Jack Kingston: “For 11 straight years, until 1992, illegal drug use fell in all categories of drugs except, for some reason, heroin, but…”

“For 11 straight years, until 1992, illegal drug use fell in all categories of drugs except, for some reason, heroin, but everything else had fallen. Now, since 1992, when a lot of these drug education programs and a lot of the interdiction programs and enforcement programs were cut, under the Clinton administration drug use has gone back up to the extent now that, just to give some numbers, marijuana use among teenagers has since 1992 increased 137 percent amongst 12- and 13-year-olds. Now, for 14- to 15-year-olds there has been a 200 percent increase. Of the graduating class of 1995, statistically half of the will have experienced some sort of illegal drug, and a drug like LSD which we really had not been talking about at all in recent years is now back strong on the streets and LSD use has increased 62 percent since 1992. One of the things that we have been fighting is the fact that the President had slashed the funding for the Office of National Drug Control Policy by 80 percent.”