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20–878 PDF 2005

FISCAL YEAR 2006 DRUG BUDGET

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

FIRST SESSION

FEBRUARY 10, 2005

Serial No. 109–15

Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpo.gov/congress/house

http://www.house.gov/reform

(II)

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM

TOM DAVIS, Virginia, Chairman

CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut

DAN BURTON, Indiana

ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida

JOHN M. MCHUGH, New York

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

JOHN J. DUNCAN, JR., Tennessee

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio

DARRELL E. ISSA, California

GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida

JON C. PORTER, Nevada

KENNY MARCHANT, Texas

LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia

PATRICK T. MCHENRY, North Carolina

CHARLES W. DENT, Pennsylvania

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

——— ———

HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

TOM LANTOS, California

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York

PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania

CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri

DIANE E. WATSON, California

STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts

CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

BRIAN HIGGINS, New York

ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of

Columbia

———

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

(Independent)

MELISSA WOJCIAK, Staff Director

DAVID MARIN, Deputy Staff Director/Communications 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

DAN BURTON, Indiana

JOHN L. MICA, Florida

GIL GUTKNECHT, Minnesota

STEVEN C. LATOURETTE, Ohio

CHRIS CANNON, Utah

CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan

GINNY BROWN-WAITE, Florida

VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina

ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland

BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont

DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois

DIANE E. WATSON, California

LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California

C.A. DUTCH RUPPERSBERGER, Maryland

MAJOR R. OWENS, New York

——— ———

EX OFFICIO

TOM DAVIS, Virginia HENRY A. WAXMAN, California

J. MARC WHEAT, Staff Director

NICOLAS COLEMAN, Professional Staff Member

MALIA HOLST, Clerk

TONY HAYWOOD, Minority Counsel

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

Hearing held on February 10, 2005 ....................................................................... 1

Statement of:

Reuter, Peter, Ph.D., professor, School of Public Policy, University of

Maryland ....................................................................................................... 68

Walters, John, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive

Office of the President .................................................................................. 18

Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:

Cummings, Hon. Elijah E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Maryland, prepared statement of ............................................................ 10

Reuter, Peter, Ph.D., professor, School of Public Policy, University of

Maryland, prepared statement of ................................................................ 71

Souder, Hon. Mark E., a Representative in Congress from the State

of Indiana, prepared statement of ............................................................... 4

Walters, John, Director, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive

Office of the President, prepared statement of ........................................... 21

(1)

FISCAL YEAR 2006 DRUG BUDGET

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2005

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 2:45 p.m., in room

2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Mark E. Souder (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Souder, McHenry, Brown-Waite and

Foxx.

Staff present: J. Marc Wheat, staff director and chief counsel;

Nicholas Coleman, professional staff member; Malia Holst, clerk;

Tony Haywood, minority counsel; and Jean Gosa, minority assistant clerk.

Mr. SOUDER. Good morning, and thank you for coming. Today we

are holding our subcommittee’s first official hearing of the 109th

Congress, and it is very appropriate that our topic is the Federal

drug budget, the money that the U.S. Government spends to reduce

drug abuse, whether through law enforcement, drug treatment or

drug use prevention. Since its creation, this subcommittee’s primary mission has been to oversee all aspects of the Federal Government’s approach to the drug abuse problem. This hearing will

go to the heart of that mission.

When evaluating drug control policies, we must always apply one

simple test: Do the policies reduce illegal drug use? That is the ultimate performance measure for any drug control policy, whether

it is related to enforcement, treatment or prevention. And if we

apply that test, the Bush administration is doing very well. Drug

use, particularly among young people, is down since President

Bush took office in 2001. Under this administration we have seen

an 11 percent reduction in drug use, and over the past 3 years

there has been a historic 17 percent decrease in teenage drug use.

That is in stark contrast to what happened in the mid to late

1990’s, when drug use, particularly among teenagers, rose dramatically after major declines in the 1980’s and early 1990’s.

These statistics show that the policies pursued by this administration and the Congress are working. The combination of tough

and vigorous law enforcement, treatment of those suffering from

drug addiction, and no-nonsense drug abuse prevention and education programs has yielded significant positive results. Our goal is

to continue and build on that success by identifying which specific

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policies are working best, and which ones could use improvement,

and which ones are not working.

The President submitted his overall budget request on Monday.

Although the Office of National Drug Control Policy [ONDCP], has

not yet issued its annual Drug Budget Summary or its annual National Drug Control Strategy, our review of the overall budget proposal reveals the outlines of the President’s drug policy priorities.

First, the President is proposing a significant boost to Federal

law enforcement and drug interdiction operations. I support that

increase. Without a credible deterrent to traffic, the supply of drugs

will simply overwhelm our other programs. Treatment and prevention will not work if drugs are not only plentiful and cheap, but

there is no legal penalty or social stigma attached to their sale and

use.

The President’s boost to Federal law enforcement agencies, however, is accompanied by a substantial proposed reduction in Federal assistance to State and local law enforcement. The administration is asking Congress to eliminate funding for the Byrne Grants

Program, to cut funding to the Methamphetamine Hot Spots Grant

Program by over 60 percent, and to cut funding for the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas [HIDTA], Program by more than 50

percent. The HIDTA Program budget cuts would be accompanied

by a transfer of the remaining funds to the Justice Department’s

Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force [OCDETF], effectively terminating the program as it currently exists.

These cuts would certainly have a very dramatic impact on drug

enforcement at the State and local level, at least in the short term.

I am also concerned that the damage to Federal, State and local

law enforcement cooperation would be even more long-lasting. Most

drug enforcement takes place at the State and local level, not at

the Federal level. We need to be very sure that we continue to

treat State and local agencies as partners in this effort.

Second, the President is proposing modest increases in drug

treatment programs from their currently appropriated levels. I welcome these increases, and I believe that this administration is taking positive steps to improve the performance and accountability of

treatment programs. Without effective performance evaluation, it

will be impossible for Congress and the public to judge whether

various treatment programs are worth the substantial investment

they require.

I am particularly encouraged by the administration’s continuing

commitment to its ground-breaking Access to Recovery [ATR], initiative, which seeks to increase the availability of drug treatment

services and to give patients greater control over the kind of service

they receive.

Third, the President is proposing deep cuts or level funding for

many of our major drug use prevention programs. The administration is specifically asking for the elimination of the Safe and DrugFree Schools Program, and the level funding of the Drug-Free Communities Program, and level funding of the National Youth AntiDrug Media Campaign. I have serious concerns about this.

It is true that many prevention programs, particularly the Safe

and Drug-Free Schools Program, have had difficulty maintaining

an antidrug focus and demonstrating results in terms of reduced

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drug use. However, terminating them outright or refusing to fully

fund them sends the message that the Federal Government is

backing away from prevention. Reducing demand is a crucial element of drug control policy. Rather than terminate prevention programs, we should look for ways to improve them by forcing them

to measure their real impact on drug use. The Media Campaign,

for example, has already done this. Its studies show that the advertising is reaching its intended audience and increasing their perception of the harms of drug use. The resulting reduction in youth

drug use is the ultimate measure of success.

In addition to our discussion of the budget, we will also be addressing the role and the future of ONDCP itself. ONDCP, which

was established in 1989, is intended to act as the principal advisor

to the President on drug control issues and to coordinate all aspects of the Federal Government’s drug control policies. I have ongoing concerns, however, about how much impact ONDCP is having on administration policy. For example, ONDCP appears to have

been largely absent in the ongoing debate over how to address the

rapid expansion of Afghan opium production since the fall of the

Taliban in 2001. Many of my colleagues and I have been very disappointed in the failure of the Defense Department to take effective action against the heroin traffic in Afghanistan; we are now

also worried about the State Department’s commitment to this program. ONDCP needs to take a more visible and active role in

bringing the Defense Department and the other agencies together

to craft a workable, effective anti-heroin strategy in Afghanistan.

We plan to address these and many other issues today as we

begin the budget process and our work on the reauthorization of

ONDCP and its programs this year.

We thank our principal witness, Director John Walters of

ONDCP, for agreeing to come and testify today. We also welcome

Professor Peter Reuter, a former drug policy advisor to the Clinton

administration, whose testimony was requested by the minority.

We thank everyone for taking the time to join us, and look forward

to your testimony.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Mark E. Souder follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. We will do a couple of procedural matters before

moving ahead. Before proceeding I would like to take care of several of these procedural matters. First, since this hearing was originally scheduled as a full committee hearing, I ask unanimous consent that all committee members of the full Government Reform

Committee present be permitted to participate. I ask unanimous

consent. Hearing no objection, so ordered.

I also ask unanimous consent that all Members have 5 legislative

days to submit written statements and questions for the hearing

record; that any answers to written questions provided by the witnesses 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.

We have been joined—as Members make their way over from the

vote, I went ahead and I did my opening statement so we could get

rolling since we are 35 minutes behind.

Let me first introduce two new Republicans on our side before I

go to you for an opening statement; you can catch your breath. I

am joined by our new subcommittee vice chairman, Mr. McHenry

of North Carolina, and also by Ms. Brown-Waite from the west side

of Florida, and we appreciate your participation in today’s hearing

as well.

I now yield to the ranking member, Mr. Cummings, for his opening statement.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And certainly we welcome Mr. Higgins to our side of the table.

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for holding this very important hearing on the President’s proposed drug budget for fiscal year

2006. I would like to extend an appreciative welcome to our two

distinguished witnesses, the Director of the White House Office of

National Drug Control Policy and principal advisor to the President

on drug policy, John Walters; and certainly to Dr. Peter Reuter, the

founder and former director of the RAND Drug Policy and Research Center and now professor of public affairs in criminology at

the University of Maryland School of Public Policy.

As we meet today to discuss the President’s proposals for Federal

drug control programs and the process by which the Federal drug

budget is formulated and defined, drug abuse, addiction and a corrosive and often violent drug economy continue to ravage communities throughout the Nation. These communities are urban, rural

and suburban, rich, middle class and poor; and the drug threats

they face vary greatly along geographical and demographic lines. It

is clear that disadvantaged populations in our Nation’s cities are

disproportionately affected, however, and nowhere in America are

the tragic consequences of drug abuse and drug violence more evident than in my own city of Baltimore, including the neighborhood

I call home.

It was just today in the Sun paper the Federal prosecutors took

over a State case where a woman had been fire-bombed out of her

house because she decided to cooperate with the police with regard

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to some drug activity, and, Director Walters, you will recall we

dealt with the Dawson case where seven people were incinerated

to death because they simply wanted to cooperate with the police

with regard to drug activity. And so we see it up front and personal

in the 7th Congressional District of Maryland.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy plays an important

role in shaping our Nation’s response to the drug problem, and I

am thankful to Director Walters for demonstrating his concern and

compassion for the plight of my neighbors in Baltimore City. And

I will say it, Mr. Chairman, that—and I say it to the world—I

think John Walters has done an outstanding job; he has been fair;

I’ve never felt one moment of bipartisanship. I feel that you deal

with things in a very professional way, and I am glad that you are

where you are.

Because the drug problem is so multifaceted, the agencies that

address its various aspects are located throughout the government.

ONDCP was created in 1988 for the primary purpose of coordinating drug control policymaking among these various agencies.

The ONDCP Director’s authority to certify the budgets of the

agencies that perform drug control functions is among the statutory tools that ONDCP has at its disposal to ensure that those

budgets reflect and advance the President’s priorities and goals in

the area of drug control. The Director also oversees the formulation

of the National Drug Control Strategy, which places the drug budget request and policy objectives in a narrative framework and evaluates the effectiveness of drug control initiatives for the prior fiscal

year.

Beginning in fiscal year 2004, ONDCP undertook a restructuring

of the Federal drug budget that affects what costs and functions

are included in the collection of agency budgets that we call the

drug budget for purposes of evaluating and formulating policy. We

will look at the implications of that restructuring today, in addition

to looking at the drug budget itself.

Although we have yet to see either the President’s 2005 strategy

or a detailed accounting of the Federal drug budget, the proposed

funding for all Federal agencies involved in drug control is set forth

in the overall budget request submitted to Congress this week.

From that, we can draw some conclusions.

The fiscal year 2006 drug budget is more heavily weighted toward supply reduction than to demand reduction, and to a greater

extent than in years past. The fiscal year 2006 budget allocates approximately 39 percent of drug control funding to demand reduction versus 45 percent in fiscal year 2005. Sixty-one percent of the

drug control spending is devoted to supply reduction activity, much

of it based in source countries.

The total $4.8 billion allocated for demand reduction fiscal year

2006 is not just a smaller percentage of the drug budget, it also

represents a net reduction of about $270 million compared to the

level appropriated by Congress in fiscal year 2005. The most severe

program cut in the area of prevention is elimination of $441 million

in funding for grants to States under the Safe and Drug-Free

Schools Program within the Department of Justice, and the consequences will be felt in classrooms across the country where

States cannot fund drug education on their own. The Drug-Free

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Communities Grant Program is funded at $10 million below the

authorized level, and the budget of the new Community Coalition

Institute is slashed by more than one-half.

In the area of treatment, there are substantial increases for drug

courts and the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Program,

but the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant,

the backbone of the Nation’s drug treatment infrastructure, and

Targeted Capacity Expansion grants are merely level-funded. Within the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, only the President’s

Access to Recovery voucher initiative, a new program, that serves

only 14 States currently, receives a significant increase.

With regard to domestic law enforcement, the President’s budget

increases support for the Drug Enforcement Administration, but

proposes not only to cut the HIDTA Program by more than $128

million, more than half its fiscal year 2005 budget, but also to

move it to the Department of Justice. This would sharply curtail

joint antidrug efforts by Federal, State and local law enforcement,

and change the flexible nature of the HIDTA Program that makes

it so effective and valuable in the Baltimore-Washington region and

elsewhere. At the same time, we are increasing funding for supply

reduction activities that have yet to fulfill their purpose of affecting

the price, purity and availability of dangerous, illicit drugs like cocaine and heroin in the United States.

Although marijuana use among the 8th, 10th, and 12th-grade

students has dropped significantly, according to the December 2004

Monitoring the Future survey, the very same survey shows use of

cocaine and heroin increasing in the same population subgroup.

Thus, while the data allows the President to claim victory in meeting his goal of reducing overall drug use by 10 percent over 2

years, there is a disturbing trend going on with regard to cocaine

and heroin, and our Nation’s drug policy must be responsive to it.

Mr. Chairman, the significant shifts in drug control funding priorities at the beginning of the President’s second term will be attributed in part to the deficit, but the apparent de-emphasis of demand reduction is disconcerting even in that context. The deficit

has many effects, but eliminating the unmet need for treatment capacity is not one of them.

I’m also troubled by what drug policy experts outside the administration believe is a rather arbitrary approach to deciding what

agencies and functions are included in or omitted from the restructured drug budget. Both of these developments concerning the drug

budget raise questions about how ONDCP’s statutory authorities

are being exercised that we should address today and in the coming months.

I’m really looking forward to a healthy discussion among our colleagues and our distinguished witnesses, and I yield back the balance of my time.

[The prepared statement of Hon. Elijah E. Cummings follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Ms. Brown-Waite, do you have any opening comments you would like to make?

Ms. BROWN-WAITE. No, Mr. Chairman, I don’t have any opening

comments, except to say that I recently sat in a teen court, and if

you don’t think that the drug problem is very pervasive among

teens and very young teens, then I think we’re deluding ourselves.

I look forward to hearing the testimony today so that we can

have a better handling on where this money is going, and the efficacy of it, too. Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. Mr. HIGGINS. No, thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you for joining the committee; I look forward

to working with you.

Ms. Foxx is another new Member from North Carolina.

Do you have any opening comments?

Ms. FOXX. No.

Mr. SOUDER. OK. Thank you very much.

Director Walters, you know our routine in the government forum,

and we need to swear you in as a witness.

[Witness sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show that the witness responded in

the affirmative.

Thank you again for your leadership in this very difficult subject

where we constantly work at our trials, and hopefully we can make

a little progress year by year, but it is a never-ending problem. We

thank you for your leadership and thank you for again coming before our committee. I look forward to your testimony.

STATEMENT OF JOHN WALTERS, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF NATIONAL DRUG CONTROL POLICY, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF

THE PRESIDENT

Mr. WALTERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is a great pleasure

to be here with you and Ranking Member Cummings, who I have

had the pleasure of working with over the number of years I have

been Director of this office.

I don’t look at my job as a hard job, I look at my job as a remarkably beneficial gift to work on something you care about. I know

many of you see your service to the country in the same way. And

I’m pleased at the opportunity to work with many of you who have

given so much and allow us to be more effective in what we do with

the executive branch programs that we fund.

I appear before you today, as you have mentioned, to discuss the

fiscal 2006 National Drug Control budget. Later this month, in a

couple of weeks, we will release the updated National Drug Control

Strategy detailing the policies and programs that are part of the

fiscal 2006 budget. I appreciate this committee’s longstanding support for the President’s budget and strategy, and I am pleased to

report that partnership, as you mentioned, has produced historic

declines in youth drug use between 2001 and 2004, a 17 percent

decline nationwide.

We recognize that in some areas that decline has been greater,

and in some areas the problem has gotten worse, and in some

areas it hasn’t gotten better. We do not intend by that number to

suggest there isn’t more to do; you know that, and we know that.

Indeed, our policy and strategy and our budget is designed to capVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:11 May 11, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00022 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\20878.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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italize on what we have learned over 30 years of struggling with

this problem, and it is based on the President’s direction that our

job is to make that problem smaller as rapidly as we possibly can.

With Congress’ support and the President’s fiscal 2006 budget,

we can keep programs such as the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and others in prevention and other areas of the budget, as

within our sight of reaching the President’s goal of a 5-year reduction in drug use of 25 percent.

My written testimony discusses the programs across the executive branch in some detail. I would like to ask at this point that

it be included in the record, and I will just touch on a couple of

points if that’s all right, Mr. Chairman.

Just as an overview, the 2006 provides significant resources to

reduce the problem of illegal drug use. In total, the National Drug

Control budget for 2006 is $12.4 billion, an increase of over $270

million—of almost $270 million, or 2.2 percent, for fiscal year 2005.

In a fiscal year when discretionary spending is essentially frozen,

drug control dollars have increased; and at a time when our country is at war, performance and effectiveness matter. The State of

the Union, as the President said, in this budget, it substantially reduces or eliminates over 150 government programs that are not

getting results, or duplicate current efforts, or do not fill essential

priorities. The principle here is clear: Taxpayer dollars must be

spent wisely or not at all. I think we can all agree on that point.

In terms of highlights of the Drug Control budget, I will just

summarize a couple here and then take questions in followup areas

that you have particular interest in.

In continuing programs that we know work, the budget of HHS,

Education and ONDCP include funding to support important prevention efforts. Almost 40 percent of the drug budget, as you mentioned, is for drug treatment and prevention. At the Department of

Health and Human Services, the fiscal year 2006 budget proposes

$150 million for Access to Recovery, a $15.8 million request above

the 2005 enacted level for additional treatment, resources. At the

Department of Education, the 2006 proposes $25.4 million for student drug testing programs, an increase of $15.4 million over the

2005 enacted level. At ONDCP the 2006 budget proposes $120 million for the Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, which is consistent

with the enacted level for the current fiscal year.

Funding for supply reduction in the Departments of Homeland

Security, Justice, State, Treasury and Defense will support operations targeting the economic bases of the drug trade; domestic,

international sources of illegal drugs; and trafficking routes to and

within the United States. This is the remaining 60 percent of the

drug budget as apportioned among law enforcement, international

programs, intelligence spending and interdiction activities. Program areas have recently expanded, as you know, to combat heroin

production in Afghanistan.

At the Department of Justice, an additional $22 million is requested for DEA in Central and Southwest Asia operations; in addition, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement TaskForce fiscal

year 2006 request includes almost $662 million for the Department

of Justice, over $44 million for the Department of Homeland Security, and $55.6 million for the Department of Treasury.

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At the State, the 2006 budget remains committed to our allies in the Western Hemisphere by proposing $734.5 million for the Andean Counterdrug Initiative. And in supporting the fruition of democracy in Afghanistan, the budget proposes $188 million for counternarcotics programs in that country.

In conclusion, I look forward again to working with the committee as we have in the past, and the entire Congress, to implement

the policies and programs called for in the fiscal year 2006 budget

of the President. What we are proposing we believe will yield continued success.

I thank you, Mr. Chairman, Mr. Cummings, for the opportunity

to appear before you today. And for the members of the committee,

I look forward to your questions.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you, Mr. Walters, Director Walters—Mr.

Czar, as they called you.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Walters follows:]

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Mr. WALTERS. I spent a lot of time telling school kids there are

no czars in America, and there are a lot of people who died to make

sure there never will be.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you.

I have many questions today, but let me start with kind of a general concern about some of the smaller programs within ONDCP

that I believe are indicative of a larger concern that I have, and

many other Members have, with the budget proposal list coming toward us.

I’m going to roll several things together. These things are going

to be, for the most part, pretty familiar with inside your Department, and I would like you to respond, because collectively these

raise the specter to me of what happened under the Clinton administration when he first became President. They basically gutted the

drug czar’s office, it was one quick swoop from 120 staff down to

20 staff, and we watched drug use soar in the United States, and

we are still trying to catch back up.

Now, let me illustrate a couple of things. The administration requested $2 million less, basically a 10 percent cut in your own

budget, for administration in the Office of ONDCP. You also have

positions for Administrator of the Drug-Free Communities Program, which is acting; Keith Sanders’ position in the Counterdrug

Technology Assessment Center, which is acting; the Deputy Director of Supply Reduction, which is acting; Deputy Director of Demand Reduction, which is acting. Now, there is nothing necessarily

wrong with any of the individuals, but this is not exactly a heavy

commitment out of the administration to get these people into a

nonacting position and to firm up the funding and appointing of

people.

Furthermore, to get into some other illustrations that we have

concerns with, the administration proposes to eliminate $1 million

for the National Alliance of Model Drug State Laws, which has

been very critical in trying to develop laws across the country for

States. Administration has proposed to substantially reduce the

CTEC Program, the Counterdrug Technology, and particularly the

research part gets cut almost 50 percent. The Technology Transfer

Program gets cut also by about—it looks like about 20 percent.

Meanwhile, it’s increased, as a small program, the U.S. AntiDoping Agency, to $7.4 million, and world dues to $2.9 million for

Anti-Doping.

Now, we’ve all talked about steroid use, we’ve all talked about

the problem with athletes, but when you look at the overall problem—when we say we’re going to do performance measurements

here—and we look at the impact that we’re having in the technology assessment areas, in the areas of your own staff of Model

State Drug Laws, and the huge abuse of marijuana in our society

and of meth in our society, and then to take money from these programs and put huge increases in one shot into a steroid program,

this more looks like it’s a news release thing than actual measurement of what’s going to reduce drug use in the United States. So

first, in these smaller programs inside your agency, I have deep

concerns about what they’re doing to your particular department.

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Mr. WALTERS. There is some confusion, and so let me try to untangle some things in the presentation; I apologize if it’s not as

clear as it should be.

My agency is the Federal agency that is the pass-through to the

Olympic movement. The World Anti-Doping funding and the U.S.

Anti-Doping Agency funding could be put in another agency; and

those institutions have been stood up, they’ve been establishing

what the various nations’ contributions are going to have to be, and

our request corresponds to the responsibility of the United States,

because it falls to the Federal Government to pay these dues.

Those are simply a matter of we’re members, the money comes

through my office, and we are the pass-through agency.

On the other programming areas, first, we have made a decision

about the relative value in areas of investment. I recognize reasonable people can differ about how you apportion what percentage of

money for technology transfer; in my office, for research. We believe both of them are important. And again, I would say in this

budget environment, as you know better than I know, we have

more money in the drug budget. That did not happen by accident.

That is a competition about resources and effectiveness; and again,

it is a competition that will be played out here in Congress, I know,

as well. So we will—we believe—in the programs that we are sustaining, we are sustaining because we believe in them. As you see,

we have programs that we don’t believe are working, and we have

cut them. So we have been—and we have, in some cases, eliminated them.

In terms of the personnel, let me just say, two of the positions

you raised are Presidential-appointed positions that require confirmation. The incumbents left those positions late at the end of the

first term. We made the decision that it was not feasible, given

timing, to nominate and confirm such an individual late in the

term. We are in the process of working with the White House to

identify appropriate candidates and to nominate them.

Some of the other positions that are more senior, we are moving

to fill those. Some of them are senior enough, frankly, that there

has also been a custom where, you know, depending on who is

going to be the incumbent administration, to allow them to select

their own senior people.

We remain funded. We are making some cuts that I believe are

warranted by the efficiencies we’ve been able to establish with regard to my own personnel. We believe that responsibility for efficiency is not just elsewhere; we’re a management agency helping

the White House and the executive branch make wise decisions

and give information to Congress about what works and what

doesn’t and where we can properly make investments. We try to

make sure that we’re a good example of that.

But the effort to sustain programs that are working is something

that I think we all believe in. And I also think that we all believe

that just because something has a title on it and says it goes to

do something that’s worthwhile, if you spend money on that and

it doesn’t work, it doesn’t serve the children or the adults or the

people who need treatment or the people who need public safety.

The goal is to try to fix these things and to provide, where we can,

more efficient use of dollars. We all wish there were more dollars,

36

and you feel that as well as I do, but there aren’t. And we have

made what we believe are recommendations in this budget that

will allow us to follow through with prevention and treatment and

law enforcement.

Essentially what the budget does, as the chart here shows, is if

you take the five functional areas of the budget, we have asked for

roughly 26 percent of the budget to go to treatment, 121⁄2 percent

to go to prevention, 27 percent to go to domestic law enforcement,

23.2 percent to interdiction, and 11 percent to international. We

are going to spend more money on treatment than we do on interdiction; we’re going to spend more money on prevention than we

are on international programs under this budget. We think that is

a kind of balance.

Now if we were in a world where some of the demands on us

weren’t what they were in Afghanistan or somewhere else, would

we move some of those dollars around? Of course we would. But

we think that part of the integration involves doing things that

have to be done internationally. And I will point out one example

which I believe you are all familiar with.

Last year, in the last calendar year, through the help of the Colombians, who have now reduced—and we don’t have 2004 numbers yet, but just the 2002 and 2003—30 percent of the coca that

produces cocaine, most of which comes to the United States. And

in the last year our interdictors and their people in staging areas

seized 400 metric tons of cocaine. That did not come into the cities

and the communities of the United States.

Now, we all want this to be more aggressive. We are all hopeful

that the acceleration in Colombia and our ability to control borders

and interdict will help prevent the poison as we treat the people

who suffer from the poison, as we prevent young people from going

down that path. But again, this is a supply and demand problem;

we’re trying to control both parts. And we are trying to apportion

resources across programs that work—treatment, prevention, public safety—here at our borders, and international programs that

will make a difference, because, of course, much of the substances

that we face come from outside our borders.

Mr. SOUDER. Before yielding, and I’m going to in a second, I’m

going to do a series of questions in the second round that are in

depth because this is—we’re trying to understand the budget directly.

As I understood you to say you felt that you were 10 percent

overstaffed—you said through efficiencies you were able to absorb

this, which is a way of telling us you are 10 percent overstaffed—

that several of your acting positions are—in fact, you had a reason

for; several others were less clear to me. But what my problem is

with this in general is we’re having the same problem over in the

Department of Homeland Security. We have a Director—a Coordinator of Narcotics that has been put in a detailed position, they

wouldn’t fund it. They zeroed out the category for Director of Narcotics. So this is a pattern across the administration, not just a

random thing.

The Anti-Doping you said was a pass-through; is that correct? So

did you support that or not support that?

37

Mr. WALTERS. Yeah; we believe that the United States should be

a contributor to these programs that provide integrity and, in fact,

become a model for our own professional athletic enterprises as

well; and they keep, obviously, the Olympic movement better protected from doping as a form of change in chemistry.

Mr. SOUDER. And as I understood, you said you’re putting hard

measurement criteria on this, and we would like for our committee’s record the hard measurement criteria that the Model State

Drug Laws have not, in fact, contributed to a reduction in drug use

that you said in your testimony, because I presume if you propose

zeroing it out, that they must not have worked. If you propose increasing the dues for the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency apparently,

internationally, you have more evidence that their program works

than I do.

If you have evidence that CTEC didn’t work and deserved a 20

percent cut, or that their research program deserved a 40 percent

cut, we would like that provided to the committee; because if this

is evidence-based, not budget-based, then there should be some evidence.

Mr. WALTERS. Look, I’ve always been candid with you, I’ll be candid here—and I would if I wasn’t under oath. I am under oath.

We are trying to make decisions, as you know, about programs

and their effectiveness. We have a certain amount of resources we

can spend. So some things can work but not be a high priority.

Some things can work to a certain degree, but they’re not efficient

enough to—we’re making judgments; we don’t have a machine

that’s like a thermometer that says you’ve got 80 degrees, you get

$80. We are making judgments, and I recognize reasonable people

could differ.

On the World Anti-Doping, that’s a dues. We have to pay that

or we don’t get to compete in the Olympics, and we’ve agreed to

make commitments to try to participate. That money happens to go

through my office. It could go through HHS, it could go through another agency. That’s just a matter of where it was lodged before I

got here.

On the issue of CTEC and others, certainly reasonable people

could differ about where you want to put dollar for dollar. We’ve

made a judgment. And in my office, with the number of people—

I didn’t have people sitting around, you know, making chains of

Styrofoam cups—but I have made, through our efforts at creating

a work force that is more effective in building efficiencies to work

on focusing on people, what we think are prudent adjustments in

the work force.

I have been in government long enough to be in a situation—I’m

not saying that you’re putting me in that—where people make

those kinds of adjustments and then are punished for coming forward and saying, I can be more efficient, I want to take less, and

people who fought for the appropriation, Appropriations Committee

punishing you for doing that because they think you kind of undermine changes they made.

I hope we can be fair enough here to say, look, we want the agencies to be more efficient. This isn’t about how many bureaucrats it

takes to do the job, it’s about the job we do for the country and if

we can be more efficient. Nobody is gutting my office, nobody is

38

forcing me to take fewer people. I am suggesting that we can consolidate and focus our energies in ways that as we’ve seen, since

I’ve been in the office for about 3 years, that will allow us to be

more effective in the future with fewer people. I think that’s what

you want.

Mr. SOUDER. Just for the record, the Technology Transfer Program is a model program that we are actually trying to set up and

copy in Homeland Security that gets night vision goggles, it gets

radios, it gets key things for local law enforcement to try to help

them compete with the increasing sophistication of drug dealers

across the country. You had set up a model program. We get a

model program, and then we propose gutting it; and what it looks

to me is it is a move to dollars to Federal programs and away from

State and local efforts, and that is the difference in policy.

Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to just piggyback on some of the things that the chairman

has said.

When, say, for example, the President and his Cabinet, and you,

I guess, propose to eliminate the Safe and Drug-Free Schools

grants to States, and to cut the HIDTA budget by $100 million, I

just want to know, were you for that?

Mr. WALTERS. Yes, sir.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Were you for that? And how does that process

work?

Let me tell you why I’m asking. I’m not trying to—I just want

to know, because this affects a lot of people. And I think that when

you’ve got employees who—I mean, I’ve sat and talked to some of

these wonderful, brave folks that work in HIDTA, and a lot of them

are putting their lives on the line every day. And one of the things

that they like to feel is that the people who are at the top are supporting them; I mean, that is just good for morale. And I think

what I am trying to figure out, for my sake and for theirs, is how

does that process work? And then I would like to hear specific comments about HIDTA and about the Safe and Drug Free Schools

programs. I’m just using those two.

Mr. WALTERS. Well, if you want—the general background is, in

terms of the construction of the budget, we send out guidance in

springtime essentially to all the drug control agencies, following

the enactments of the previous year, the current fiscal year; or in

the proposals, the policy that we are contemplating, what we think

works and doesn’t work, we give them general guidance about their

programs’ directions and futures. We receive program-level submissions in the summer as they are submitted through the agencies—

actually, sometimes before they’re submitted through the agencies—through OMB. We continue discussions with the departments

about priorities and directions. We receive sometimes information

on evaluations and data during the year. We work then with the

departments, with OMB, and then for those—where there is a dispute, there is an appeal process right up to the President on critical budget matters.

In the case of the two programs you raised specifically, Safe and

Drug Free Schools, I am aware, I have travelled around the counVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:11 May 11, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00042 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\20878.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
39

try, that there are a number of people doing important work in

schools that is partly or significantly funded by this program. I am

also aware—and we have said for some time, we have had discussions with Members of Congress—that the problem with this program is there also is a significant amount of money here that you

can’t show whether it’s producing any results. And the program

has been broadened; and, in fact, you are allowed to transfer

money, as some school districts have done, out of drug programs

into other education programs.

Now, again, we can have a variety of flexible programs. I’m responsible for saying what works in drug control. This program,

after several years of working with the program staff, does not

have the demonstrable results, and there is some indication that

we have difficulty building those into this format. That’s not helping a lot of the kids that need the help. It’s holding the place of

a program that should, but it’s not being restructured.

We’re proposing to put more money into national programs and

education that can be targeted. We’re proposing to expand and sustain things like drug treatment, things like community coalitions,

things like drug testing that we believe will help to expand and effect reductions in both prevention, and those who have begun to

use, by cutting off that use early or by treating it.

In the case of HIDTA—which I recognize is a subject of some

concern, we knew that when we made the decision—the program

has important needs to focus on disrupting the market of the drug

trade. There has been criticism of the program that too much of the

money goes to Federal agencies. We have put more money into FBI

and in DEA to back-fill some of the positions that were taken because of needs with regard to terror, and to construct an intelligence that would then allow us to target both further and the

State task forces better; the Fusion Center that is being set up now

through congressional appropriation in the Justice Department, a

total of almost $90 million in those three categories. The $100 million for the HIDTA Program that we are offering to

transfer to—or proposing to transfer to Justice would allow us to

do two things: one, put the program in the context of other Justice

programs and management under the Deputy Attorney General

where task forces exist. We know these drugs, the drugs that come

to your city, are not made in your city, they come from other

places; they come from other cities on the east coast, they come

from other countries, they come from organizations that market at

various levels. And in order to effectively cut those off we need better focus and intelligence and coordination; and where we’re doing

that will make a difference.

We have been trying to put this into the structure of law enforcement from Federal to State and local task forces. The effort will be

to maintain the State and local focus of the HIDTA Program, but

put it under a consolidated management and direction that can

work more effectively with State and locals to cutoff the drugs and

the organizations that are marketing the poison at the higher levels that make a difference.

The 400 metric tons of cocaine I talked about seizing has happened without an increase, significantly in interdiction assets because of other pressures in the Caribbean and in the eastern PaVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:11 May 11, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00043 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\20878.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
40

cific. The reason is we’ve had better intelligence. When we do it

smarter, as we do with terror, when we can identify individuals,

and when we can coordinate pressure on key elements, we can

make a difference.

If the Federal Government, on the other hand, however important local law enforcement is, and it is important, obviously, but

when all those resources are drawn in a way to the largest number

of potential sellers or the largest number—we’re not cutting off the

head of the snake. We start this process, which you and I have

talked about, of taking generation after generation of young men,

especially poor, minority young men, in our cities and putting them

in jail. And I think citizens rightly say, can’t we stop this? Lock the

people up the chain that if we focused on wouldn’t allow this business to continue.

That’s what we’re all trying to do, and the way to do that, we

believe, is by using the intelligence tools which you have given us

and which we have worked with law enforcement to get, by focusing—and I recognize for some people this change is going to be

painful, but the reason we’re doing it is not to cut the budget; the

reason we’re doing it is to cut the drugs. And we believe that the

record here will show that we have been able to strengthen

OCDETF, strengthen the task force structure, and put this program in the context of other coordinated law enforcement programs

to do the jobs we’re trying to do to help HIDTA around the world

find the key elements, incapacitate them, keep them off balance,

and to help reduce the terror and ravages they put in our cities.

Mr. CUMMINGS. We have had—and I appreciate your response.

We have had a number of people from DEA and others come in and

talk about how the fight on terror, against terror, has yielded some

significant results with regard to drugs; in other words, we tighten

up on the borders, we, like you said, using our intelligence more

extensively, and in that net sometimes you come up with some

drugs, findings or results.

And I guess when you were talking about the 400 tons, I was

saying to myself, well, maybe it’s true that a portion of that 400

tons came—that we were successful there because of our efforts

with regard to terror. But let me give you the other side of it that

concerns me.

The chairman and I worked very hard on trying to get—we were

worried that when we moved to dealing with terrorism, that the

new Department of Homeland Security would not have—would not

put the emphasis on drugs that we were hoping that they would.

We were worried about that, so we had—we were able to create a

position—what was the name of that position?

Mr. SOUDER. The counternarcotics officer.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Yeah, the counternarcotics officer. And I’ll tell

you, the chairman—we had the counternarcotics officer in here 1

day for a hearing; and it was one of the saddest things I’ve seen,

because he was temporary, he had to beg for his budget from different people. It seemed almost like he had been—become a stepchild in the whole process. And I will never forget that day because

I remember the chairman and I looked at each other and said, is

this what we created? I mean, we were looking for somebody who

had some real authority, somebody who did not have to go around

41

asking different people could they get money. And the chairman

can correct me if I’m wrong, but it was kind of a disturbing moment because it seemed to go against the very thing that we were

trying to do.

And I guess as I—you know, as I listen to you, I just wanted to

make sure that, see, with the HIDTA, they would definitely—they

had their eye on drugs. That was their thing. I just wonder when

you move things around a little bit and you say, well, we’re going

to now have them coming under Justice, and Justice is going to do

this and do that, I don’t want our efforts to combat the drug problem to get lost in the process. That’s what concerns me.

And, you know, I think that—it’s not just that I’m concerned

about these employees that go out every day and put their lives on

the line, I am very concerned about that, but I am also concerned

about what you’re concerned about. I am concerned about the mission, because as I’ve said to you many times, you know, I’ve got terrorists in my own neighborhood——

Mr. WALTERS. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS [continuing.] That people are much more afraid

of, believe it or not, than they are of somebody coming from—you

know, sending a bomb over to this country and harming somebody,

because they deal with it every day, they see it every day. They see

their relatives destroyed by it every day; they see their property

values going down every day. And so—they see that they can’t

come out of their houses every day. So it’s not like some foreign

person over in Iraq, they’re worried about what’s going on in their

neighborhoods.

And I think—and he can speak for himself—I think the chairman had the same kind of concerns, that we want to make sure

we deal with terrorism—we’ve got to do it, no doubt about it—but

we also have to balance it and make sure that we deal with the

problems that we have here right at home.

Mr. WALTERS. And we could not have a stronger point of agreement on that.

I also think of it as, for those people who die serving in the

Armed Forces in Iraq or Afghanistan or in other places where is

it less visible, they don’t give their lives to allow young people to

be eaten up by drugs. They don’t give their lives to have our new

neighborhoods destroyed. It’s a failure to keep faith with them and

the sacrifices they and their family make to not make this problem

small as fast as we can.

We agree. And the issue here is not about caring. Now, do I

think we could make some continued management improvements?

Of course I do. I think the intelligence fusion that we’re talking

about is critical. I know people like to say, well, there’s too much

talk about intelligence and various centers, and are they really

working. The key to doing this is intelligence, and I believe the battle on terror is not an obstacle, but a lesson. This is a small number of people, small quantities of poison sent to our cities to kill our

citizens. We need to be—we can’t turn ourselves into a police state.

We need to be able to go after the structures that provide that, and

we need to obviously prevent citizens from being addicted and from

starting this path, who draw that, through their dollars, into our

communities. We believe in that balance.

42

Now, again, people may differ about what level, what program,

what contribution. We have made decisions that we believe are

right. I recognize that people can have other opinions about the apportionment, but the key that I think that we can’t reasonably disagree with is we want law enforcement pressure against the critical elements that will break down the system, the higher the better. The frequency of operations against high-level structures in

trafficking have to be accelerated. We have to break down, as we

do, the ability of these networks to continue to operate when we

take one or two people out in working with the Justice Department. Two-year investigations, however great and dedicated people

are, and take down somebody and charge them with 600 years of

violations is something that we’re trying to change.

We have created the first consolidated target list of potential—

or of known major traffickers, and we want to accelerate taking

them down, identify and remove them as rapidly as possible to

begin to cause breakdowns. We have not had serious breakdowns

except for two examples. It looks like the largest decline you see

on teenage drug use is in two categories, LSD and ecstasy, over the

last 3 years, where, in addition to the overall 17 percent reduction,

you see reductions in over 60 percent. It is apparently because we

have significantly disrupted the supply, in addition to getting our

prevention messages on ecstasy.

And on LSD we certainly disrupted supply because we took down

a major distributor who had, in abandoned missile silos, made or

who had material to make 25 million doses. The consequence is we

did not realize how centralized that was.

The goal is to expand that so that we accelerate both prevention

and demand reduction and supply reduction. Again, can we do

that? Many people think it can’t be done, but this is a business

that is infinitely capable of resisting damage by law enforcement

or by interdiction or by operations. We don’t believe that. We believe people are making a difference every day. We believe 400

metric tons of cocaine that doesn’t come from the United States

saves lives. We all want to begin, though, to say people are having

trouble getting drugs to harm themselves, they’re getting into

treatment, they’re getting away from the temptation. And that’s, I

think, our common goal.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Just one more question, if you will, Mr. Chairman.

I can’t ask you, because asking would be too cheap. I am begging

you to help us deal with this issue of witness intimidation. I’m telling you, we cannot have thugs going around killing people because

they want to testify and cooperate with the police. We can’t have

that.

Mr. WALTERS. I agree.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Anywhere.

Mr. WALTERS. I agree.

Mr. CUMMINGS. And I cannot tell you how much this bothers me,

because what that means is that we will have a lawless society.

Now, I don’t know how bad it is in other places, but when you

have a situation in Baltimore that 30 to 35 percent of your cases

can’t go to trial because witnesses are being threatened, and killed

sometimes, and harmed, and they disappear—we had a murder

43

case—not a murder case, some fellow comes and shoots up a school,

shoots into a crowd of students. They couldn’t even go forward with

one of the cases because nobody would testify because of what we

think to be witness intimidation. And you know the Dawson case.

All I’m saying, I mean, I just—we need help.

Mr. WALTERS. I will talk to the Attorney General, who has recently been confirmed. I’ve had brief discussions with him, but

we’re going to sit down and we’re going to review the full range of

programs. I’ll talk to him, and we will get back to you on what we

can do.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. I’m going to go through some of the different sections that were in your written testimony as well as in the budget

because I want to make sure we will be following up with written

questions, because as we work with the Appropriations Committee,

as we work with your reauthorization and others—and we have

oversight over all these different programs, and our staff has been

getting budget briefings department by department. And I want to

say at the beginning, again, when I first was elected, and Lee

Brown was the director of this office, I watched a man who had

been aggressive in local law enforcement in Houston and then in

New York get denuded in the Office of National Drug Czar. And

he had to come up here and tell us all the time about how this fit

the budget expenditures, how this is going to be more effective,

how they were going to work in other types of programs as we

watched drug abuse rise year after year after they started doing

the cuts. And then we finally get it turned around, starting with

General McCaffrey, who flattened it, you came in and have been

very aggressive, a strong advocate, and all of a sudden it’s like,

where did this reversal come from?

Your requests are $200 million less than the previous year. Yes,

you have had some reshifting. I understand that there needs to be

targeting. I understand that there are budget pressures, but let me

go through a couple of other things.

First off, probably the most successful thing, and you fought for

every dime, is the Media Campaign. You have done measurement.

You have retooled it. We get these little fights on the side, but basically it has worked. Last year, you requested $145 million. This

year, you are requesting $120 million. What you are requesting is

what we appropriated because, as you and I have talked, Congress

failed. It wasn’t the administration that failed in the Media Campaign. Congress failed. We have in effect in real dollars had substantial reductions in this program from two angles. We haven’t increased it inflationary for—how long is the $120 million figure in

there?

Mr. WALTERS. The $120 million is for this year. When I took office, it was a $170 million program.

Mr. SOUDER. So we are down to $120 million from the $170 million. Last I checked, even though the inflation rate is low, it has

still been an inflation rate every year.

Mr. WALTERS. The inflation rate in advertising purchases is

higher than the base rate of inflation.

44

Mr. SOUDER. You have some inflation in the cost of advertising dollars. Is it safe to say that the value of your $170 million would

probably be $200 million today?

Mr. WALTERS. Yes. Again, off the top of my head—I don’t want to be cavalier, I don’t know—but it would be more than $170 million, sure.

Mr. SOUDER. I would argue that you probably—even inflation of

3 percent a year is a 12 percent increase, which puts you up near

$200 million alone, let alone the rate of increase greater than 3

percent. We had lots of small programs in that budget. You have

tightened those up. You have worked with the advertising production cost. Yes, you can achieve certain efficiencies, but I don’t think

anybody here is going to argue that you can achieve 40 percent efficiencies. You have done very well with this.

Mr. WALTERS. Let me just say, just so we are clear to you about

what has happened; we have maintained in the target youth audience, middle-age teenagers, the reach in frequency of 90 percent of

the target audience sees on average four ads a week. We have

maintained that throughout the program. We have strengthened

the force. For the parent part of the audience, I think it is about

85 percent see three ads a week. I will have to go back and give

you the precise numbers. But we have maintained that contact.

How we have done that is, there is a match, as you know, in this

program. For every $1 we buy, we get $2. We had in the past provided part of that matching money to other youth-related programs, boys and girls clubs, other kinds of programs, SAAD,

MAAD, would be able to match it. We have taken the match back.

The match is now running our ads almost exclusively. So we have

maintained contact by focusing the program on our messages, and

I think that is why you see it doing the extent of the work. I am

not against being efficient here, but again, I have a problem. If I

request—if I am telling my colleagues in the administration, I am

going to request an amount I can’t get through Congress, you help,

others help with the appropriation process, but to ask for money

we can’t show we can get through Congress is to take money away

from another program we should fund. I will be happy—I am worried because every year, you know, this program has been cut. I am

worried about keeping $120 million.

Mr. SOUDER. A couple of things with this. I want to make sure

this gets on the record because this is the single biggest program

left if HIDTA goes out from under you. This is the core of your office, and it is the core of our prevention efforts, especially if we

ditch Drug-Free Schools. This is the prevention program, this and

drug testing, which is a much smaller program. This is our whole

prevention program in the United States under the administration’s basic—other than a much smaller drug testing program.

Mr. WALTERS. And good community coalitions.

Mr. SOUDER. And good community coalitions, which also is flat

funded. And no new programs. In other words, it is a maintenance.

In the Media Campaign, several things. One is what it means is

that when we say we need to regionally target meth because you

are tying to reach the national, you have to go to partnership and

then the match ads. We don’t have the flexibility in the budget to

do things other than this basic targeting that you just described,

45

in other words, reaching the target youth audience on the marijuana message—and we have had a great impact on that, but the

diversity of messages and the things we were doing is what has

partly been tossed out in the budget.

The second point I would make is that, as you know, if you don’t keep the $120 million in the campaign, at some point here, the

whole campaign goes down. In other words, if you don’t reach a

threshold in advertising, all of us agree that the measurement isn’t

going to be there and that we don’t spend $90 to $100 million to

get decreased messages. I know you will dig in, but I would have

several points here in this budget. When you request $120 million,

and OMB full well knows this, that the odds of holding $120 million become harder than if you request $145 million. This is a labor

negotiation process. If they don’t believe that, I better not see a

budget next year that has things that the administration wants at

a figure that we didn’t appropriate it. Because under this logic, you

have a number of things such as move HIDTA to OCDETF. I don’t

think that is going to happen. But if it doesn’t happen, then don’t

come back for money for OCDETF if the principle is which you are

telling me they tell you, if you don’t get it funded, then don’t request it. Then if they have a bunch of funding things in here this

year that don’t get funded, don’t come back to us. That is the principle.

Mr. WALTERS. Let me try to correct a couple of points because

I don’t want to leave the misunderstanding. Nobody tells me. I can

make an argument for anything I want, and I will do that when

I think there is merit. But again, through a lot of work and a lot

of support, including amazing support from some key members, including the Speaker, we got the $120 million. We have had a debate with the Senate over the value of some of these programs. You

know that as well as I do because you have both followed this. We

are trying to work with Congress. This is a partnership. We understand that. We are trying to make requests that are reasonable and

that will cause in some cases change.

The other argument here is, we just kind of continue to go along,

and we don’t provide leadership. I believe this is a leadership budget. We have drug use going down. We have drug funding going up.

I know we are making changes. I know some people may not agree

with some of those changes. But, again, we did not make these by

accident. They are not a fait accompli. We believe they are right.

It is not about, this is a budget I am holding my nose about. If

somebody says that they do not know what they are talking about

in the budget process, we made changes to take programs out that

were less effective and support things that are more effective.

Would I like more money in some of these programs? Yes. But

you make a reasonable judgment about your ability to get the request. Because as both parties agreed as recently as the last election, we have to get the deficit down, and we need to keep the economy growing. We are going to have to control domestic spending.

In that environment, when you know what the budget has, how

many other agencies are taking substantial cuts, the drug budget,

I repeat, is up and drug use is down. That is what you were asking

us to do and that is what we are trying to do here with these programs.

46

On the Model State Drug Laws Program, for example, you mentioned my office. I do not believe that is currently making the contribution it should make at $1 million and I believe my staff can

work with States as we are working with cities around the country,

including Baltimore, including Washington, DC, including Detroit,

Los Angeles and New York directly to help do that. I am asking

to make an economy there. Congress has had a different view over

the last several years. It wants $1 million. It wants it as a separate

agency. Again, I have not changed my mind and I am not lying to

you. I think we should zero that and let my staff do it.

Mr. SOUDER. This year again it is being cut 10 percent. Your

staff is being reduced. Administration is being reduced 10 percent.

You have people that are not being cleared and you are in effect

telling us that you are going to take over responsibilities for other

agencies. Furthermore, your request is down $200 million. What

you are saying is Congress last year—you are increasing Congress’

request appropriated last year, not the administration’s request.

You reduced the administration’s request. And then what I did not

go through with you is we believe there are some funny numbers

in how you combined the drug dollars. In other words, there are

things that are not counted in the drug budget and things that are

counted in the drug budget and things that we do not feel are necessarily going to be used for narcotics that easily can slide over to

homeland security. And like Ranking Member Cummings just said,

we are a little less confident when things move to OCDETF, or to

FBI, that those are going to remain drug assets. I want to get into

a couple of other categories.

Mr. WALTERS. May I correct just one thing I have been reminded

for the record? My budget does not propose the reduction of one

single FTE in my office. The reduction in salaries and expenses is

because of a reduction in rent and lease space, which is an economy that is reflected there. Let me correct for the record, I am not

reducing my staff. However, I will also stand behind my statement.

This is not about how many bureaucrats are in my office. I resigned at the beginning of the Clinton administration when I was

the caretaker to hand over the keys when they announced the cutting of the office by 80 percent, down to 25 people, because—I

stopped being the caretaker because there was not anything to

hand over. I understand what the gutting of the office was and I

took a very strong stand at that time. That is not what is happening to my office. I would not stay if that was happening to my office. I want to be clear, suggestions to the contrary, I vigorously object to that.

Mr. SOUDER. You had a 10 percent—you had a $2 million reduction in rent which is 10 percent of your total administration budget?

Mr. WALTERS. I will give you the office budget. We can go

through that with you.

Mr. SOUDER. We want to see that, because that would mean that

your reduction in rent was 10 percent of your whole administration

operations cost.

Mr. WALTERS. Well, there may be other expenses. I am just saying I am not proposing to cut FTE.

47

Mr. SOUDER. That leads to the problem we ran into in Homeland

Security. We will want to see, then, and we can followup, what

FTE means, how many people are detailed. Does this mean—because what we learned over there when we got into it is that they

did not have any dollars so they could say that they did not get

a reduction in FTEs because they were detailed and they got a reduction in detailees which reduced other administrative expenses.

Let me move to the HIDTA question. Mr. Cummings has already

raised this. I am going to ask you a series of questions, and then

you can restate a little bit, but let me start with the end. At your

nomination hearing, you said—you stated your opposition to moving the HIDTA program. I am now going to ask some questions to

see how this relates. Do you believe that this move will increase—

enhance the capacity of the HIDTA program and of ONDCP to coordinate investigations and resources between Federal, State and

local law enforcement? We created your office as a coordinating because we had all these other agencies fighting over who was going

to do narcotics and that the whole purpose of having a Director of

ONDCP and we moved HIDTA in because what happened is that

if you did not have direct control and the ability to move certain

dollars around, you did not have power. All you could do is go into

a meeting and say, I think, I think, I think, rather than having the

ability to actually move dollars. Do you really believe this will enhance the capacity to coordinate? Do you believe that State and

local agencies will welcome this move? That is certainly not what

we are hearing. The whole design of this program was to draw resources from them and blend it with a small amount of Federal

money. There is a concern about this. Will it make them more likely to cooperate? That is not what we are hearing. Do you think

they prefer to work with OCDETF rather than HIDTA as it is currently set up? Do you believe that the HIDTA program will be more

effective, this transfer will be more effective than the HIDTA program in the use of taxpayer dollars where we are leveraging a

small amount? Most of the HIDTAs we visited as we were doing

a reauthorization all over the country, most of the dollars in there

were paid for by State and local people with the operational supplement to these huge dollars being invested. And if you believe this

is going to be more efficient, what document, study, report, JO

evaluation, internal audit or anything suggests that OCDETF is

going to be more efficient at doing this than what we have already?

And you and I know that I have some concerns about whether the

HIDTA program has been turning into a pork-type program, how

it should be targeted and whether there should be national targeting. I have backed you up to a certain percent national targeting.

But this looks like a wholesale instead of a 10 percent national targeting.

In your responses so far, you say we need to go after the top

guys. But do we need to go after the top guys with 100 percent of

the money or do we need to go after them as we tried to work with

and get cooperation? If you help us with some, we will help you

with some. This looks like a surrender of that strategy, and saying

the Federal Government is going to take all the dollars and we are

going to go on our own. Good luck.

Mr. WALTERS. That is not what we are proposing here.

48

Mr. SOUDER. By the way, by cutting Byrne Grants, those who do

not have HIDTAs, like my area, have a drug task force, now have

just had the Byrne Grants slashed simultaneously. So to argue that

the Justice Department with OCDETF is going to have an equivalent with Byrne Grant in their department and in effect replace

your office with the Justice Department, this is not going to happen

if Byrne Grants are zeroed out.

Mr. WALTERS. Let me back up 1 second. I do not think the criteria is fair to the people who are doing what they are doing now

when you propose change, are they going to like that? Change of

the kind we are talking about, of significant restructuring, is something that people, even when it is for their own good, if it is, sometimes resist. There can be change that is not good. I understand

that.

Mr. SOUDER. I want you to clarify that what you are saying is

that prosecutors, sheriffs, agents in the field do not want change.

The people who are doing 90 percent of the arrests should not be

consulted when there is change? We should not ask them whether

they like the change? I do not understand when you say they will

not like the change. They might not, but they are the people who

are doing it. We are not arresting anybody.

Mr. WALTERS. I was doing the intro to my response to your question.

Mr. SOUDER. Excuse me.

Mr. WALTERS. I do not think this change is designed to reduce

cooperation. I recognize there are people who are not in support of

this. We recognized it when we made the decision. The issue is how

do we best reduce the supply of drugs in the United States at the

national and at the local and regional level. Everything that we

know about this is that we need to do this by a better understanding of how markets work, identifying vulnerabilities, and by going

after those vulnerabilities. Because of the multijurisdictional character of this, again, they do not make the drugs they use in your

district primarily in your district unless they are meth. They do not

make the heroin. They do not make the cocaine. They do not make

much of the marijuana. That comes from somewhere else. That is

why we have a Federal enforcement effort. That is why we have

these laws in this area of crime that we do not have in other areas

and why we work globally as well as locally.

The question is, how do we better focus that? We are saying all

of our experience with OCDETF, with law enforcement, means that

our local task forces, which are, I will point out, in DEA, parts of

OCDETF, involve local people, as well as the HIDTA program.

Again, we are—yes, we are pursuing this program as a targeted,

managed, directed cooperation. The $100 million that we are proposing for the program will be focused, as we have said, in the

budget on State and local support, not on Federal support. I talked

about the increases we have made to other key Federal agencies

that have participated to provide resources for them. I know there

are people who understand this HIDTA program to be a revenuesharing program. We have fought that battle. There are people in

the Senate. There are people in the House—more in the Senate—

who want this to be, you designate a place, and they get a certain

49

amount. There are 28 places that get that, the rest of the country

does not, or maybe it will but we do not know.

We believe the best way and the recommendation here is—because we believe we have a chance to substantially reduce the supply of drugs by strengthening our enforcement. And it must include

State and locals in this case. But on a coordinated, managed, targeted basis. And so we are trying to integrate these enforcement

efforts together under the authority of the Deputy Attorney General of the Justice Department, we are trying to remain consistent,

in this case, with State and local law enforcement. I know there

are some painful decisions about how much Federal assistance

there is going to be to State and local law enforcement and whether

it is going to come through Justice grants or Homeland Security

grants or what the levels are going to be and those are difficult,

and then, when the funding jumps around, people get jobs, their

jobs are in jeopardy, that is a problem. I am not ignorant of that.

I have sympathy for that.

But when you have the positions that we have, you try to make

decisions on the basis of what will best serve the interests of the

country. I recognize sometimes people are going to be unhappy.

Sometimes they are unhappy for good reasons, and we need to follow what they are telling us. Obviously, they know things that we

do not know, and we ought to be willing to learn. But we also have

to make a judgment. In my judgment and the administration’s

judgment, here is—this program is a powerful tool. It has been a

powerful tool. It can be a more powerful tool if it is moved and integrated, remaining State-and-local-focused and part of a consolidated effort that will increasingly with the information we have

and the way we are doing targeting allow us to break the businesses that are the drug trade.

Otherwise, you are chasing primarily small people, putting them

in jail year after year, generation after generation. Break the business. Do not break the generation after generation is what we are

calling for.

Mr. SOUDER. Before yielding to Mr. Cummings, and I say this

and for those who are not used necessarily to this aggressive questioning coming out of me to an administration figure that we, in

fact, share most views. We have some disagreements right now.

You are having to defend a budget that basically I do not believe

is defensible. But this is—we share deeply almost all the different

values and my being aggressive and your being defensive. I encourage you to be a little more cautious because you, in effect, have implied several times that the primary resistance to this are people’s

jobs, that people do not want to have change in certain areas because they are vested in a certain way. This is somewhat a disagreement of philosophy, not about who has turf or jobs. I believe,

as you aggressively do, that Colombia, Afghanistan, I have made

those same kind of arguments, but it is a balanced approach, and

I believe this budget is gutting a balanced approach. That is my

concern. Mr. Cummings.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Can you explain what data goes into OMB’s program assessment rating to how HIDTA and the Media Campaign

were rated? Do you know?

50

Mr. WALTERS. Yes. The principal data that goes into it are the

reports that are part of the GPRA process, the government results

and—the accountability statute that each program is supposed to

provide. The quality of the design of those plans and objectives for

the program. And then the quality of the measurement of achievement of those. In other words, if the program has a certain purpose

but the operation of the program is not aligned with that purpose

or is not able to carry out that purpose or the data shows that if

it is aligned properly it is not achieving that purpose, it gets a

lower score than one that is. Again, this is a tool. It is a tool for

the decisionmaker. It is not the decisionmaker.

Mr. CUMMINGS. From a very practical standpoint, let’s say the

budget goes through as it is right now as proposed. What happens

to the HIDTA offices?

Mr. WALTERS. We are proposing—again, we have proposed this

as a starting point. We have not proposed this as a decision in all

detail. I will work with the Justice Department. We will work with

people in the field to realign the program under the principle of integration and coordination, focused on State and local support. I

presume that means that some of the structure may continue as is.

Some of the structure obviously would change. But we have not

made—we have not decided that in advance. When you obviously

meet with a program this involved, with the partnerships involved,

we are going to need to work not only with Justice Department but

obviously the people in the field.

Mr. CUMMINGS. But it could mean and it is reasonable to assume

and you may have said this in what you just said, that some of

those offices actually, the locks will be put on and the program

itself is gone, will be gone, some of these 25 at least.

Mr. WALTERS. Sure. Everything is on the table at this point.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I was listening to some of the chairman’s questions. It was my understanding that back in the fiscal year 2006

budget scores, there was a $300 million increase for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as drug control spending. But

when my staff looked at the ICE Web page, they saw items describing ICE’s efforts in the war on terrorism, investigations into Canadian telemarketing fraud and child sex abuse cases, to extradition

of a double murderer to Honduras, but not a single item explicitly

relating to drug control. How is it that ICE is scored as a drug control while the costs of prosecuting and incarcerating defendants for

drug crimes is excluded from the restructured Federal drug budget?

Mr. WALTERS. You are asking that question because I think we

have kind of touched on this topic, and I am glad to have a chance

to respond. As you know, in the first strategy that we released in

2002, we announced our intention to restructure the budget. The

goal of this restructuring was to focus the program array on the

things we are doing and managing to make the drug problem

smaller, not just the cost of the drug problem. There had been in

the past, beginning when I actually served in the Reagan administration, when this problem began, is to try to also capture, how

much does the government spend on the drug problem? On many

of those that were arrayed, part of them were arrayed to show

what the costs were. Part of them were arrayed to show, if you

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spend a lot of money, you care a lot, which sometimes is true,

sometimes is not true. So, for example, programs like Head Start,

because a small number of the people who came in relatively might

have gotten referred to treatment or prevention, there was a good

faith effort to estimate that, and that small percentage arrayed

against a small program created a large number. So you had a

large budget.

But the problem was, I believe that was fundamentally dishonest

and certainly was not good management because we were scoring

parts of things that we could not manage and we could not work

with you at managing. So we reduced the budget to the managed

programs that are designed to make the problem smaller, so we

could, for the first time, take money across supply and demand,

prevention, treatment, interdiction and international programs.

There are pressures on those programs that have to be kept in

mind but we could look at these things and really do them in a

comparative way. For some agencies, a small number, for example,

some DHS programs, Veterans Affairs, this is modeled on what

happened at the Department of Defense, you have multifunction

programs that do not pull out a single component like DEA or like

the block grant for treatment. What did we do in that case? We

issued a series of circulars asking those departments, once they got

their appropriation and on the basis of the appropriation we represented, to give us a financial expenditure plan that they would

manage those dollars for drug control purposes. For example, we

made a change in this year’s budget with regard to Veterans Affairs. Veterans Affairs had scored not only the treatment, and as

you know they are the largest single hospital system in the country, and they spend a lot on treatment. In addition to that, they

were scoring related health care costs for people who come into

treatment. Sometimes those health care costs are a result of your

addiction. We know there are diseases. But what that happened to

do is capture roughly a half a billion dollars as treatment funds

connected to this budget.

As we refined these numbers in the process, we took those out.

I could inflate the treatment number and the demand reduction

number today by half a billion dollars just by not making that

change. What I chose to do is to focus on, what are we really

spending here and to talk about what—not what the drug problem

costs, because you know the cost. A large portion of mental health

costs are connected to substance abuse. A large portion of dependency and welfare costs, child endangerment costs as well as a variety of other costs, prison costs, prosecutorial costs; those are not

managed costs. Those are consequences of the drug problem, and

we are not going to not give somebody health care and Medicare

and Medicaid that may be because the disease is related to drugs

because we did not fund the drug portion of it. We are not going

to not incarcerate people that are convicted because we did not

score this.

Again, we provide information on cost. We provide a report which

we just released again on the cost of drugs to the society. The specific institutional costs, incarceration, problems in their jobs, health

care costs, missed opportunity costs. We provide that report in a

separate publication that covers all those costs. So we are not hidVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:11 May 11, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00055 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\20878.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
52

ing any of those costs. What we are doing is providing a budget

that really shows you what we are spending and so, when you

make choices as legislators, you can say, I think this ratio is wrong

or I think this program makes sense, and this does not make sense,

and you are not getting a scored array of money that does not

mean anything. It also allows people to say, we are spending $80 billion on drugs, and how can we show it is effective? I recognize $12.5 billion is a

lot of money. I have not been in Washington so long that I do not

spend that. But I like to point out to people, for those who think

it is a lot, it is a big country, a country that spends $25 billion on

candy a year. So I think this is a responsible budget that focuses

on the responsible programs that work, and we need to make sure

that is what we are focused on and not about accumulating costs

for reasons that really confuse the central debates we need to have.

Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Cummings asked you about ICE and the fact

that ICE does not have anything on their home page, and we are

having a tremendous problem as a member of the Homeland Security Committee figuring out what they are actually doing in drugs.

Why is that in the budget when they do not even acknowledge in

their home page that they do it?

Mr. WALTERS. Again, I cannot account for what is on their Web

page. I can account for what is in their financial plan, and we will

be happy to provide that to the committee. I think that is a truer

statement of what is going on here. And obviously, I could put anything on a Web page and make it seem bigger than it is. The issue

is, what are you doing? But I will say that ICE is a valuable and

important player in a number not only of investigations but, obviously, enforcement actions, and we are working with them, as we

are with other agencies of Homeland Security, and the personnel

there are making important contributions. I am sorry that some of

this stuff does not get conveyed to the public, which is important,

and to other people as clearly as it should be, but I do not think

that is indicative of the fact that they are not doing and we cannot

account for the fidelity between what we propose in the budget and

what we see as results to the best of our ability in these multifunction agencies.

Mr. SOUDER. There is an alternative explanation to what you just

said. In other words, your explanation is that the home page may

not be reflective of what they are doing and what we are in effect

questioning, is the financial proposal to you reflective of what they

are doing, because maybe the home page is reflective of what they

are doing and that is my concern from hearings cross-examining

ICE officials.

Mr. WALTERS. I believe those financial plans, and my staff can

correct me if I am wrong, are also subject to their financial

authority’s audit and vouching for it. You do not just get to kind

of say you spent that much and we say, OK, great, we take you

at your word. There are internal financial and fiscal measures.

Again, when we imposed using these authorities that actually

are in the office and are a subject of, I think, our reauthorization,

when we imposed these they were not particularly welcome in a lot

of these agencies because we were now telling people in agencies

that, in addition to kind of like giving us an estimate of what you

53

spend that you then can go ahead and do whatever you want with,

you are actually going to have to do what you said, and we are

going to require—we require a spending plan before they spend

their fiscal year money. So we will be happy to let you know what

we see and what the corresponding report is on the fidelity of those

financial plans but, again, we have done this to create a real representation of where resources are going and to really be able to

make decisions about priorities that are consistent with what happens to the best of our ability.

Mr. CUMMINGS. One of the programs that we have been able to

move enthusiastically under this subcommittee was the Drug-Free

Communities Program. It is a program that we embraced because

it is a way of empowering the everyday citizen who wants to address prevention and drug problems in their neighborhoods to do

something. There are so many people who are probably watching

us right now who are sitting there just feeling helpless. And so that

is a program that I like. I am sure—and it is just based upon conversations with my colleagues, not only on this subcommittee and

committee but in the Congress. I get a lot of inquiries about it. People want to try to help their communities help themselves. You

talked about the effectiveness of using taxpayer dollars. I just was

wondering, what is your assessment of the Drug-Free Communities

Program? And then we had to call this an institute, and now I see

that their budget has been cut by half. I am just wondering, where

are we on that?

Mr. WALTERS. Let me make it clear. We have level funded the

Drug-Free Communities Program. We have requested the same

funds in the various components that we requested last year. In

this budget environment, we did that because we think it is an important program. It is a measure—as you can see, we have made

sometimes painful decisions on programs we do not support, and

we made those recommendations. We have doubled the number of

Drug-Free Communities during the first term of the Bush administration. There are now 714. We have worked with your office on

one of those coalitions in your district. We believe this works. It is

in the process, though, as a new program of a complete evaluation.

It has been reviewed under the hard structure, but we are in the

process of creating an evaluation mechanism that will allow us to

tell whether those communities are effective. I have instructed my

staff to accelerate that process to the maximum extent possible because I think what we want to do is to see as clearly as we can

what the contribution is of those communities in reducing drug use.

We believe it allows us to bring together, as you know, faith communities, treatment, law enforcement, private sector, government,

schools, parents, public officials in those communities, because we

know that when they all play a critical role in this problem, we

make more progress. We think that is the way to go. The program

is designed to, as you know, help to form coalitions, help to stand

them up, give them a number of years, if they are working to be

able to be supported and to then get them supported by the community. So we are hoping to be able to continue the process of

growing that program. But the goal is, I think, certainly reflected—

the goal of increasing those communities, the number of communities we have met, we continue to push the program.

54

Mr. CUMMINGS. The reason why I raised the question is that there is $10 million on the authorization, but I guess your argument would be is that if it is level funded, considering all the

things that are happening to other parts of the budget, that is considered a victory. I am not trying to be facetious.

Mr. WALTERS. Yes. Look, would you make some of these decisions in another environment? Maybe. Maybe. Again, I think this

program is strong. Also, I think it would be useful to us to have

the evaluation. Again, I think people feel very good about the program. I think it has done some remarkable things. I have visited

a lot of these communities. It gives hope. I agree with you. My

staff, I am instructing to actively try to recruit more in areas that

we identify where there is a drug problem. This is a tool that is

relatively inexpensive that allows us to help organize people, in our

cities, in Native American areas that have been hit by substance

abuse, in rural areas where people feel isolated. We have all kinds

of examples of these that work. We have created mentoring coalitions to help start other coalitions. We have a lot of things going

on. We have people who—yet we are also being rigorous and say

where coalitions fail. We want to be able to replace failing coalitions with new coalitions that have an opportunity to work and

allow failing coalitions to have an incentive to make themselves

work. We went through this, I think, with some of the folks in your

district where they had trouble getting themselves organized, and

now they are there, and now they are moving, I think.

Mr. CUMMINGS. They are. That is what I was trying to get to

when I was talking about the coalition piece being cut in half. It

seems to me that, if we really want to maximize our dollars and

try to guarantee as much progress as we can, you want to buildup

your coalition. It seems like your institute, if you build that institute up, have that cooperation using best practices and things of

that nature, then you would have a better opportunity of maximizing effectiveness.

I know it is a small amount of money but I am talking about the

coalition piece. But I think, for that small amount of money, the

dividends are just huge, or have the potential of being huge. So the

last thing I think I would want to see done is cut the coalition institute piece in half. Do you follow me?

Mr. WALTERS. Yes. Again, I understand this as we are not only

supporting the community coalitions program, we are supporting

the institute. We are not supporting it at the same level Congress

appropriated last year. You added $1 million. We believe that,

under those circumstances, our request last year is the right request this year. People will have other views. We are not trying to

cut the effectiveness of the program. We are trying to make sure

we support the program and continue that effort and in this environment, again, I think this is a measure of our seriousness in support and not a measure of criticism here. There may be a difference

about how much money you put into the institute versus—look, my

own view is I want to keep that million dollars in the base of the

program to start more coalitions. It is $100,000 a year; $1 million

is 10 more coalitions. Maybe somebody thinks that $1 million in

the institute is a better way. I guess my view is, I want to keep

that $1 million in the coalition program. You could say, well, why

55

don’t I just ask for another $1 million? Because I also have to

worry about the technology transfer program and C tack and the

Media Campaign. So we are trying to make an environment that

is responsible decisions about proportionality which I recognize reasonable people could differ over. That is the thought process. I am

being honest with you.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me just ask you this. I think you said—correct me if I am wrong—you said that when—I guess when Clinton

first came in, you decided you wanted to leave. Is that what you

said?

Mr. WALTERS. That was too brief. I am sorry. At the end of the

President’s father’s administration when I was working at the drug

office, there was a request for individuals, political appointees, I

was actually a deputy for supply reduction at that time, to stay on

in each of the agencies to transfer the agencies to the incoming administration. I was asked to be that person at the Office of National Drug Control Policy. There were 146 FFEs in the office at

that time. Following the inauguration, I was in there, it was February 9, I believe, I was there till that point. I was working with

the one person that was there for transition. The administration

announced that it was going to cut the office from the 140-plus positions, and we had already removed political appointees, so it was

below that a bit, to 25. I did not believe that there could be a serious transition to 25 people, and so I resigned at that point before

Mr. Brown was nominated and confirmed which I would not have

done, but I just felt that, and that is why I maybe was too defensive when the chairman suggested that my office was being gutted.

I have been there, and I have strong feelings about the office.

I think the country is certainly stronger than any single bureaucratic office, but I think it plays an important part and so maybe

I reacted a little more strongly than I should have. But I watched

a lot of destruction. I watched a lot of what we had built up because the office just came into existence in 1989, and I think, while

the office does not simply make for the national effort, I do think

it exists to coordinate things that need to be coordinated and when

it is broken, things start falling apart. As long as I am here, I am

only going to be here as long as I think things are not falling apart,

and I do not think that is what is happening here and I maybe reacted a little too strongly to the hint that the chairman thought

they were. Again, I recognize that we are all in the same agreement on this, but there was some painful history there.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me just ask you this. I hate to put you on

the spot, but I am curious. When you look at the cuts, is there anything, any of these cuts that bother you personally? I believe in

you. But I am just wondering, is there anything here that bothers

you? That you look at and you say, well, you know, maybe we have

gone a little bit too far here? Or maybe this is not going to get it?

Is there anything here? Or that you lose a little sleep over?

Mr. WALTERS. I think that the array of programs that we are

talking about here are, and not just because I am in the administration, are the things we need to do. The places that we have increased funding I believe are critical places. Would I if I had a free

hand do more? Last year, we asked for $200 million in the President’s Access to Recovery Program. Congress gave us $100 million.

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I believe and the President believes we need more money in treatment. We believe we need to provide it in a flexible way. We believe we need to provide it to more of the people who are seeking

treatment and do not get it. If we came back and asked for $150

million, I recognize in this budget it is going to be hard to get the

additional $50 million. I certainly know that both of you care very

much about this, and we are going to need help again to try to get

that. I would like to see more of that. The other large cut that you

have brought up, look, I believe the HIDTA program will work better or the purpose of HIDTA by restructuring in focus. I sense

there is a disagreement among us about what we should be taking

our bearing from and so forth. I believe that we can change the

face, and we can only change the face of supply reduction systemically by coordinated intelligence-based Federal, State and local enforcement. We are partly moving there. We need to accelerate that

as rapidly as possible.

Maybe we should have some discussions with you and maybe

some of your key staff about what tools we think we are bringing

to bear and why we think that so that you can have a full understanding of maybe why it is not just a matter of, somebody says

yes and somebody says no from the executive branch. You have

many things you have to be concerned about. I understand that.

We should be fair in making sure we are making you fully aware

of what we are thinking so you can judge whether or not we are

right.

The other area is obviously in the Safe and Drug-Free Schools

Program. I understand that this is certainly a serious cut, and I

also understand that it affects the apparent balance in the program. And I certainly appreciate the many people who are working

in schools to be effective. The problem with the program is that in

this environment, the program is not focused effectively and demonstrably on reducing drug use and prevention. We believe that

we can better support that by working in community coalitions, by

nationally targeted programs where we put more money into the

national program part of the education account to allow accountable grant programs to reduce substance abuse. We also believe

that, frankly, as we have talked, the other areas of support that

we are trying to foster are building into the health care system a

better ability to screen for drug problems early, doctors and pediatricians and hospitals in the screening brief interventions programs, in the effort to bring drug courts. We are trying to double

the drug courts program. There were 400 more drug courts last

year alone, up to over 1,600. Everybody knows these work and they

are critical for people who start down the path to stop and to get

them early. We also believe that drug testing is the most powerful

and potentially far-reaching and lasting program. If we can get

over the misunderstanding that it is going to be used to punish—

that it cannot be used to punish—it allows us to connect the understanding of addiction as a disease with the tool of public health

that has changed the face of so many childhood diseases.

We cannot give people the treatments we have for HIV/AIDS if

we do not test them to find out whether they have HIV. We do not

treat people for tuberculosis if we do not test them as to whether

they have tuberculosis. And when we do, certainly we have to

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worry sometimes about the stigma, but in this case, we know testing works for adults in major parts of our, not only the military

and transportation safety, but when I go to schools, I see kids who

are afraid. I am sure they are the same kids that you see in Baltimore, the same kids I see in other cities and places. Middle school

and high school, they see what is happening to some of their peers

and some of their families. They do not understand why adults do

not do more to stop it. It is because, in part, in addition to prevention, it is a game of hide and seek. Kids start, they bring this behavior back, they encourage their friends to use with them. They

are an example. Drug use is fun and it does not cause any consequences. Look at me. That is an ad for drug use. What testing

does is it gives those kids the ability to say, I cannot use, I get tested. It is an amazingly powerful prevention tool, and in the schools,

that have it, kids feel safe.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I have to tell you, if I extracted a part of the argument you just made, it would fit very nicely with justifying keeping the Safe and Drug-Free Schools piece. I am just telling you,

what you just said. As you were talking, I could not help but think

about—and then I will finish up. I am finished, Mr. Chairman.

When I think about Safe and Drug-Free Schools, I think about

the fact that with our kids, it is not always the deed. It is the memory. It is a memory that we impart with them that lasts with them

for a long time. As I was sitting here listening to you, I could not

help but think about my daughter who is now 23 years old. I will

never forget; she came home when she was about 6 years old, and

she says, ‘‘Guess what I learned today, dad?’’ I said, ‘‘What is that?’’

She said, ‘‘I learned the fire department came in and told us to

stop, drop and roll.’’ I had never heard of that, believe it or not.

The reason why it came into my mind is because, as we were talking about it, I was kidding her about it the other day.

But what I am saying is I am just wondering. I heard your testimony about the Drug-Free Schools. It seems like the problems that

you talked about, in other words, trying to measure, making sure

the money actually goes into efforts to stop our kids, prevent our

kids from using drugs, it seems like there would have been a better

way than, say, eliminating the program even if you had to reduce

the funds, I do not agree with that, but if you had to, but to zero

in a bit on those specific concerns. I am sure you may have had

more than you did not mention. But what I am saying to you is

sometimes I think we need to—the same reasons you just gave are

the same reasons that I think it is important that we send those

messages as early as possible, and hopefully, when that young person gets in that environment, whether they are in the 10th or 12th

grade, 11th grade or whatever, and they are around drugs that

they can hearken back to a time when there was some program in

their school where Ms. Brown said something about not using

drugs. It may sound very simple, but it is very real.

I think one of the things that Americans are asking for, I hear

all this stuff about moral concerns in the elections and all that, but

you know what people really want? They want to make sure that

government helps them raise their kids in a safe environment, in

an environment that is healthy, and so that they can grow up and

be productive citizens. I think that those kinds of programs like the

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safe and drug-free schools is one of those things, because all kids

go to school. We have a captive audience. Just something that I

just wish you would consider.

Mr. WALTERS. Thank you.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SOUDER. I want to ask some additional questions on international. First, you do not only manage different programs, but you

also weigh in on a wide range as our No. 1 antidrug spokesman.

I wondered if you have weighed in with USAID concerning its financing of harm reduction programs. Let me give you two examples.

The 14th International Conference of Reduction of Drug-related

Harm was held in Chiang Mai, Thailand from April 6–10, 2003. It

was sponsored by the International Harm Reduction Association,

the Asian Harm Reduction Network and cosponsored by the Center

for Harm Reduction and USAID. What was a Federal agency doing

cosponsoring in effect a drug maintenance, as you and I have

worked with this issue—harm reduction is a code word. What were

we doing and did you speak up to USAID and say, this is not what

you should be doing with Federal dollars? Also, the Asian Harm

Reduction Network’s 350-page second edition manual for reducing

drug-related harm in Asia contains a USAID logo, and the production of the manual is acknowledged inside the cover, ‘‘this publication was made possible through support provided by the Office of

Strategic Planning Operations and Technical Support, Bureau for

Asia and the Near East, United States Agency for International

Development.’’

Included in the second chapter of the manual, rationale for harm

reduction, are sections on, ‘‘needle and syringe programs,’’ ‘‘sales

and purchasing of injecting equipment,’’ and removing barriers.

Chapter five, injecting safely, are sections devoted to, ‘‘sharing of

injecting equipment and safe injecting.’’ Did you review the USAID

drug program and have you spoken with Administrator Mastios

about the abuse of taxpayer dollars clearly contrary to the intent

of Congress?

Mr. WALTERS. I was not aware of these publications, or I did not

attend that meeting. I will say that, as I think you know, we have

been pretty aggressive with international bodies that have been

called to or drifted toward harm reduction, more aggressive than

I believe others have been in the past as this has become a more

pervasive issue. We have reminded people of their treaty obligations. We have talked to media in some foreign countries, including

Canada. You were with me.

We have met with international bodies, including U.N. bodies

about the structure. I was not aware of the particular publication.

I will be happy to look into it and report back to you.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. Let me move on. You and I argued yesterday about Drug-Free Schools, so we will not go through that

today. But I have some concerns. I know the program is not as effective as it should be but I do not believe it should be zeroed out.

I believe we need to make it more effective. Let me go to intelligence next because you talked about intelligence and you made a

statement with which I do not agree. I agree that intelligence is

the most important but intelligence without the assets to effectively

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do something about it is a problem, and we have been hearing

steadily from the different agencies about concern that our intelligence is identifying targets, and we are not able to implement,

and this budget I believe will make it more difficult to implement.

Let me give you an example. JIATF South is a successor, as you

know, to JIATF East which is based in Key West. They are responsible for coordinating drug interdiction between defense, customs,

Coast Guard and other agencies on the gulf coast. JIATF West,

based in Alameda, CA, was responsible for the same mission in the

eastern Pacific. As of October 1, 2003, JIATF South’s area of responsibility was expanded to include both the Gulf coast Caribbean

and the eastern Pacific, which was before under California.

Now that the JIATF West is in Hawaii, they have a far more

western outlook. This change has greatly increased JIATF South’s

workload, which goes directly to your question of intelligence, but

it has apparently come with no additional resources or personnel,

so they now have Caribbean and eastern Pacific, and at the same

time, the Defense Department has reduced their budget. So while

we are talking about the importance of intelligence, we have consolidated and factually reduced, and it did not transfer those resources. In other words, they reduced JIATF West when it went,

and they did not transfer them to the south. So given this DOD reorganization, what have you done to make sure that we have adequate resources that they can manage it in JIATF South?

Mr. WALTERS. The use of those interdiction resources, as you

know, are something that we at times have to triage because of the

platforms and the need for those platforms in a variety of missions.

When we raise the threat level, we pull Coast Guard and other

military assets into roles that may pull them out of interdiction

service and have in the past, as well as when we have other kinds

of demands throughout the Caribbean and the Pacific that are specific and may move some of these around. We have a limited number of these platforms and personnel. So in some cases, yes, it is

a dollar issue, but in some cases, it is a matter of you have to use

the pieces that are on the board at the present time. There have

been and there are people as you know as well as I who have

worked heroically over time in this area as in other areas of Homeland Security and Defense to do the additional job that they have

had to face since September 11, 2001. I think their results speak

for themselves. It is historic levels of seizures which no one has

ever seen before. In fact, levels that, for the first time, give us the

possibility of having a fundamental change in the ability to market

some of these substances on the basis of a significant contribution

from interdiction. We are trying to work to make sure that these

resources are allied, but as you know as well as I, I cannot tell you

that we do not base demands on military personnel, military budgets as well as Homeland Security agencies. So we are trying to

triage this.

I do not think that anyone can say that the budget as it was presented is chintzy with regard to Homeland Security or the war on

terror. We have tried to focus on that, understanding it is the first

priority. Yes, we are still—we still have limits. And so I understand

your point, and I will continue to try to work to help to make sure

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the resources are there. My staff works regularly with the people

in those centers and in those agencies.

I would expect that at times and sometimes for some duration,

people are going to feel some additional weight and sometimes we

do not have all the platforms we want. We are trying with this

budget to increase the available flight hours, for example, from air

time patrol aircraft, which are a critical part of the interdiction

process. We are looking at deploying and the Coast Guard has been

heroic in deploying more of the hitron teams that are so effective

in this kind of interdiction in most of both the East Pac and the

Caribbean. Again, though, I would say, the achievement here under

these circumstances is largely because of substantially improved intelligence that helps to give us the ability to use platforms in a targeted way. As you know, you have seen this, there are vast

amounts of ocean and vast amounts of air and vast amounts of

land that you have to cover. And if you are out there patrolling

around looking for something, you are not going to find much.

Mr. SOUDER. Does it make you sick to your stomach when you

hear people at these intelligence agencies saying we can see this

stuff moving, but we do not have the resources to stop it, knowing

people are going to die on the streets of the United States because

we do not have the resources to stop it, now that we know it is

coming?

Mr. WALTERS. Sure. But the goal here is—I also am aware that

this is—it is an operational setting. You try to have as many resources as you can in an optimal way because there are demands

on resources other places that are also designed to save lives. We

cannot just make sure everybody has everything they want in one

sector all the time and that means we are going to try to optimize

productivity and make a judgment about how.

Mr. SOUDER. Part of what the frustration, and it is bubbling up

in Congress is that we had a battle in the last administration of

where initially the Defense Department had put drug use. They

had put it at the bottom. By the end of the Clinton administration,

to their credit, they had moved it back up. Our current defense secretary moved it back to the bottom, so we have seen it weaken at

JIATF Six. And consolidating it into Northern Command, we are

having the battle over air time assets in the Caribbean and South

America.

We are having a similar battle over in Afghanistan that I am

going to get to in a minute, and the fact is that we have intelligence. They have pulled refueling support out, which has been

very critical, and we could get that in a speculative question of potential terrorist activity, when we know we have 20,000 to 30,000

people dying annually of drug abuse, when we see a load of cocaine

and heroin coming and do not catch it because we are trying to prevent something that we do not have—it is a risk assessment game

here. None of us want a nuclear, chemical or biological attack to

hit the United States. None of us even want a small dirty bomb

to hit the United States. The question here is that you have to do

risk assessment, and this is what some of us are pushing.

Sometimes you are going to need to be the skunk at the picnic

because somebody has to say, you cannot put it all over here for

an infinitesimal risk and ignore what is coming at you. That is terVerDate 11-MAY-2000 10:11 May 11, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00064 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 D:\DOCS\20878.TXT HGOVREF1 PsN: HGOVREF1
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rorism in the streets of Baltimore, terrorism in the streets of Fort

Wayne, and let it come when we see it coming, where we know it

is going to land. But we have a boat pulled over here because there

is a one-one-thousandth of a hundredth percent chance that something may be coming over here, and everybody panicked. That is

literally what is happening right now in the resource battle because nobody wants to get blamed for missing something because

we have diverted resources. That is why we are questioning the

ICE budget, because it does not reflect that these resources that

might be dedicated to drugs, the second they have any kind of

warning they go off of drugs; whereas if it is a drug agent who is

assigned to that, like we are battling the Air and Marine Division,

if it is somebody trained to be a drug agent, we know that the likelihood of them being diverted for anything but a real threat is

minimal. But if it is a budget item that says this is for narcotics

and it is not a dedicated narcotics person, it means that about 80

percent of the time, they get diverted. The boat, unless it is a clear

drug boat, gets pulled back into harbor. So we get accounted in the

drug budget—gives us, oh, we are flat funding drugs, but in fact,

we are not. The same thing with air platforms. We need to know

out of—your position is that you are going to be a strong advocate

internally and stand up and say, look, we understand there are

other problems but I am the drug guy and you cannot forget us or

we are just going to get run over by the huge complex that is pushing the terrorism on the Defense side which are important and

which every Member of Congress campaigns on, including me, but

not at the expense of forgetting what is happening at the grassroots level as people are dying in the streets back home.

Let me get into Afghanistan, and I will finish with my round of

questioning here. I have become concerned that not only did we

allow the biggest growth in heroin in modern times there on our

watch, partly because this was a low priority and the Defense Department does not grant the link between, or has not at least historically granted the link between terrorism and drugs. They did

not understand how many people were dying around the world apparently in their effort because it is a very difficult terrain. It is

a very difficult country that nobody has ever been able to get control, including the Afghanis themselves under any administration

in their history. We know that there are warlords in the north who

get tied up with it, but most of it is down in the Kabul area that

is critical to the support of the government.

It is not like I have not been there, I have not talked to, I have

not met with Kurds. I know how difficult the process is. But the

fact is that, on our watch, it soared. We had knowledge of where

this is and we have not sprayed it. the British did not spray it, and

then we did not spray it. Secretary Powell seemed very committed,

but the current Secretary seems to be backing up, and I have a

very deep concern about that. And in the last 2 weeks, we have

seen a whole bunch of publicity on the news that seems more to

be praising the efforts rather than acknowledging that our efforts

there are miserable, that they put several DEA agents in who are

more or less trapped in Kabul. We holler about getting them helicopters, and then they put proposed second-rate Russian helicopters or other helicopters rather than the helicopters that we

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would put our own military in. And then act like two DEA agents

are going to solve the heroin problem there without military support. They need Huey helicopters. They need soldiers to protect

them coming in.

We would not dream in Colombia of doing what we are doing in

Afghanistan. And if the administration continues to defend not

spraying, low-grade helicopters, minimal in Afghanistan, I do not

know how I can go to the floor with a straight face or go down to

Colombia and tell them, by the way, you have to spray. By the

way, we need helicopters that are high-level helicopters. By the

way, we need to have troops to support you on the ground so you

do not get shot out of the air when you go to your area. Because

what has worked, as you have said, in Colombia is having these

type of things. And in Afghanistan, what in the world are we

doing? Those people who have been involved in this are disturbed

that other Members of Congress are going over there and getting

a whitewash. The question is, is somebody in the administration

going to stand up and say, look, you are doing better than you were

a year ago, but the fact is, as you have said in front of our committee and I have said, the Taliban had a huge jump in heroin. Then

for 2 years they basically went down because they stockpiled it. So

there is some news story or some spray story on the national news

that says, oh, the opium farmers in south Afghanistan decided not

to grow this year. They just had the biggest growth in world history in Afghanistan. So what if they do not do it a year or two?

We did not send any message. And we are urging them to do alternative crops. What we know is alternative crops will not work unless they see they are not going to make the money out of heroin.

Then they will talk to us about alternative crops. Is anybody taking

this message to the rest of the administration?

If Secretary Rice and Secretary Rumsfeld both develop this attitude, we are in deep trouble. At least Secretary Powell was battling

with Secretary Rumsfeld about it, and Congress has been battling,

and we need to know where you stand, and are you going to speak

up on our problems in Afghanistan?

Mr. WALTERS. Let me start by saying, the budget that we are

discussing includes one of the largest single 1-year increases, I

think, in any place outside the Andes for Afghanistan. We are putting resources there. We have done resources in regard to the supplemental. The circumstance I think we also need to be in, as you

and I have discussed this before, we may see this in slightly different ways. Several years ago, Afghanistan for the first time got

its independence. Within the last year, it not only elected its first

President but, just before that, got its first constitution.

As people reported at the time, some people who voted for the

President said, for the first time in 5,000 years, somebody asked

the people of Afghanistan who they wanted to have govern them.

I think we have seen the benefits of democracy here.

We all understand that the largest single threat, I think, including President Karzai, but certainly the Secretary of State, the current Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, certainly the

President and my colleagues at the White House, that one of the

single, if not the single biggest single threat to the democracy in

Afghanistan is opium production.

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President Karzai has sought this time, this year, to respond to

what everybody thinks is remarkable growth from last year’s production by organizing the leadership in the fledgling democracy,

the Governors and some of the other leaders, to knock this down

themselves.

He strongly made the argument that for this year he doesn’t

want to spray it. Frankly, our ability to move and put in the infrastructure we have in Colombia in several months was probably not

a very conducive situation to have a massive or significant spray.

You know we are talking about over 200,000 hectares of poppy.

We sprayed 130,000 to 140,000 hectares of coke in Colombia in a

12-month period last year, with a full and uprunning program.

Poppy has to be eradicated in roughly 3 months, and we have doubled the area.

The ops tempo would have to be, if you look at that, six to eight

times the rate of what you have in Colombia. You can’t—even the

United States cannot drop that in 2 months. And as I think, because you have been involved in this, you also know, my experience

in working with countries in the world is it makes an awful lot of

difference whether the leader of that country wants to do this.

The difference in Colombia today, while we have resources that

are obviously critical—the single biggest difference is President

Uribe. His goal is zero coca, zero poppy in Colombia. And he has

aggressively pushed that. We have leaders in other countries that

have been our partners, who are working hard in difficult circumstances, but they are not as committed, they are not as able.

Now, for President Karzai to ask for this year, to say let me do

it my way as the new leader of Afghanistan, let me try to rely on

Governors—some of which I have transitioned out and put in my

persons, some of the leaders and some of the military leaders that

we have moved, let me put an Afghan face on this. Let’s not have,

in this new democracy, spraying, given some of the history of these

factors in the past with Russia and/or Soviet Union and Afghanistan. Let me try to do this my way.

Now, I don’t know whether some of these accounts that have

been recently written about how much progress was made—I am

always skeptical of these things until we prove them. We have

teams, as you may now know, looking out to see if we can verify

this in the report term, and we will report these obviously to you

and other Members of Congress and the American people as soon

as we have something definitive.

I don’t believe we will have a survey until the end of the year,

but we can see, hopefully, with enough people out there, what’s

going on. But many of us do believe that ultimately if you are going

to eradicate on a large scale, you are going to need to do spray.

I will point out, though, that when President Uribe took office,

most of the people who gave an assessment of him, including not

only intelligence agencies, but some people in Congress and then

the executive branch, said he cannot do what he says he is going

to do. And every single case, in my experience, everything he said

he is going to do, he has done or he has done more than he said

he was going to do.

I don’t know what the relationship will show in the history between President Karzai and what he says he is going to do in his

64

achievements, but I do think in a new democracy, and given the

importance of the leadership of the nation, and under the circumstances we face with the logistical situation of our own, giving

him a chance to show what he could do in Afghanistan is a reasonable position.

Now, on the issue of how much do U.S. agencies support this, as

you know we are training police, military, supporting court systems, alternative development, infrastructure development, all

those things are ongoing. They are in a difficult security environment in some places. There are other priorities that we have had

to face over the last several years that have made our ability to

have to triage security situations—and while supporting elections

and other things—not the easiest task even for the United States

of America.

I don’t believe that we have made bad decisions. Now, an individual emphasis here or there, but I don’t believe that we have failed

to do what we could do under the circumstances. But that doesn’t

mean that we are happy with where the poppy or where the opium

trade is. We need to go after it more aggressively. We are proposing—and my office has been involved directly in creating a strategy

that includes five parts that we are going to try to implicate on

eradication, institution building, alternative development, standing

up, cooperation, domestically and internationally, that we believe

will make a difference.

But, again, until we get there, I am not saying it is done, but

I do believe the path for creating a better situation not only for democracy, but for the drug trade, is a path that we can reasonably

expect ourselves to follow.

Are we impatient as you are? Of course we are. But I do think

that while reasonable people might differ about emphasis or how

we construct this, given where we started, given the primitive circumstances that we are in, given how fast this came back, and

under the overall threats we felt and we had to face in the global

war on terror, Afghanistan is a remarkable success in terms of

where institutions are today. We have to get rid of the poppy. And

President Karzai is saying—and I think the people around him understand that, and that, as a lead partner in this relationship, is

critical.

Mr. SOUDER. I appreciate your explanation. I believe if the American people knew the classified material, they would be outraged,

and I believe as that comes out, we are going to face a problem

here in Congress that is greater if the administration doesn’t address directly and aggressively what is impossible to sit on indefinitely.

That the fact is that we knew where supplies were, and we didn’t

attack them; that there were political reasons not to do so; that we

don’t control much of the ground now; that President Karzai has

given us lots of words, and I have heard them, and I believe he is

an honest man trying to do this.

We do not take this out of President Toledo in Peru. He is in a

teetering democracy that just had a terrible administration. He is

in a teetering position. That democracy could fall. In Bolivia it

could fall. In Ecuador they had seven Presidents in 9 years.

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And if they start looking at it and saying oh, teetering, we can’t

do this, we send messages that are going to reverberate around the

world based on trying to treat Afghanistan as a different type of

a country than other countries. I understand that; historical.

But, hey, the heroin wasn’t there when the king was there. It

was not a democracy but it was a quasi-democracy, and it was a

nation for a long period of time, it was not unorganized. And it had

a period where it went chaotic. And I know it’s difficult; it’s difficult in any country.

President Uribe did have the courage to come in, but partly what

he saw was DMZs, like we have right now in Afghanistan, do not

work. In fact, in Afghanistan we have 80 percent of the country in

a DMZ like we had in Colombia, where we can’t eradicate, where

we can’t go in, and that type of approach in Afghanistan—maybe

it’s too late this year.

The British were in charge of it in the first place. We did a hearing on that. It may have been too late to get in this year. Then we

ought to be going for the stockpiles, because we are going to spend

millions and millions of dollars trying to interdict around the world

now as a followup because we didn’t spend it at the front end. And

that’s what I would say.

Mr. WALTERS. I want to be clear. We don’t believe it’s too late

to eradicate. In fact, we are training a centralized eradication force

that will be in the field doing force to eradication, in addition to

the supplements that President Karzai is organizing or attempting

to organize with some of the provincial leadership. I was talking

about aerial eradication only at this point in time. Again, I think

that ultimately on the magnitude that we are talking about, there

will be a considerable lead for aerial eradication.

Mr. SOUDER. Manual eradication can’t even begin to hit a tiny

portion, particularly when it’s not safe to go on the ground—and

the only areas we can eradicate, and this is what we ran into in

Colombia—is that if you only eradicate manually a small section of

a country—and that’s a country that, in effect, you control the

ground—what they do is they just plant in other areas where we

don’t control the ground.

The military has to get involved in this, because this is a shooting war. And the DEA and the State Department are not going to

be able to do spray planes. How is the DEA going to do a bust in

trafficking when people have all sorts of military weapons? That in

Colombia we don’t ask three DEA agents to go in with some State

Department employee flying a plane. We have to have all kinds of

trained units to protect them. The only organized force right now

in Afghanistan is our military.

And if they don’t take responsibility, the world will be so flooded

with heroin that we won’t get this undone for 8 years. And that’s

what many of us in Congress who have worked on this issue—Congressman Dana Rohrabacher is upset, Congressman Mark Kirk is

upset, and furthermore downplaying it on the military side, which

is what we are trying to do right now, and saying, oh, it’s not that

great of a problem and they are going to be good for a year or two.

This is what the Taliban did. And they didn’t even produce at the

level of the market to keep the price up. They have enough right

now unless we hit the stockpiling and go aggressively at this, this

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will be a long-term set back here, and we don’t have a year for

some of this.

Mr. WALTERS. Well, let me just say, I don’t believe anybody is

downplaying this. I don’t believe that the President, I don’t believe

the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, I don’t believe the

other officials that I work with, I don’t believe the British are

downplaying it. I don’t believe President Karzai is downplaying it.

They understand it’s central to the future and the stability and the

possibilities of peace and stability and democracy in Afghanistan.

The question is, what is a reasonable plan for the way ahead?

We don’t intend to drop three DEA agents anywhere and tell them

to go do X or Y. We are creating coordinated teams with Afghans

and U.S. personnel, some DEA, some others.

We are working with the British, we are working with other

countries that have responsibility for some of the areas or cities of

Afghanistan, to integrate the enforcement against labs, against

people that are involved in trafficking, against the growing cultivation, and the interdiction of the movements of drugs and drug-related movements of precursors and others.

Again, we are creating an integrated plan. We are standing it up

in an environment which is more primitive even than Iraq. We are

trying to create this with a country that wants to have leadership

in its own country. I think the key here is, you know, there are limits to the resources and the people that we can play to kind of take

over Afghanistan.

But also, more than that, you have to give the country back at

some point. You know, what we have in Colombia is, certainly, a

lot of U.S. support. But the massive effort is Colombians, and Colombians that we have helped train, we have helped support. We

are on some operations with them. We do provide equipment.

But basically, you know, the operation—and I think what is so

impressive about the cooperation is how the Colombians are taking

it to the forefront, and I think that is a difference from some other

places and sometimes in the past, even from Colombia.

President Karzai is asking to have his people in the forefront. We

are supporting him, including the U.S. military. What the ops

tempo is, I recognize there are some people over there who, you

know, criticize some of the other agencies when they are not there;

they don’t do what they want, so forth. This is part of our job to

try to manage this in reasonable ways.

I don’t consider the goal of making nobody unhappy reasonable.

But you are fair to say it has grown. It is unacceptable, it has to

be contained, it has to be shrunk for both reasons of drug control

and reasons of controlling terror and providing stability in Afghanistan.

But I disagree in the sense of, you know, people don’t get it. We

get it. We are trying to do it. We are trying to do it as rapidly as

possible. Do some people have a view that we should have done

more, faster, in this area? I understand that they do.

I sit through these meetings. I know demands on other sectors

and personnel here. I do not believe that it—that what has been

done was either unjustified or unreasonable because somebody was

heavy-handed. I know that people believe that defense has not

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been as aggressive as it could be and reasonable people may differ

about that.

Mr. SOUDER. Drugs are running 24th, or they are our 24th priority, I think it’s a safe assumption.

Mr. WALTERS. Well, except that if you look at what the Defense

Department is doing, it is not 24th out of 24 priorities. It has maintained its funding, it has maintained its support in critical areas.

It has been aggressive in providing support for critical parts of this

effort.

The reason we are better—again, I understand what you said

earlier, which I didn’t get a chance to comment about. Now if we

see drugs coming to the United States from South America, we

don’t stop it. Of course it’s troubling. But again, let’s step back and

look at what the record is.

We have historic seizures, massively fewer drugs are getting to

the United States. Not a few fewer; massively fewer drugs are getting to the United States than ever before—through the support of

Congress, plans, and the Andean initiative that was started before

I got here, and started originally in its original form during President Bush’s father’s administration—and massive increases in the

effectiveness of interdiction. I’m sorry that some of that is not

maybe as prominent or balanced on the Web sites of some of the

agencies.

But do I care more what is on the Web sites or what is not getting to the streets of America? The fact is, those men and women

are saving lives every day with what they seize. Are we going to

do better? We are all dedicated to try to do better.

But again, I don’t think it’s fair to leave the impression that

there’s a massive amount that we are not getting, or it is staying

the same, or we are declining in our effectiveness. We are massively more effective, not slightly more effective, massively more effective every year. And I believe the budget that we are proposing

will capitalize on that project.

Mr. SOUDER. Well, thank you very much for being patient today

and taking so many questions.

I believe that we have been more successful. I am very concerned

about the changes proposed inside the Department of Homeland

Security from the Shadow Wolves to the Air and Marine Division,

to how they are using the Coast Guard that will reduce that effectiveness.

I am concerned that they are lowering their emphasis and funds

to drug intelligence. I am concerned that, given the fact that we

have made our first progress due largely to your aggressive approach, that we seem to be backing away from some of the other

things.

I do want to say that in the budget, I very much appreciate your

continued advocacy of the treatment programs. I thought there

were a number of programs in there from drug courts to prison reentry-type things that are very important that have been neglected.

And what we do inside the prisons, the President said he was going

to focus on this, and he is beginning to address that and I hope you

will continue to work with us on that.

Because that is a key part, and I think you have a balanced approach overall, but we have some strong disagreements, and I am

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sure you are going to hear about it from a lot more committees

than this one, and we will continue to work together.

With that, thank you for being with us.

And we will go to panel II.

Mr. WALTERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. SOUDER. If you will stand, we in this committee, we do as

an oversight committee——

[Witness sworn.]

Mr. SOUDER. Let the record show that the witness responded in

the affirmative. Thank you for your patience as we work through

this budget, and thank you for joining us today.

Will you go ahead and give us your testimony?

STATEMENT OF PETER REUTER, PH.D., PROFESSOR, SCHOOL

OF PUBLIC POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND

Mr. REUTER. Thank you very much.

Mr. Chairman, I am pleased to be here today to speak about the

workability of the current ONDCP budget concept. I am a professor

at the University of Maryland and a researcher at the RAND

Corp., but the testimony represents my own opinions, not those of

either RAND or the university. And I hope my written testimony

may be entered into the record.

My testimony will not deal with the proposed 2006 drug budget

but with how well the current ONDCP budget concepts serves Congress and the public as a representation of Federal drug policy. The

agency made major procedural changes in 2003. I argued that

ONDCP changes, if properly implemented, could generate a useful

document for that agency. However, there still remains a need for

ONDCP to prepare a more comprehensive document, fully representing what the Federal Government spends to reduce the Nation’s drug problems, and providing the basis for fully informed policy decisions.

Moreover, there were problems in the implementation of the new

procedures that resulted in the omission of some major policy items

that, even under the rationale offered, ought to be included in the

budget.

Let me start by saying that the drug budget serves a number of

purposes. For many years, it provided just an important description

of the Federal component of U.S. drug policy. It also serves more

functional goals as well. Very few individual programs have been

evaluated, and so the drug budget was often interpreted as providing a broad sense of how well the Federal Government was doing

in its drug control decision. And in the 1990’s, ONDCP constructed

an elaborate performance measurement system linked to the detailed budget.

Until 2002, the published budget aimed to be as comprehensive

as possible about Federal expenditures. The resulting figures had

limitations as a tool for policy decisions by ONDCP.

Consider Federal prison expenditures, which I will come back to,

a major item in the old budget. Given the flow of convicted offenders from the courts, two factors determine these expenditures. The

existing laws, mainly the mandatory minimum sentences for drug

offenders in Federal court; and two, the guidelines established by

the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

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If Congress wishes to spend less on incarcerating convicted drug

offenders, it will have to reduce minimum drug sentences and/or direct changes in the guidelines. Neither of these are options for

ONDCP in its budget certification and policy role. Plus, Bureau of

Prison expenditures for incarcerating drug offenders did not represent a number that ONDCP could influence. Medicaid presents

the same kind of budgeting programs, an entitlement program;

there is little direct budget flexibility. The real power to address

substance issues in Medicaid, which can be quite substantial, is

through other policy leaders that might increase the eligibility of

high-risk populations.

In 2003, ONDCP developed a new budget concept. First, it would

only include programs that reduced drug use and not those that

only reduced the consequences of drug use.

Second, it would not include expenditures that were buried in

much larger and broader programs, although the director mentioned a few exceptions. The two distinctions proposed are reasonable ones. Subprograms that reduce the adverse consequences of

drugs, such as health care for AIDS patients, or, indeed, prevention

aimed at AIDS, in fact as a consequence of sharing needles, will

have no effect on the level of drug use. This may be a worthy program, but will not have consequences for the targets that ONDCP

uses to assess progress in the fight against drugs, and ONDCP is

not alone in making this kind of distinction.

The British Government, a sophisticated practitioner of drug

budget arts, makes a similar distinction among programs, using

the terms proactive and reactive. The other change had a more

pragmatic basis; agencies with small drug-related workload or programs addressing a wide range of issues, beyond drugs, were removed from the budget unless funding could be reorganized and

displayed to show drug funding in discrete decision units.

Done properly, these two changes would allow ONDCP to focus

its attention on programs that specifically target drug use and that

are not buried inside larger programs, a reasonable enough exercise for the agencies on purposes.

However, there were two problems. First, as implemented, the

new budget does not seem to meet the criteria laid out for it. Important items that should be included are omitted.

Second, and perhaps most important, there’s a need for a most

comprehensive budget for broader public purposes, not just

ONDCP’s decisionmaking.

The major difference between the two budgets, the two budgets

under the two procedures, as shown by comparisons provided for

fiscal year 2003, is the exclusion of almost all costs associated with

the incarceration of Federal drug prisoners and the exclusion of

most prosecutorial expenditures.

These amount to about $4.5 billion, according to an estimate by

John Carnevale, former ONDCP Director. The only Bureau of Prison expenses included in the new budget are those aimed to lower

drug abuse among prisoners. Thus, the Bureau appears by function

only as a treatment agency. This seems consistently odd.

Incarceration and prosecution are intended to reduce drug use by

affecting the supply side of the market. The vast majority of Federal drug inmates are there for smuggling or selling, rather than

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using or possessing drugs. Incarceration is what makes investigation, what is included in the budget, effective as a method of deterring drug dealers.

Investigation does impose its own costs on the drug distribution

system through seizure of drugs and assets. However, the bulk of

the penalties that Federal enforcement imposes on drug distributors result from incarceration rather than from these other penalties. Thus, if one seeks to estimate the total costs of Federal efforts to reduce drug use, then both prosecution and incarceration

are being included, not just investigation, as is now the case.

Moreover, the Bureau of Prisons is not an agency in which drug

control is buried in a much broader mission. The majority of BOP

inmates are drug offenders. Thus, even by the second of the tests

offered by ONDCP, namely the explicitness of the drug control role,

its expenditures could be included.

A similar question can be raised about the exclusion of most

prosecutorial expenditures. Prosecution precedes incarceration and

is also a critical component of the drug enforcement system, but

logic for including incarceration costs in Federal supply control efforts applies equally to prosecution.

I have only had the opportunity to mention a few examples of the

problems created by the new procedures. More are provided in the

written testimony. The reformulated ONDCP budget concept, if

properly implemented, can serve a useful purpose. It focuses the

agency on what it can influence. However, the budget documents

need to be supplemented by the re-creation of the old, more comprehensive budget, which can inform the broader debate about

drug policy. This will allow the Republican Congress to better understand the cost of current policy and help them make more informed decisions about issues that are important that lie outside

of ONDCP’s jurisdiction.

It would be even more useful if the budget were to include regular estimates of expenditures by State and local governments. The

only estimate ever made, done for 1991, showed that State and

local governments spent as much as the Federal Government, if not

slightly more. Probably true today. Estimating these figures is complex but feasible. If Congress wishes to have a full understanding

of drug policy in the Nation and the role that Federal programs

play, it needs this broader set of figures, at least on an occasional

basis.

I am happy to answer questions.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you for your testimony.

[The prepared statement of Mr. Reuter follows:]

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Mr. SOUDER. Mr. Cummings, do you want to start first?

Mr. CUMMINGS. You heard the testimony of the Director, did you

not?

Mr. REUTER. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. When I asked him—and I assume that you are

familiar with the programs of Safe and Drug-Free Schools?

Mr. REUTER. I am.

Mr. CUMMINGS. You heard his comments with regard to that, we

are now basically eliminating that program. I mean, did you have

any opinion on that?

Mr. REUTER. Yes. Actually, about 4 years ago, I coauthored a

study commissioned by the Department of Education, published by

RAND, evaluating the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act. And I must

say, it was fairly negative about it.

That is to say that we felt the evidence suggested that money

was very broadly used and not focused on drug programs, and

many ineffective programs, certainly of unknown effectiveness and

implausibly effective, were being funded.

Mr. CUMMINGS. So you would have been, I guess, generally in

agreement with Mr. Walters with regard to—because it sounds like

you are saying almost the same thing he said, that money was

being spent on things that were not directly to address drugs used

in drug prevention, and that it was very difficult to measure its effectiveness; that is, these funds’ effectiveness in that program?

Mr. REUTER. That’s correct. This was money that was treated almost like a formula grant, and the result was that, you know,

money was given in very small amounts to schools and the costs

of trying to evaluate, even keep track of what the schools were

doing with these funds, was simply unjustifiable.

And the Clinton administration proposed a rather, as I remember, a rather clumsy restructuring in which there would be lots of

evaluation. But if you take evaluation seriously, that really chews

up a lot of money; and there was a question about whether you

couldn’t come up with a different way of distributing the funds that

focused the funds more on high-risk schools, you know, the forces

that tend to get money, distributed more evenly into almost a formula grant that go against that. But you could certainly design a

program which did two things: one, focused on higher-risk schools;

and, second, made better use of what is known about effective prevention programs.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Now, it is interesting that you said what you just

said, because one of the things that Mr. Walters said during that

discussion on Safe and Drug-Free Schools was that he found that

one of the more effective uses of funds was to be able to, I guess

for lack of a better term, search lockers and things of that nature,

as I recall correctly. I mean, have you found that to be ineffective?

Mr. REUTER. I am not the person to sort of get to what are effective programs. I am a reader of the literature—and not much to go

around.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I understand.

Mr. REUTER. Let me give you an example of the limits of what

we know here.

Mr. CUMMINGS. OK.

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Mr. REUTER. About 4 or 5 years ago, a panel of the Department

of Education was asked to assess what were known to be effective

and promising prevention programs. And about 150 providers of

programs offered their curricula for judgment by that panel. At the

end of the day, they identified nine as proven effectiveness and

only, I think, two or three of those nine were broad-based drug prevention programs. Some were very focused, like those on steroid

use amongst athletes.

The simple truth is that we don’t have much basis for giving

schools directions about what are good programs to use. That isn’t

to say there aren’t good programs, but we do not have an empirical

basis for making judgments of effectiveness.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Does the restructured budget stand in the way

of formulating sound drug policy, do you think?

Mr. REUTER. Yes, I believe it does. I mean, not, I think, with the

precise matter that we are talking about here. I mean, I think that

could be fought in terms of the existing drug budget.

But I think the omission of the prosecutions and incarceration—

I mean it’s terribly specific—but that’s a huge item. We are talking

about $4.5 billion there, and so discussing the Federal effort without including that is discussing sort of the—discussing the land

area of the United States but sort of skipping Alaska. I mean, it

just gives you the wrong view about what the Federal Government

is doing.

As I said, for ONDCP’s purposes, I fully understand the Bureau

of Prisons’ decision. Prosecution was a little more difficult, but I

understand the logic.

But if you are then talking about Congress as a decisionmaker,

surely it’s important to know what it is that is being spent on the

enforcement side in the full, aimed at reducing drug use, not merely the consequences; and the prisons and prosecution are a very important component of that.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Shall we—I’m sorry, please.

Mr. REUTER. No, go ahead.

Mr. CUMMINGS. One of the things, when you mentioned prisons,

one of the things I always found fascinating is how people’s drug

problems could become worse when they went to prison.

Mr. REUTER. Prison has always been a school for worsening of

problems. I mean, it’s not that nobody gets better in prisons, but

rehabilitation is not what prisons tend to do. It’s more like

dehabilitation. I used to do work on organized crime, and I was

talking to a low-level Brooklyn Mafia associate, and he got talking

about people in Chicago, and I said how on Earth—I mean, he had

hardly gotten to Manhattan; I mean, this is a guy, very local. He

was talking about Chicago. He said, well, we are in Atlanta too.

And you just sort of realize that these are, in fact, ways of both

forging networks and improving skills, I am afraid, that happen

and have happened over many generations.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Would you have liked to have seen more money,

or would you have liked to have seen more money going into prisons to address drug problems?

Mr. REUTER. I mean, I think it’s important to remember that the

Federal Government is only a moderately important player in

terms of prisons for drug offenders. I think the U.S. prisons have

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about 60,000 or 70,000 persons in them for drug offenses, probably

more like 250,000 in State prisons. And if you include local jails,

that probably adds another 150. So if you are sure the Federal

Government should be locking up more prisoners and more people

for drug offenses, you really want to take it in the context of the

total incarceration that we impose on——

Mr. CUMMINGS. That wasn’t my question.

Mr. REUTER. I’m sorry.

Mr. CUMMINGS. My question was the prisoners that they do

have.

Mr. REUTER. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Should part of our policy be to make sure that

Federal prisoners get drug treatment?

Mr. REUTER. Oh, I’m sorry. It’s not a particularly high-risk population.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I guess a lot of these people on that level, on the

Federal level, may not even be using drugs.

Mr. REUTER. State prisons have a much higher high-risk population, so I have no judgment about exactly how many, and the

Federal prisons are sort of better served than State prisons are.

But if you had treatment resources for prisons available, it would

be State prisons that are in most need of it rather than Federal

prisons.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me ask you this. You heard my questions on

Immigration and Customs Enforcement?

Mr. REUTER. Yes.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Can you comment on that, please?

Mr. REUTER. In the late eighties and early nineties, agencies

were eager to show how much they were doing to deal with drugs,

because it was the leading crisis at this time.

The drug crisis—the drug problem is an important problem now,

but clearly not seen as anything like the leading crisis. Agencies

understandably think that other missions have higher priority, and

I think, very plausible, that at the margins they divert resources

that had the drug label on them to other things. But I certainly am

in no position to judge that has occurred.

Mr. CUMMINGS. And so if you were—and I know you are not trying to—but if you were to give some advice to us within your own

parameters, as people who sit here trying to use the taxpayers’ dollars effectively and efficiently and as persons who see methamphetamine use destroying people, and crack cocaine, powder cocaine,

heroin, so on and so on destroying people and communities, and if

you were to give an opinion or give advice as to things we need to

concentrate on as legislators, what would that advice be?

Mr. REUTER. OK. I teach in a public policy school. We take advice seriously. That is to say, I don’t particularly value my opinions

about things. I am much more comfortable saying what are the

consequences of choices than saying which you should make. There

are no——

Mr. CUMMINGS. Well, why don’t we do that? Why don’t you give

me the consequences of proceeding the way we are proceeding with

the budget? You are familiar with the budget situation here.

Mr. REUTER. I——

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Mr. CUMMINGS. The proposed budget. And I want you to tell me

what you think the consequences will be if we proceed down that

road, the road we are going now, as opposed to some other road

that might take us in the more positive direction.

Mr. REUTER. OK.

Mr. CUMMINGS. How about that?

Mr. SOUDER. May I add a supplement to that to reinforce your

question?

Mr. CUMMINGS. Sure.

Mr. SOUDER. For example, were you here for the last——

Mr. REUTER. The whole thing, yes.

Mr. SOUDER. Director Walters clearly stated over and over—and

you could hear us fencing—that he sees nationalization and some

of these programs, as opposed to the dollars going to State and

local agencies, giving them resources, giving the prosecutors, for example—there is a very particular thing; what would be the consequences of that substantive change?

Mr. REUTER. You have asked me a broad question. I will take

some liberties. The first thing is to realize that policy works very

much at the margins of this problem.

If you ask why marijuana use went down through the eighties

and then up through the mid-nineties, I defy you to find a plausible

explanation in policy. I can put on a chart, two lines. One is the

size of the cohort of—I think it’s 14 to 19-year-olds, and the prevalence of drug use in monitoring the future for 12th grade, and you

will be hardly able to see any light between them.

There are broad demographic factors and, in fact, cultural factors

that drive a lot of these phenomena. And what you do with policy

is going to have fairly modest effects on broad things like how

many kids start using drugs. Doesn’t mean one shouldn’t try, but

you should not have an expectation that these are going to make

large differences.

The one kind of program from which you can make an exception,

where you can say we really do have some evidence that we can

make a difference in substantial numbers, is treatment. Now, in

part it’s because there was, until recently, so much hostility to drug

treatment, that treatment—the treatment community had to,

under pressure from Congress in particular, to constantly evaluate

to show that they were able to make a difference in the lives both

of the people they treated and the communities in which they operated.

So crime is lower in Baltimore because there’s been an expansion

of drug treatment, a very large expansion of drug treatment in the

case of Baltimore. That we can argue with pretty strong evidence.

For everything else, you have impressions and contradictory evidence. If you ask me whether moving resources from Federal prosecutors to local prosecutors is going to make a difference, neither

I nor anybody else has a basis for a judgment on that.

And I’m sorry that I, you know, that I sound unhelpful. But if

you ask what is the empirical base from these decisions, the answer is minimal. And that’s why, oddly enough, treatment, you

know, scorned and despised for so long, actually now has something to offer. It can provide some evidence that it makes a difference. It doesn’t mean that enforcement can’t make a difference,

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but it is really quite striking that the period during which enforcement has become greatly intensified as measured by the probability

that a drug dealer, cocaine or heroin dealer will go to prison, over

that period.

Cocaine and heroin, at least up till 2 years ago—I haven’t seen

more recent data—has seen decline, substantial declines in prices,

and almost no change in availability as measured by surveys.

That’s a gloomy statement. There’s a description of what we, in

fact, have observed over a long period of time: intensified enforcement and, in terms of drug use, minimal effects.

Drug enforcement serves lots of purposes, like making neighborhoods safer. And it’s clear that enforcement, particularly local enforcement, aimed at neighborhoods, has reduced the sort of disorder and crime around drug distribution. There’s a lot more that

goes on inside as opposed to outside, and Baltimore sort of really

stands out in how that problem has not shrunk as much. In many

cities it has shrunk very substantially. So enforcement has a lot to

show for itself.

But if you ask, by the indicators that are used, how, you know—

what is the prevalence of drug use in the population, there’s very

little, you know—there’s nothing to suggest that tougher enforcement has made a difference. And if that’s the measure that’s going

to be used, as has been used in large part in the strategies, then

enforcement is just not going to look very strong, and these

changes are not important.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Let me make sure I am clear on what you just

said. Are you saying that treatment is the one thing that seems to

have some effect on drug usage?

Mr. REUTER. I am saying, yes, there is a credible base of evidence, systematically gathered, that shows both that it reduces

drug use and which reduces crime and other adverse consequences

for the community. If I might just say, it isn’t to say that there is

no such thing as an effective drug prevention program or that law

enforcement makes no difference. But as a researcher, I can fairly

say, you know, it is an act of faith, an argument, not evidence, that

tougher enforcement, in fact, reduces drug use in American cities.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Well, I can tell you that in Baltimore what we

found, there came a time, in change of administrations, when our

current mayor, to his credit, Mr. Chairman, got drug dealers off the

corners. And they just basically disappeared.

But then you go to other parts of the city, and it seems as if they

have been sort of—if you had a circle and they were all around in

a circle, and all inside, that they had been pushed to more or less

the center of the circle, you could see them on the outside. And so—

but yet still, the crime continued, the problems continued.

But one of the things that I do find—and I am just listening to

what you are saying, and then I want to hook it up with the

ONDCP—is that when they—although the crimes seemed to stay

pretty steady, but there’s a community in Baltimore that has successfully gone through treatment, and it is truly a broad community.

Sometimes I go to speak before people who have dealt with addiction, and they talk about being clean for 10 years, 5 years or

whatever. And it is a large community and one that helped—they

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help each other, you know. If one happened to end to be a barber,

they go to that barber. They will end up in a certain church, and

it’s actually—it’s a very strong community. And it’s just a shame

that people have to go through that process to get there.

I guess where I am going here is that, you know—so you are saying that no matter what we do, you don’t see how we can attach

success to any kind of enforcement?

Mr. REUTER. I want to be very careful about this.

Mr. CUMMINGS. I want you to be.

Mr. REUTER. Right. The principal outcome measure that is

used—and the chairman certainly in his opening statement referred to this—the principal measure that has been used for the

success of drug policy in this country is use—predominantly use in

schools, but probably use in the household population.

I am saying that there is no evidence in favor and a good deal

of evidence that contradicts the proposition that tougher enforcement—and enforcement has by most measures, by most measures,

gotten very much tougher over the course of the 1990’s and has

had substantial effects on drug use.

Looking at the marijuana chart over there that was there. I

mean, during the period of the nineties, in which marijuana use

amongst youth went up very substantially, incarceration for drugselling offenses went up just as dramatically. And marijuana possession arrests went up very substantially during that period,

much faster than drug use amongst youth, marijuana use amongst

youth. Marijuana use amongst adults declined during that period.

But we have seen a very persistent ratcheting up of enforcement

over a long period of time and seen pretty stable drug use in the

general population.

I think of enforcement as playing an absolutely critical role at

the local level. And, you know, there are lots of success stories

there, you know, success stories that even research isn’t going to—

I mean, success stories are often stories people tell. But success stories that, you know, when you go out and measure, they really did

accomplish what they said they did.

But if what you are after is reducing drug use in the general population, then tougher enforcement seems an implausible way of

making a great deal of progress.

And in Washington, in front of Congress, it’s hard to say this,

but policy is in many respects quite marginal.

Mr. CUMMINGS. Thank you.

Mr. SOUDER. Let me say, first, I appreciate your comments. As

you are well aware from my earlier comments, we couldn’t have a

more comprehensive disagreement about what happened in the

early days of the Clinton administration, when you were an advisor

in the Clinton administration, and an interpretation of those results.

I have to say with all due fairness, I don’t think I have ever

agreed with a RAND study, as you call it, with narcotics. But I believe that you do a very good job of articulating some of the key

debate points, and you have raised them around the budget. And

that doesn’t mean just because I don’t agree with all the conclusions that—trying to go through this process and sort through the

challenges you have raised.

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You have raised a very critical point as we look at what even inside—if we do drug abuse prevention inside the prisons. When we

are locking up people and we Federalize the enforcement question,

we go up the chain, more often the dealers, not the users, and

therefore we need to look at where our dollars go for treatment. I

thought that was a very insightful comment that I haven’t really

heard in the debate.

I think that we can play a couple of figures—liars, liars—figure

here, in how we cut the charts and how we treat lag effects.

Mr. REUTER. Oh, yes.

Mr. SOUDER. Because, of course, when drug use goes up, arrests

are going to go up. And then when the people become incarcerated,

they are not there using the drugs, because they are in prison, and

they at least aren’t counted the same. Therefore, drug abuse is

going to go down. So how you treat a lag effect in the charts becomes critical.

But I would argue that—let me take an interesting statistic.

Mr. REUTER. Sure.

Mr. SOUDER. Since we have kept divorce rates—divorce rates

went down for 2 years under Calvin Coolidge; I believe 1 year,

early in the Eisenhower administration; under 2 or 3 years of

Reagan; and they have gone down under Bush.

So if you elect a conservative President, the divorce rates goes

down: Obviously that is not true. They didn’t pass a policy, because, as you said, the culture is what really drives it, not the public policy.

The question, however, is how much do the signals that public

officials send and the laws that they pass also have an interactive

relationship in defining the culture? If you, in doing your research

presume that isn’t true, or just say look, this was a cultural

change, and it’s a hard-to-measure change, which is driving which?

But clearly there’s a symbiotic relationship.

And there is also for every trend, a counter-trend, so that there

is also the result that when incarcerations go up, the next generation says, hey, I don’t want to go to jail, and therefore they change

their behavior, so you are measuring that as a cultural change

about their attitude toward marijuana, when in fact it may have

been an enforcement change with the delayed effect.

Those are the types of difficulties as we go through these kinds

of numbers.

Mr. REUTER. I appreciate that you have laid on the table about

five topics on which I give long talks, and I will not try to deal with

all five of them, and certainly not at length.

Let me just say, pick out a couple—the effects of incarceration

on measured drug use is sort of an intriguing topic. I mean, the

incarcerated population—I am just sort of going to give you a rough

figure—I think probably there are 700,000 more drug users locked

up now than there were in 1990. So, just a rough figure.

And you say, well, if you talk about a few million—if you talk

about 2.5 million to 3 million cocaine users, which is chronic cocaine users—which is a conventional estimate now—and about 1

million heroin users—that’s, what, 3, 3.5 million of that, most of

the 700,000 that are locked up as chronic drug users using cocaine

and heroin, it clearly has made a difference to the estimates.

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Even if you figure that in, it’s still true that for heroin, the existing estimates suggest that there has been a decline in the number

of chronic heroin users. I mean, there’s always been—for some

years there’s been a concern that we are at the beginning of a new

heroin epidemic, because heroin is so much cheaper and more potent than it was certainly in the mid-eighties. And what is striking

is that there is very little evidence. Take that away, the evidence

is that there’s been very little initiation into heroin use.

And the problem is a problem of an aging cohort of people who

used heroin and cocaine when they looked glamorous and they

were popular, certainly with heroin but almost as certainly with cocaine. There’s been very little initiation.

Mr. SOUDER. But isn’t that almost a commercial for the fact that

maybe our Drug-Free Schools programs have had more of an impact than we thought? Maybe all of the arrests on TV had more

of an impact than we thought. Maybe the TV news story showing

people who have committed different murders or have blown up the

Dawson family have had an impact, and that maybe this is bad

stuff, and it affected the cultural attitude? I mean, how do you——

Mr. REUTER. Fair enough. The big declines in household use of

cocaine occurred, you know, really in the mid-eighties, in the—by

1985, certainly 1988, the use rates were way down.

And most of the tough enforcement really has come after that.

And I think it’s a tough story to tell that somehow it was knowing

that tough enforcement was coming that led people in the mideighties already to stop getting involved in cocaine.

A much more reasonable story, an epidemiologic story, is the reputation of cocaine changed dramatically and the tragic deaths of

Len Bias and Don Rogers probably had huge consequences. You

can certainly see a sharp break in monitoring the future that was

taken after their deaths. And cocaine, which had been a glamorous

drug and famous, and Time magazine said some nice things about

it in 1980 or 1982, it became seen as dangerous—as a dangerous

drug, no longer glamorous, even clearly with heroin.

That it seems to me is much more plausibly what drove down the

rates and has kept them down. I mean, cocaine and heroin have

become very cheap by historic standards, dramatically cheaper

than they used to be. They seem quite widely available. There has

not been an upsurge in the use. Neither of us can really make, you

know, a strong empirically grounded, sort of microempirically

grounded case. But I would argue it’s much more plausible.

Mr. SOUDER. I fundamentally agree with your point that those

had a bigger impact, but I would argue it’s a symbiotic relationship. I don’t argue many cocaine addicts say, oh, I could go to prison, therefore I am not going to do cocaine. But I believe it is a cultural effect of watching what happened with Len Bias, followed by

then stronger laws on incarceration.

Also, because you did say that while it might not affect drug use,

it makes the streets safer, which is, in fact, what is behind much

of the drug arrests; it is not trying to help the individual. That is

what we need to do more of in treatment. We don’t have a real disagreement on treatment, prison reentry programs here, and this

type of thing.

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The question is that really the law enforcement part is to make

the streets safer, to make people safer, to try to break the chain

of other people being exposed to it the first time by locking up the

dealers. There’s other types of goals other than just getting a person off of drug abuse. But even, I would argue, that there’s more

of a symbiotic relationship. I wouldn’t disagree on what the lead is.

The lead is cultural. The question is, what does public policy do to

reinforce our——

Mr. REUTER. Could I be positive for one moment? I am mostly

skeptical. A close colleague of mine, Mark Kleiman, has for 15

years been arguing for a policy that I think is really still the

cleverest idea of the last 15 years about drugs, which has the simple name of Coerced Abstinence.

And the notion is simply that anybody on pretrial, you know,

pretrial release, probational parole—and we are talking about 4.5

to 5 million people are in that condition, it may actually be higher—be subject to regular monitoring of their drug use and graduated sanctions.

You know the first time you test positive, you know, spend the

afternoon in court, you know, watching what happens. The second

time you spend two nights in jail. You know, the fourth—you know,

it’s an idea which is obviously reasonable. The few evaluations that

have been done have been very positive about it. It is surprising

how many people, given the right incentive, even if they have long

careers of addiction, are able with those incentives——

Mr. SOUDER. Isn’t that what a drug court does?

Mr. REUTER. Well, drug courts handle a small population. You

hear about 1,600 drug courts. If you ask how many people are

going through that system——

Mr. SOUDER. Yes, but now you are talking about the numbers.

What I am asking is——

Mr. REUTER. Drug courts.

Mr. SOUDER. It’s a similar concept.

Mr. REUTER. It’s a similar concept, but I mean——

Mr. SOUDER. Narrowly applied.

Mr. REUTER. It is narrowly applied, it can be much more routinized. The Pretrial Services Agency in this city certainly did it for

a while.

And it is—I mean, you were talking about in substance how to

use the correction system both to reduce crime and to reduce drug

abuse. And this Coerced Abstinence is a very large population. If

you do estimates of what share are chronic heroin and cocaine

users in this—one of these conditions, pretrial release, probational

parole, you know, it’s—you know, about half or a third to a half of

all cocaine and heroin is probably consumed by people in those

states.

And those are programs which are difficult to implement only

sort of because they cross sectors of the criminal justice system,

you know, probation; and, you know, probation has to then deal

with corrections, has to deal with drug treatment and so on. And

there’s been sort of resistance, not because anyone is against the

program, but just because it’s difficult to implement.

At times certainly in the previous administration, there was

some ritual endorsement of it, but it sort of never has taken off.

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If I had to say do I have one thing to offer that I think congressional appropriators could pay attention to, I would say getting Coerced Abstinence—which has been tried more in Maryland than

any other State—would really have the potential to make a difference in a way that brings enforcement and treatment together

in a constructive fashion.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you. Any other comments?

Mr. CUMMINGS. No, I don’t have anything else. But thank you

very much.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you for your patience. It was a long afternoon.

Mr. REUTER. It was, but it was a—I have to say. It was a fascinating exchange between you and Director Walters.

Mr. SOUDER. Thank you very much.

With that, the subcommittee stands adjourned.

[Whereupon, at 5:35 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]

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