.042
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.043
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.044
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.045
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.046
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.047
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.048
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.049
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.050
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.051
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.052
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.053
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.054
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.055
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T9579.056
<all>