http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n636.a02.html (1)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n637.a01.html (2)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n637.a02.html (3)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n638.a01.html (4)
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n638.a02.html (5)

THE DRUG LEGALIZATION MOVEMENT IN AMERICA (continued from part three)

8. Strengthening the Southwest Border

The shared two-thousand-mile border with Mexico attracts drugs and provides
Mexican drug traffickers ample opportunity to move large quantities of
heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and methamphetamine into the U.S. Drug violence
spills over this border into the neighboring states -- New Mexico,
California, Texas, Arizona. Drugs that cross this border pass into our
heartland (into Kansas, Iowa, Illinois) and beyond (Massachusetts, New
York, Oregon) and attack cities, suburbs, and rural communities alike.

Improving our counter-drug efforts along this border first requires us to
better organize our existing efforts. We need to improve our chain of
command and accountability for programs in this region. Our Southwest
Border programs must also become more flexible and intelligence-driven.

We need to better understand the emerging threats and deploy our resources
to counter these threats.

We also must shift from a system that is dependent upon manpower to one
that relies on cutting-edge technology. We simply cannot think that in an
era of expanding interchange that we will be able to unpack every crate of
carrots or search every railcar by hand. We need to develop and deploy a
family of complementary systems within the next five years that can inspect
increasing numbers of in-bound containers, shipments, and conveyances for
drugs. We want to provide major ports of entry with the capacity to subject
in-bound shipments to non-intrusive inspections by complementary systems.
Through technology, we shall put in place a seamless curtain against drugs.
This curtain will not be iron but information -- derived from technology
and intelligence. It will be held in place by good organization and shared
commitment -- a commitment based on common values and interests. It will be
permeable to trade and culture but impermeable to drugs, crime, and violence.

9. Attacking Drugs in the Transit Zone

Transit zone interdiction plays a critical supporting role to source county
programs. Transit zone interdiction programs remove significant amounts of
illicit drugs from the pipeline each year that would otherwise reach the
United States. These efforts also raise the costs and risks to traffickers
of moving cocaine into the United States. Additionally, interdiction
operations in the transit zone produce information that can be used to
attack trafficking organizations, thereby strengthening the overall U.S.
law enforcement effort against international crime. Transit zone
interdiction programs reinforce international, bilateral, and regional
cooperation against the threat of illegal drugs and strengthen the
capabilities of transit nation law enforcement institutions.

Drug traffickers are adaptable, reacting to interdiction successes by
shifting routes and changing modes of transportation. Large international
criminal organizations have extensive access to sophisticated technology
and resources to support their illegal operations. The United States must
surpass traffickers' flexibility, quickly deploying resources to changing
high-threat areas. Consequently, the U.S. government designs coordinated
interdiction operations that anticipate shifting trafficking patterns.

Drugs coming to the United States from South America pass through a
six-million square-mile transit zone that is roughly the size of the
continental United States. This zone includes the Caribbean, Gulf of
Mexico, and eastern Pacific Ocean. The Coast Guard is the lead federal
agency for maritime interdiction and co-lead with U.S. Customs for air
interdiction. The interagency mission is to reduce the supply of drugs from
source countries by denying smugglers the use of air and maritime routes in
the transit zone. In patrolling this vast area, U.S. federal agencies
closely coordinate their operations with the interdiction forces of a
number of nations. In 1998, roughly eighty metric tons of cocaine were
seized in the transit zone.

Stopping drugs in the transit zone involves more than intercepting drug
shipments at sea or in the air. It also entails denying traffickers safe
haven in countries within the transit zone and preventing their ability to
corrupt institutions or use financial systems to launder profits.
Consequently, international cooperation and assistance is an essential
aspect of a comprehensive transit zone strategy. Accordingly, the United
States is helping Caribbean and Central American nations to implement a
broad drug-control agenda that includes modernizing laws, strengthening
law-enforcement and judicial institutions, developing anti-corruption
measures, opposing money laundering, and backing cooperative interdiction.

The Caribbean Violent Crime and Regional Interdiction Initiative will
expand counter-drug operations targeting drug trafficking-related criminal
activities and violence in the Caribbean region including South Florida,
Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the independent states and
territories of the eastern Caribbean. This initiative will implement mutual
cooperative security agreements between the United States and Caribbean
nations, implement commitments made by the U.S. President during the
Caribbean Summit held in Barbados in May 1997, develop regional maritime
law enforcement capabilities; increase the capability of Caribbean nations
to intercept, apprehend, and prosecute drug traffickers through modest
expansion of training, equipment upgrades and maintenance support, and
institutionalize the Americas Counter Smuggling Initiative (ACSI) to
provide at-risk commercial carriers, industry, and government offices with
training to prevent goods and conveyances from being used to smuggle
illegal drugs.

Nonetheless, traffickers have demonstrated that they can absorb
interdiction losses in the transit zone as the cost of doing business while
increasing source country cultivation and production to make up
interdiction losses. In the transit zone, traffickers have the initiative
and can choose when, where, and how to challenge interdiction forces. They
are able to alter routes and methods in response to effective law
enforcement interdiction activity. Transit zone operations will be most
effective when source country programs are able to effectively constrain
drug production potential, preventing trafficking organizations from making
up interdiction losses.

10. Building International Cooperation

The United States continues to focus international drug control efforts on
supporting the critical work of drug source countries. International drug
trafficking organizations and their production and trafficking
infrastructure are most concentrated, detectable, and vulnerable to
effective law enforcement action in source countries. The coca and opium
poppy growing areas are easily detectable and relatively fixed. The
cultivation of coca and opium poppy and production of cocaine and heroin
are labor intensive and can be disrupted by concerted law enforcement action.

To be successful on the scale necessary to disrupt the illegal drug
industry, drug source countries must have control of growing areas,
adequate law enforcement resources, capabilities, and the will to confront
a sometimes politically powerful segment of the population or one that is
protected by well-armed and well-equipped insurgent groups. The
international drug control strategy seeks to bolster source country
resources, capabilities, and political will to reduce cultivation, attack
production, and disrupt and dismantle trafficking organizations, including
their command and control structure and financial underpinnings. Our
actions focus on assisting the host nation expand law enforcement control
over drug crop growing areas, reestablish the rule of law, and eliminate
illegal drug crops in ways that protect human and democratic rights. The
political will and long-term commitment of these other nations are critical
to our common success against drugs.

These international efforts are making a difference, for example:

! Cocaine production in Bolivia and Peru has dropped by 300 metric tons
over the last four years.[124]

! Coca cultivation in Peru has plunged 56 percent from 115,300 hectares in
1995 to 51,000 hectares in 1998. [125]

CONCLUSION

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Mink we thank you, the rest of the Committee,
and the Congress as a whole for the bipartisan support we have received in
our efforts to reduce drug use and its consequences in the United States.
Your support is critical to progress we are now making. Look at the results.

Here at home, in the last two years, youth drug use rates have leveled off
and in many cases are now in decline (this marks a sharp departure from the
prior six years, which saw the number of our children doing drugs steadily
increase). Overall drug use in the United States is now half what it was in
the 1970s. During this same period cocaine use has fallen by 75 percent.
Drug-related murders have reached their lowest point in over a decade.

On the international front, cocaine production in Bolivia and Peru has
decreased by 300 metric tons over the last four years. We have built a
common consensus against drugs. We have eliminated the distinction between
producer and consumer nations, and built a common understanding that drugs
threaten all nations. Working with the rest of the international community
we have built strong counter-drug cooperation through the United Nations,
and within this hemisphere through the Organization of American States.

These advances provide a solid foundation upon which to build. With your
continued support we can continue to significantly reduce the threat of
drugs to our nation and our people. Clearly, the answer is not to make
dangerous, addictive substances more available or to drop our societal
guard. Instead, we must focus on prevention, treatment, enforcement,
interdiction and international cooperation. In other words, we must remain
focused on those things that we know work.

Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today.

[The footnotes are posted in part five]