Mr. MICA. Mr. Speaker, usually on Tuesday I come as chairman of the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources to talk about the subject of illegal narcotics and our national drug policy.

Tonight is Thursday night. Most of the Members are heading back to their districts; but I have an opportunity to continue sort of, as Paul Harvey says, tell the rest of the story that I left off on on Tuesday, this past Tuesday night and also to kind of update the Congress, my colleagues, and the American people on some of the threats that we face as a Nation from illegal narcotics.

Tonight, I have a little bit different focus, but I am going to try to highlight some of the failures of this presidency and this administration. I have done that before. I do not mean to be critical other than deal with the facts of the situation and deal with the legacy of this administration as it relates to illegal narcotics and the problem with our society.

In just a few minutes, Americans across the country will turn on their nightly news and see, I am sure, clips, Mr. Speaker, of today's talk by the President before the NAACP in Baltimore. Tonight, the American people will hear his speech. I have got a copy of his speech. What is incredible about his speech is what is left out.

Once again, the President, who has only talked about a war on drugs, and I think I have the exact figures, eight times mentioned the war on drugs in 7 years, according to the Nexus research that we conducted on the number of times the President had talked about a war on drugs.

But if one takes the President's speech from today before the NAACP, he does not talk about the war on drugs. The President paints a rosy picture and, again, a copy of the speech that was given to me says ``Today we are releasing an annual report on the status of our children. According to the study, the teen birth rate for 15- to 17-year-olds has dropped to the lowest. The birth rate for African-American adolescents has also dropped.''

The President talks about everything but one of the most impacting problems that has faced our minority community. What the President is not going to tell the NAACP or recite to the American people are the statistics that have been given to our Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.

The President will not tell us that according to the national household survey on drug abuse, drug use increased some 41 percent from the beginning of his administration in 1993 to 1998 among young African Americans, an astounding increase.

According to that household survey on drugs, also, another minority population that has been dramatically impacted is the Hispanic minority population with young Hispanics experiencing an increase from 1993 to 1998 of 38 percent. These are facts that should startle every minority parent in this country and were left out of the President's address today in Baltimore.

It is incredible that the NAACP would meet in Baltimore and that the President would speak to them in Baltimore, because I always use Baltimore as the prime example of a failed policy relating to illegal narcotics. That failed policy is the direct result of the mayor that was elected there.

I took from a 1996 book by Dan Baum, Smoke and Mirrors, that he is very critical on the war on drugs, and he is very laudatory towards those that promote legalization. In 1998, Kurt Schmoke was the candidate and was elected despite his liberalization policy. This is from that book written in 1996. It says, ``Kurt Schmoke, however, dodged the bullet.'' In other words, he got elected. ``Written off politically in 1988 for suggesting the legalization of drugs, Mayor Schmoke approached his first election campaign in 1991 with trepidation. But every time one of his opponents, either in the primary or general election, tried to blast him as the legalizer, the shot went wild, and it never became an issue having won office in 1987 with 51 percent of the vote,'' and he calls him this, ``Legalizer Schmoke won reelection with 58 percent.'' This is touting electing a mayor who has a liberalization policy, a nonenforcement policy of illegal narcotics.

The President met in Baltimore today and spoke before the NAACP. These are not my words, a Republican majority Member of the Congress. This is a report from Time Magazine, and I will read it verbatim, from September 6, 1999. The legacy of the mayor that adopted this policy favorable towards narcotics. Let me read.

"Maryland's largest city seems to have more razor wire and abandoned buildings than Kosovo. Meanwhile, the prevalence of open air drug dealing has made no loitering signs as common as stop signs. Baltimore, which has a population of 630,000 has sunk under the depressing triple crown of urban degradation. Middle-income residents are fleeing at a rate of 1,000 a month. The murder rate has been more than three times as high as New York City's, and 1 in 10 citizens is a drug addict.''

"Government officials dispute the last claim.'' I am reading from this article in Time. "It is more like one in eight, says veteran City Councilwoman Rikki Spector. And we have probably lost count.''

This is the legacy of a failed policy. The President did not talk about that in Baltimore today. What is sad is that nearly two-thirds of the population of Baltimore is minority and African American, the victims of what has taken place.

Let me also read a little bit about what this article says. I do not want to again give my opinion at this point, but let me state what was in the Time Magazine. ``How did Baltimore get here? Smokestack economy that was the lifeblood of the city for decades has died and drained its money and its soul. In 1940, half of Baltimore's population lived and more importantly worked in Baltimore. Today only 15 percent live there.'' My colleagues just heard the statistics of the flight.

"Meanwhile, increasing incompetent political factions have elbowed each other for State handouts. The reign of current Mayor Kurt Schmoke, an Ivy League educated African American, was supposed to restore the power of the mayor's job and the health of the city. And Schmoke has spent his 12 years ineffectively lording over an increasing mess.''

This is where the President and the NAACP met today. This is what the policy, again a liberalized policy, of legalization, nonenforcement, has led to. Repeatedly, deaths, over 300. When one stops and thinks of this, this is Baltimore, a population, and we see the population went from nearly a million to 675,000.

What is absolutely incredible is the number of addicts, and this is 1996. The addicts were 39,000, a part again of this policy. They have gone from 39,000. If we take the figures one in every eight, according to the City Councilperson, we are looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000 heroin and drug addicts in Baltimore.

The President of the United States, when he spoke in Baltimore, did not tell us about the legacy of this community. What is interesting is the policy of Mayor Schmoke is the policy that the Clinton administration has attempted to adopt on a national scale. That is why we see a prevalence of illegal narcotics coming into the country. Non or lack of enforcement. Do not stop the drugs at their source. Do not go after the dealers.

My colleagues think that possibly I am making some partisan statement. This is the record of the Clinton administration on individual defendants prosecuted in Federal courts. Drug prosecutions, 1992 to 1996, they went from 29,000 to 26,000. Instead of tougher enforcement, the President and the Attorney General and the Department of Justice under their leadership went to fewer prosecutions. So we have hounded the administration since 1996 to increase prosecutions, and they are starting to edge up.

Now, my colleagues possibly could not believe this, but they have managed to also divert the intent of Congress, and they have managed to bring sentencing down. So first they tried this nonprosecution. Now they are trying to blame us by not being tough on sentencing. So first they were making a joke out of prosecution for these offenses; now the sentences are down. Convictions also are a concern, the convictions. We also see the same trend down.

Now, my colleagues might say, well, the tough zero tolerance policy does not work. There could be nothing further than the truth. The President cited figures today in Baltimore before the NAACP. But he did not tell us that those figures are impacted by jurisdictions with tough prosecutions.

The murder rate in New York City was averaging 2,000 murders in New York a year when Rudy Guliani took office and instituted a zero tolerance policy in that city. He got tough on narcotics arrests. This chart so dramatically shows that, as one increased the arrests for narcotics, one decreased the crimes. The murder rate dropped 58 percent in New York City.

Again, this is Baltimore. Baltimore, the deaths continue over 300. In New York City, we had in the mid-600 range number of murders in the last 2 years down from 2,000, a 58 percent decrease.

This is the liberal policy again that the President did not talk about, but the policy of tolerance, a policy of not going after criminals who are dealing in death and destruction. We see what they have done, not by my words, but by the words of the media to a great and historic city.

This is interesting also. We conducted a hearing in Baltimore about a month ago, after Mayor Schmoke, thank God, left office and a new mayor, Mayor O'Malley, was elected. We went into the community and the Subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources conducted a hearing there; I believe it was on a Monday. The mayor came and testified, and I thanked him for that. He heard the police chief testify that he was going to make a lame effort at going after open-air drug markets. There was also testimony at that hearing that the police chief and others in the administration had made a decision not to participate with the high intensity drug traffic effort in cooperation with the Feds and other agencies.

Thank goodness when the Mayor heard this, he dismissed that police chief, and he has appointed a new chief who has adopted a zero tolerance in that city. That is the bright spot. But, again, the President did not talk today about the death and destruction. These deaths and this destruction, the 312 in 1997, 312 in 1998, and 308 in 1999, they all have faces on them. These are wonderful human beings that God created and this only shows the tragedy of death.

Imagine what it is like to have a population of a city like Baltimore with one in eight, according to the city council person, not me, or even one in 10 if we want to use that statistic, are drug addicted. A young person drug addicted, a father or a mother, a wage earner. Imagine the toll. Imagine transposing this policy on the United States of America. Fortunately, it is limited to a jurisdiction like Baltimore.

Others jurisdictions, like Rudy Giuliani in New York and others who have adopted a zero tolerance policy are in fact making great progress. And the progress that the President spoke about today is due to some of those efforts. In fact, it is so dramatic, these statistics for New York and some of the other zero tolerance and tough enforcement policies are so dramatic, the effect of them, that they are affecting our national statistics.

The Baltimore Police Department estimates that 95 percent of the street gangs in Baltimore are dealing in drug trafficking, specifically heroin and cocaine. Former Mayor Schmoke's nonenforcement policy led to, in 1996, Baltimore's leading the Nation in drug-related emergency emissions, which grew to 785 per 100,000 population. Of 20 cities analyzed by NIDA, which is our National Institute of Drug Administration, the city of Baltimore ranked second in heroin emergency admissions, and Baltimore accounted for 63 percent of all of Maryland's drug overdoses.

This is again the legacy that the President of the United States did not want to talk about, but the NAACP heard other statistics today, even touting the progress that we have made, and much of it under, again, zero tolerance efforts around the country. Even with decreasing crime since 1960, total crimes have increased by more than 300 percent. Since 1960, violent crimes have increased by more than 550 percent. Ninety-nine percent of Americans will be the victims of a theft at least once in their lives.

What is interesting, when we talk to the law enforcement people, whether they are in Baltimore, Orlando, or in New York, they tell us that 70 or 80 percent of the crimes committed are drug related; people who are stealing and maiming and killing because they are on illegal narcotics or trying to gain resources to obtain illegal drugs. The violent crime rate in the United States is worse than any other industrialized country, and we can again trace it back to drug abuse.

Never in the President's speech today did he talk about the effect of illegal narcotics before the NAACP and the minority population of our country, which, unfortunately, is the most victimized, victimized in death, victimized in social destruction, victimized in every way imaginable, in the criminal justice system unfairly victimized.

And we will hear people say, well, we just need to treat folks and we need to spend more money on treatment, and I will talk about that in just a few minutes; but treating only the wounded in battle is never the answer if you are in battle and really waging an aggressive fight.

Teenagers are more than twice as likely to be the victims of violent crimes as all adults combined. And fewer than 10 percent of all criminals commit about two-thirds of the crime.

Again, I show the statistics of this administration and their record for prosecution as it dropped. And then we got them to go after prosecution from 1996 on, when we took the majority and put pressure on them. Now they are dropping sentencing, the amount of time that these hardened criminals are facing behind bars. I submit, my colleagues, that the wrong Americans are behind bars. It is the parents and the citizens of Baltimore. It is the wonderful citizens of Washington, D.C.

Our Nation's capital is another example of a horrible situation ignored for 40 years under the control of the other party, where I would come to Washington week after week, and every week read of death and destruction, and almost all of it drug related. Fortunately, this Republican administration in the Congress brought some balance to the District of Columbia. We literally had to seize the District and put a control board in charge of the District.

But when we inherited the District of Columbia, stop and think of what this majority inherited. It is just like what they did to the country as a whole. This District of Columbia was running three-quarters of a billion dollars a year in deficit, and we have just about balanced that. Of course, we did have to put in a board of control and, unfortunately, had to deny some temporary constraints on home rule. But we inherited a horrible situation. Again, the President of the United States did not talk about what 40 years of Democrat administration did to the people of Baltimore or Washington, D.C., our Nation's capital.

I always save some of these articles about again what took place, and I do not want to divert too much from the narcotics issue, but I cannot resist mentioning for the benefit of my colleagues the policy that really almost destroyed our Nation's capital and national treasure. Here are a few of these articles. The trauma care center, when we took over the Congress in D.C., in grave danger. It was basically nonfunctional. The housing authority was bankrupt when the Republican majority took over. The job training program in 1 year spent $20 million and did not train one person in our Nation's capital. This is what the new majority inherited.

I will never forget the articles in the paper about the morgue and the air conditioning having broken down and bodies were stacked up because the District, under the Democrat control, had allowed the District to operate in an unmanageable fashion. What happened was they could not even pay to have the indigents buried in the city, and they were stacked like cord wood in the morgue, and the morgue had no air-conditioning.

The City's water system was failing. We had to give it over. Basically 40 years of administration and misadministration led to this. And the stories go on and on. They are unbelievable; and I know people, unless I brought the actual articles, people would think I would be making them up.

The foster care system wears out employees. This is a lady who said as she was quitting because this is worse than Guam, she worked in Guam, what they did in the District of Columbia. Again, primarily a majority of African Americans. But the President did not talk about this in his chat before the NAACP, what they did. But he did take credit for, I think, some of the changes that we have made. And how sad for the neediest of the needy.

Even in public housing an article from the Washington Post. Let me read it. It says the Department of Public and Assisted Housing, which has had 10 directors in the last decade, suggested that it was rife with corruption, mismanagement and waste. And this is, again, what we inherited but what the President did not talk about in Baltimore today. And affecting who? The minority population. And the weakest link in the minority population, those without housing; those subjected to social services. And the list, again, goes on and on.

I think in the last 4 years, as good stewards, the new majority has turned some of that around. But the President would not talk about that, just took credit for statistics and used them to his advantage.

Unfortunately, the legacy of this administration goes beyond Baltimore; it goes beyond Washington, our Nation's capital. Again, I have said this before, it is not rocket science. We know where these drugs are coming from. We have done everything; I have done everything I can do since I came to Congress, since I was involved in the effort back in the Reagan administration, back in the early 1980s when I helped to develop the drug certification law and worked on some of the Andean strategies and other things to stop drugs cost effectively at the source. But we have watched this administration dismantle those cost effective programs.

Again, we know exactly where the illegal drugs are coming from. Right now we know that 70 to 80 percent of the cocaine and heroin is coming out of Colombia. Now, how in heaven's name could we get that percentage of cocaine coming out of Colombia? And I want to say it was not easy. This is not a guessing game, either. The DEA has what is called the DEA Signature program.