Rob Portman: “Let me add, Mr. Miller, what I view as a hopeful statistic to those that you have mentioned. That is, if you can keep a…”

“Let me add, Mr. Miller, what I view as a hopeful statistic to those that you have mentioned. That is, if you can keep a kid drug-free until that kid is 19 years old, then he or she has a 90-percent chance of being drug-free for the rest of his or her life. Those are those critical years, those teenage years. This is why, as I said earlier, it is tragic that this drug use is occurring at an earlier and earlier age. We talked about the eighth graders. In a typical class of eighth graders, five kids have now tried marijuana. What we have got to do is address this problem at every level. Mr. Mica talked about it in terms of interdiction, source country, treatment, our criminal justice system, and finally prevention and education. Mr. Speaker, I would again like to close by saying that it is my view that part of what we need to do is to increase our efforts at the community level, the grassroots level. It is a philosophy that I think is very consistent with where this Congress is headed in terms of giving people more a sense of personal responsibility, the sense that our communities are where we are going to solve a lot of our problems. Certainly, the drug problem is one of those. I urge all of my colleagues to do whatever they can, not only at the national level where it is very important but also in their communities, in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in the school districts they represent, to attack this problem. We know it can help.”