Paul Coverdell: “The Senator has raised several very, very crucial questions and sort of a constructive criticism which I might need to…”

“The Senator has raised several very, very crucial questions and sort of a constructive criticism which I might need to take to heart. First, we have not lost all the ground; we have just lost a lot of it. If unchecked, we will lose it all. I do not know that I agree that it was strictly a function of interest level. I believe there are people in our country, and some of them are in this administration, like former Surgeon General Elders, who believes the construction of the struggle was wrong. I believe that they believed rehabilitation is more important that interdiction, so there are some philosophical differences here. We now have the results of the interdiction law enforcement and education. It cut it in half. The new idea, empirically, has failed, because it has doubled, but we still have people in this administration who do not agree with the war on drugs. Now, the last point I make, the war on drugs, I think the Senator makes a very valid point that it is not something to ever be won or lost. I have called it a war on drugs, of late, because of the level, separate from usage in the United States. The fact is, we have come into an era where drug cartels with their enormous capacity of resources and sophistication, in my judgment, have put democracies in the hemisphere at stake. When the President of Mexico turns to me and says, 'The single greatest threat to my public are the drug cartels,' that raises it to a new level.”