Jim Baird: “I want to thank Mr. Salazar, Mr. Cummings, Mr. Osborne, and Mr. Gingrey for their thoughtful remarks. Just to close my…”

“I want to thank Mr. Salazar, Mr. Cummings, Mr. Osborne, and Mr. Gingrey for their thoughtful remarks. Just to close my portion of this commentary, people sometimes ask why I am so committed to this. Before I was in Congress, I spent 23 years as a clinical psychologist and I saw cases of families and lives devastated by meth. Since coming to Congress, I visit every high school in my district, I try to do it every 2 years, and last fall, I visited a little tiny rural school and was talking to the kids about the danger of methamphetamines. And this little 16-year-old gal said quietly to her classmates, you really need to listen to what he says. I was taken aback that a young lady would speak out in front of her peers. And I gently said, you know, you must have some experience with this. And she said, I do. My mother died of methamphetamine use 3 months ago. Then I was back this spring, on our spring recess which we all just came back from a couple of weeks ago, and a woman handed me a letter that described how her 2-year-old granddaughter was beaten to death by a meth addict boyfriend who was in the house at the time and was tweaking on methamphetamine. He struck her so hard she died, and then just put her in bed for someone else to find the next day. This was a little 2-year-old girl, the apple of her family's eye.…”