Mark Souder: “this afternoon and this evening I would like to talk about our problems with illegal narcotics. We have a new President.…”

“this afternoon and this evening I would like to talk about our problems with illegal narcotics. We have a new President. We have a new Congress. I have recently, as of 2 weeks ago, been named chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy, and Human Resources that deals with both the authorizing and the oversight on the narcotics question. Today I would kind of like to lay out where we are likely to head this year and some of the fundamental issues that we will be addressing. This subcommittee has been headed by former Congressman Bill Zeliff, by the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Hastert), the Speaker of the House, by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Mica), and we have been working together since the Republicans took over Congress to put an aggressive plan together with how to deal with drug abuse in America. What we saw in 1992 to 1994 was such a dramatic rise in drug abuse in America that since 1994 we would have to have a reduction of 50 percent among young people to get back to where we were in 1992. We had been making steady progress for over a decade, but two events, in my opinion, set the whole chart in the wrong direction. One was we cut our interdiction budget and let the drugs pour into our country, which gave a cheaper supply on the street in more purity and potency to the illegal narcotics.”