John Mica: “it is good to come to the floor again tonight to talk about a subject which I try to address the House on each Tuesday…”

“it is good to come to the floor again tonight to talk about a subject which I try to address the House on each Tuesday, if possible, but at least once a week, to come before the forefront of the House of Representatives and the American people what I have as a congressional responsibility, and that is the issue of illegal narcotics and our national drug control policy. In this session of Congress, I have been responsible as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources for helping to bring together a coherent national drug policy, and also carry forward a program started by the new majority to restart the war on drugs. I will talk about what has happened with the so-called war on drugs in my remarks tonight. I will try to review a little bit of some of the current controversy concerning the war on drugs, and how to attack the problem of illegal narcotics and drugs, and then to trace some of the history and problems we were not able to get into last week, particularly on how we got ourselves into this situation with Colombia and the current situation with Panama that has made the news with many of our operations being closed down there, not only from a military standpoint, but also from the standpoint of trying to curtail illegal narcotics from their source from Panama as a forward operating location. Tonight I feel a little bit caught between the left and the right on the issue of illegal narcotics.”