As you know, the Customs Service has the responsibility of intercepting contraband entering the United States; contraband that includes everything from child pornography to nuclear materials to illegal narcotics. Narcotics smuggling dominates all the others. It's where the money is.

Most of us are all too familiar with the price extracted by the drug cartels to feed the country's appetite for drugs. The price is drug addiction, financial ruin, destroyed families, neighborhood deterioration and death.

Drugs kill and maim their users, and put everyone nearby at risk: innocent citizens, unborn children, and law enforcement officers who move against the cartels. As the leading drug interdiction agency, Customs has been granted unique search authorities to combat this threat. It's an important and indispensable tool in our efforts to stop a ruthless foe, provided it is used fairly and judiciously.

As committed as we are to the fight, I do not want to add civil liberties to the list of victims. We will not allow individual rights to become casualties in the war on drugs. The complaints we have received about racial prejudice in selecting passengers for searches are very disturbing. It is certainly not Customs Service policy, and it will not be tolerated as Customs Service practice...anywhere.

When these complaints surfaced, I appointed an independent commission from outside the Customs Service to review our personal search practices. We're looking for an objective, candid assessment. The commission members are in the midst of their work now. I don't want to prejudge, with my comments here, what they may ultimately find. Nonetheless, the seriousness of the charges were such that we have taken additional, immediate actions to improve and oversee the personal search process.

Where, in the recent past, any individual inspector could decide whether or not to make a personal search, a supervisor must now approve that decision. Only a port director, the highest-ranking field manager on-site, can make the decision to conduct an x-ray of a passenger.

In addition, we've made legal counsel available to inspectors at five of our nation's busiest airports: Newark, JFK in New York, Boston, Atlanta, and Dulles in Washington. A Customs lawyer is on call 24 hours a day to assist our inspectors at these locations in determining whether or not they have sufficient grounds to move from one stage of a personal search to the next. We will soon expand this program to the entire country.

We have instituted better record keeping procedures. Before, data collection on personal searches was weak and inconsistent. To remedy this, we've formed a national passenger data analysis unit at headquarters that will maintain information on all personal searches. Field personnel are now required to file an "inspecting officer information log" that records all aspects, including race, of any search they conduct. This information will be transmitted to the new analysis unit and will be used to monitor trends in our personal searches.

We have also formed an internal task force to review the criteria used by our field personnel to select travelers for personal searches. We want to be sure that the criteria used to determine if a personal search is warranted are not arbitrary and certainly not based on race. Our task force will also make sure that our criteria are recent and up to date. For example, in the past, Customs might have considered the purchase of an airline ticket just a few days in advance of a trip as suspect criteria. With the explosion of last minute, discount travel and the use of the internet to purchase such tickets today, this indicator may no longer be valid.

We've also undertaken a series of comprehensive reforms in our inspection areas to improve the passenger environment. These changes focus on three areas: information, training, and technology.

In the past, our communication with the travelling public was unclear and unfocused. Providing a coherent statement about Customs' mission was a very important first step. Informing travelers about our practices and policies was another.

We're achieving this by installing improved signage in our inspection areas, providing new comment cards for passengers, revising our declaration forms to cut down on confusion, and making new brochures available that explain why Customs performs inspections and searches. These include a document entitled "Why Did This Happen to Me" that explains the personal search to those who are referred for a secondary inspection.

A new customer service unit has been established at headquarters to underpin our inspection area reforms. It will be responsible for handling and tracking all passenger complaints.

Training is a crucial area of reform. The personal search, even in the most impartial of circumstances, is a traumatic process. It is only compounded when accompanied by a callous disregard on the part of our personnel for the emotional well-being of passengers who are searched.

Clearly, this has occurred in several cases. We're addressing this problem with a battery of training for all our inspection personnel. Regular instruction in interpersonal communications, cultural interaction, passenger enforcement selectivity, and confrontation management is already being delivered. This training will continue throughout our inspectors' careers.

To compliment the training our employees receive, we're revising the Customs Personal Search Handbook. Instructions will be clearer, tighter, and will require strict supervisory controls over the entire process.

Technology may also make the personal search less intrusive. We're deploying advanced technology wherever possible to minimize physical contact during the personal search. In certain airports, such as John F. Kennedy in New York and Miami International, travelers selected for a personal search can elect to go through a body scan, an advanced form of x-ray.

These devices, as well as regular x-ray equipment, will be deployed soon at other major airports around the country. We need more of this equipment, and we've asked for nine million dollars in our FY 2000 budget to obtain it.

We need to be more sensitive to concerns about our personal searches. Yet, we don't want this issue to be exploited by the drug cartels. We know from experience that the cartels will try to take advantage of any situation they can to smuggle more drugs into our communities, and that they'll use anyone to do it.

It's an extremely difficult problem for us. Last year we seized two and a half tons of illegal narcotics from air passengers. Half a ton of this was concealed on or in passengers' bodies. Smugglers are men and women of all ethnic groups, young and old, rich and poor. Disabled people are even used, in the hopes that Customs will be unsuspecting.

Worse, the science of internal smuggling is advancing. The cartels have devised ways to make mules, as they call their body carriers, look less suspicious. Medication - relaxants - often masks physical symptoms they would otherwise display.

Let me give you a sense of what we're up against:

these pellets are made from the fingers of rubber gloves. They weigh about eighteen grams a piece. A smuggler would typically swallow about sixty of these, or even more. That's roughly 1 kilogram, or 2.2 pounds. Each of these pellets would be filled with heroin worth about $1800 on the streets of New York. The whole kilogram would be worth about a quarter of a million dollars, maybe more.

While this is an example of what pellets of heroin look like, Mr. Chairman, this in my hand is the real thing. The forty pellets of heroin in these evidence bags were seized this past weekend from a swallower who arrived at Dulles airport from Ethiopia. It totaled 558 grams.

Inspectors became suspicious of the passenger after he exhibited extreme nervousness, and was unable to produce tickets for the destinations he said he was travelling to in the U.S. a pat-down search of the passenger and a search of his baggage proved negative. A Customs inspector subsequently obtained permission from his supervisor to send the passenger for an x-ray. The passenger willingly signed a consent form. After tests at the hospital and x-rays showed him positive for carrying drugs, he passed 25 pellets, what you see before you here.

As lucrative as the payoff may be for the carriers, they are putting their own lives at great risk. Deaths from leakages of the pellets during transport are common. In 1998 alone, six carriers died in a six-month period. Victims over recent years have included a pregnant mother, who died after ingesting 157 pellets of cocaine. Her unborn child did not die, but instead suffered severe brain damage.

We get particularly upset when carriers are people like this, as well as children. Just two and a half weeks ago, we stopped a 17 year old boy who was an internal carrier. Doctors were considering emergency surgery to prevent the drugs he was carrying from killing him. Fortunately, the boy survived after passing 30 pellets of cocaine.

Again, I want to repeat, it would be a grave mistake for the cartels to interpret our concern for the rights of the traveling public as a weakening of resolve. The Customs Service must get better at pulling the drug smugglers out of line, and allowing the law-abiding traveler to proceed unobstructed. In no instance will we allow racial bias to be tolerated as a substitute for good law enforcement.

It's my duty as commissioner of customs to ensure that the law enforcement policies and practices of our agency are carried out with fairness, civility, and impartiality. I expect no less. People who enter our country -- all people -- should expect no less.

We've initiated many changes at customs to guarantee that the rights and dignity of travelers are protected in the process of what is one of our greatest challenges: stopping the inflow of drugs. I welcome any additional recommendations this committee may have.

Thank you.