“The President’s Fiscal Year 2000 Drug Control Strategy”
Senator Biden: Mr. Vice President, members of the Cabinet, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been doing this a long time. I look out here, and I see some very familiar faces. We’ve come a long way.
We’ve come a long way in terms of how to approach dealing with the drug problem. We used to argue — back fifteen, twenty years ago – about whether the answer was more treatment or more police or more incarceration or more testing or more interdiction. And we finally learned to walk and chew gum at the same time. We finally figured out we’ve got to do all of them, all of them all of the time.
But we still suffer in this town — and, I think, in this nation — from celebrating our successes a little too soon. We have had periods where, when the Indian drug problem dropped off the map, we decided we didn’t have a problem and we didn’t follow up. So the Indian drug strategy was never followed up in Congress or by Presidents. Then all of the sudden it became a gigantic problem again.
Now we’re in a position where drug production is down; and hopefully, we’re not going to make the same mistake again.
Another good thing that’s happened: we have each year taken a little bit of the partisan poison out of this fight. It used to be, ‘Who does it better? Who’s doing it worse?’ One of the reasons why, when I wrote the act that created the Drug Czar’s — he’s now the Drug Director, but in Congress we call him the Drug Czar — office, is that no President wanted it. Two Democratic Presidents didn’t want any part of having it; Republican Presidents didn’t want any part of there being a Drug Czar. There’s a simple reason for it — and Vice President Gore was in the Senate then and supported it at that time so he’ll remember why — nobody wants to take the responsibility if the responsibility requires you to set goals and then measure whether or not you’ve met the goals.
Because if it’s a Republican President/Democratic Congresses — and there may be one again, Congressmen, and there may be a Republican President again; I doubt it but maybe — what would happen is Democratic Senators would say, ‘That Republican President didn’t meet the goal he set.’ And Republican Congresses would say the same about Democratic Presidents.
And then along came the most decorated member of the United States military, who decided to take on the job of being the Drug Czar. He’s a guy that everybody has learned to love and hate, and the reason why is that he got in everybody’s face. And that was the intended purpose of the Drug Czar.
There are fifty different agencies, fifty different people trying to do the right thing, thousands and thousands of people, and nobody wanting one person to be in charge of everything relating to drugs.
And he’s made some enemies, even some of his friends from the old Defense Department days; but he’s finally arrived at something here.
The first drug strategy written — and Robbie and others remember I happened to write the first drug strategy in the Congress — was one of these little volumes. Now we’re finally getting there.
You know why we’re getting there? We’re getting there because this guy used to be a General, and he’s used to facts. And he kept saying to me when he took on the job, ‘How do we know what the problem is? And how do we know and how are we going to measure whether or not we made any success?’ Because like crime and unlike international finance or complicated aspects of health care, everyone thinks they’re an expert on drugs.
No one has to know anything, but they all have an answer — ‘Everybody knows if you just did it my way, you’d be done’ – when in fact, we had very little data from which to make judgments about the kind of progress we’re making, whether it was on interdiction or on treatment or on any aspect of the fight. And what he has done is what every other President has feared someone would do, and that is begin to establish hard core numbers and goals.
Now (U.S. Representative John) Mica and Biden are going to be watching this President, and finding out whether or not he is going to meet the goals, whether he’s going to fund the goals, whether he’s going to fight for the goals. The next President, President Gore, you’re going to have the real problem. The reason why is because all these things will have kicked in by then. I really mean this. He knows I’m not kidding. The next President is going to have a real problem because the database will be firmly, firmly established.
The reason I bother to bore you with this kind of thing is the drug problem is not static. It’s not static, yet we tend to approach it as if it’s static. Now it’s heroin for kids my daughter’s age. Now it’s heroin that we have to worry about. We have to worry about marijuana, but heroin’s on the horizon. It’s a big deal. I wrote a report three years ago saying that and people said, ‘No, no, kids are not going to use heroin.’ Watch, watch. Tomorrow, the next day it will be something else. And so the reason to approach this thing in the businesslike manner the Drug Director has taken on is so that we can be flexible.
Now let me conclude by suggesting that the Administration has put forward what I believe to be a first-rate strategy. They don’t claim that they have reinvented the wheel. They’re not claiming we’re going to end drugs in our time. It took us twenty-five years to get to this spot, folks, and we are not going to be able to turn it back in two, five, or ten years. And we’re never going to be able to turn it back if we conclude we’ve finally won.
I’ll remind you all that we had a drug epidemic in the teens, in the 1900’s where more people in America were consuming what we now consider to be controlled substances, as a percent of the population, than consume them today. The drug epidemic was larger. It grew out of the soldier’s disease of the Civil War and germinated for thirty-five years.
We used to have another ‘Drug Director.’ The first one was a guy named Anslinger. It was in the twenties, and guess what? They whipped the problem. They whipped the problem; and they did it through education, they did it through treatment, and they did it through enforcement as well.
And then they decided it was over. They decided all through the thirties and forties, ‘Don’t tell our kids about the problem, they may use ‘em.’ We ended up in the sixties, with a doctor in the White House — whom both Vice President Gore and I know — who went and, when we said to him early on that cocaine was a problem, came up to me in my office as Chairman of Judiciary and said, ‘Why are we picking on cocaine?’ The A.M.A. did not even list it as an addictive drug. We had gone into a cocoon again. We ‘won’ and the problem was ‘finished.’
This problem’s not going to ever be finished. Our vigilance is never going to be anything other than needed.
What the General didn’t tell you is that this guy came along and said, ‘Look there’s a particular problem in the Black community, in the Hispanic community.’ We don’t like to talk about that. If we get drugs out of white middle class communities, we all feel much better about it, even if they’re still extremely bad in black communities.
With this program that you just saw, we’re getting saturation among all children. We’re getting twice as much saturation in Black communities and in Hispanic communities because the problem is bigger and there’s greater focus on it. This is a guy who keeps his commitments.
But in addition, this program lets kids know and parents know that this ain’t your - you know that ad that used to be out there, used to be called, ‘It ain’t your father’s Oldsmobile.’ Well those of you who are out of the sixties, this ain’t your father’s marijuana. It’s a different deal. It’s a hell of a lot more potent. It’s a hell of a lot different than it was in the sixties. So we’ve got to educate parents as well.
In addition to doing that, what they’ve decided to do is two things that I think are incredibly important. I’ll conclude with this and the General spoke to it: drugs are crime. These kids using marijuana are incubators for crime. And those hard core criminals, those hard core addicts that are mentioned, the ones we least like to try to focus on, have to commit somewhere in the order of 162 felonies a year to keep their habits going. It doesn’t take a lot of math to figure out that if you significantly impact the drug problem, you significantly impact crime.
One of the things we did at the federal level years ago is we decided we were going to treat people in federal prisons. One of the Republican initiatives, with Democratic support, was to do that for the states. This has been adopted. There’s going to be a significant effort to get states to deal with zero tolerance. We let more people out of prisons, in state prisons, addicted to drugs as they walk out the door than there are young people using drugs, hard drugs. And so they’ve decided to deal with prisons as a $75 million increase requested.
Drug courts: they work. We fought over that and fought over that for years. It was Janet Reno’s idea, and she told me about it, and we put in a law a long time ago that now has bipartisan support.
And treatment. You can’t get from here to there. Ultimately, when a person consumes drugs and gets addicted to them, it becomes a disease of the brain, as Pat Moynihan says, and it needs treatment.
And so, I think this is a balanced approach. I’m hoping we have a balanced, bipartisan approach to dealing with it. We will look at it; we’ll look at it closely, and when there’s disagreement, I’m sure we’ll say it. But I am confident that the partisanship is finally moving out of this thing. This isn’t a Democratic or a Republican problem, nor a Democratic or Republican solution. It’s a solution being led by a General who knows what the hell he’s talking about, who has taken no prisoners, who has laid out in detail a hard, cold statistical analysis of where we’re going, what we have to do, and what goals we have to meet.
It’s a long way to go; but I’m confident that the combination of a bipartisan approach in the United States House of Representatives and in the Senate, led by the guy who’s been the spearhead of all of this, the Vice President of the United States, we’re going to be able to get it done.
I have the great honor of being able to introduce a young woman who knows first hand about the toll that drug abuse can take on a family, especially children who grow up in homes where parents are drug abusers. She grew up in a home in California where both her parents were heroin addicts. Her mother is in recovery, but her father is still fighting against the tremendous lure of drugs. Nevertheless, this young woman, Jessica Hulsey, whom I’ll introduce in just a second, has become a national spokesperson on the dangers of drug abuse.
She received a scholarship from Princeton University, from which she graduated last year. Subsequently, Jessica was named last fall to be a member of the President’s Drug Free Communities Advisory Commission, which I am proud to have supported in the last Congress along with many others. Jessica is an example of someone who has made and continues to make a difference in the fight against drug abuse. She knows of what she speaks. I now would like you all to meet Jessica.