Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that a National Methamphetamine Prevention Week should be established to increase awareness of methamphetamine and to educate the public on ways to help prevent the use of that damaging narcotic.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Illinois and the gentleman from Georgia as well.

Mr. Speaker, I want to rise in strong support of H. Res. 556, a resolution I have introduced to establish National Methamphetamine Prevention Week.

As was mentioned earlier, methamphetamine is a cheap, addictive drug that has penetrated the smallest of communities and has reached epidemic proportions in this country and throughout the world. In fact, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that more than 30 million people around the world use amphetamine-type stimulants, a number that surpasses the global use of cocaine and heroin combined.

Domestically, we have seen the number of meth lab seizures decline in some areas over the last years, yet increase in others as the epidemic has moved from west to east. For example, in 1999, California busted 2,579 meth labs domestically, while Missouri that year busted 439. However, by 2004, California had reduced their labs to 764, while Missouri increased to an astonishing 2,788.

The situation with methamphetamine is evolving, and as local police and drug task forces become more efficient in shutting down the local, clandestine labs, the supply shifts to become increasingly filled by finished product imported from Mexico and other countries, often in a more potent form.

In my home district in southwest Washington, for example, we have seen the purity of meth increase on the street by over 43 percent in just the last 4 years. This is a disturbing pattern. Its history has taught us that along with increases in purity, so goes admissions to treatment centers, drug-related crimes, arrests and overdoses.

Judge Woolard from Clark County in my home district has explained to me that the meth epidemic can be encapsulated in the following statistics: 80 percent of the kids in foster care in my home county have parents who are meth addicts; 80 percent of the criminal cases brought before the courts involve drug use; and 75 percent of the kids in juvenile detention are now involved with meth.

This is not a problem that is going away without a comprehensive plan for action.

My colleagues and I have recently addressed the issue of domestic supply with the passage of the Combat Meth Act which had overwhelming support in this body. We also continue to move forward on efforts to deal with the international supply of meth precursors, and will soon insist that companies where these products are produced limit and track the shipment of methamphetamine.

We have to address the demand side as well, and we can do this by continuing to fund programs such as the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign and Safe and Drug Free Schools. Additionally, we can encourage our communities to get involved in the fight against meth at the ground level. That is why National Meth Prevention Week is so important.

This bill will allow and encourage local communities in a nationwide effort to address all aspects of the meth problem from prevention to intervention to treatment.

It will also provide us an opportunity to dedicate 1 week out of the year that should actually be a nationwide effort to engage students and children in discussions and activities that will underscore the importance of avoiding methamphetamine use.

I am pleased that the legislation has 63 bipartisan cosponsors, as well as the support of the National Association of Counties, National Narcotic Officers Coalition, National Criminal Justice Association and the Association for Addiction Professionals.

I want to particularly thank the co-chairs of the Meth Caucus, Chairmen Larsen, Boswell, Cannon and Calvert, as well as Chairman Souder who has been a leader on this issue throughout the Congress. They have been tremendous allies in this fight, and I am happy to work with them on a bipartisan basis.

I also want to again thank Chairman Davis, Ranking Member Waxman and Ranking Member Cummings for their support of the bill.

Mr. Speaker, finally, I want to thank my own staff, Katie Stevens, for her work on this, as well as the law enforcement treatment and prevention professionals in my district who have done such an outstanding job combating this horrific drug.

I urge my colleagues to support the adoption of H. Res. 556 today. I hope the action will then be followed by the speedy adoption of the companion bill in the other body, S. Res. 313, offered by my colleague and friend Senator Cantwell.

Let us unite today to send a joint message to our local communities, as well as our friends overseas, that we acknowledge the devastating impact of this drug and are united in our fight against it.

I thank the gentleman for the time.

Mr. Speaker, 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.

And as if that isn't enough, I was speaking to a rotary club about something entirely different, and a prominent leading businessman came up to me quietly, shook my hand, and said, thank you for what you are doing on the issue of methamphetamine. My 25-year-old son is addicted to this drug and it would not surprise us if he died of his use of this drug.

Methamphetamine, as my colleagues have said, is a devastating drug, and we must do everything in our power to keep families' lives from being further destroyed by it. And I thank all my colleagues for supporting this important resolution and hope we can make a difference, and I know we can if we work together.

I want to thank the gentleman for yielding, and I want to thank Mr. Baird for this resolution, which I strongly support.

As the ranking member of the Drug Subcommittee of the Government Reform Committee, I have traveled, along with Congressman Souder, throughout this entire country, and we have had an opportunity to go to many, many places that are usually rural in nature, and we have seen the effects of methamphetamine use. We have heard drug court judges, we have listened to foster care parents, we have listened to wonderful people like the lady that was just mentioned who have seen their children go through being addicted to methamphetamine.

While I am from an urban area, if I were to close my eyes and if we were to substitute the name of this drug for crack cocaine or cocaine, a lot of the same types of stories I have been hearing for many, many years in the 7th Congressional District of Maryland are the stories Mr. Souder and I heard all over urban areas throughout our country.

Drugs are a major damaging element in our society. I have seen so many families destroyed. And by the way, it is not just the person who uses the drug but their families are affected, their communities are affected and their children are affected. So often the property values go down in a neighborhood because of the use. Methamphetamines fall right in that category.

Methamphetamines are easy to produce. As a matter of fact, you can find the ingredients and how to do it and make them on the Internet, and that is one of the things that is so frightening about this. When I think about some of the addicts that live in my district, they often have a hard time getting ahold of the crack cocaine or getting ahold of the cocaine. When I think about methamphetamines, however, it seems as if this is one of the things that folks could do and find it might be a little easier and a little bit cheaper to get to.

That is one of the many reasons why we have to stand up and we have to do things like Representative Baird has suggested in this legislation. We have to make sure that parents are aware, that coaches, and that people in our communities are aware, neighbors and friends are aware so that perhaps we can prevent some of this.

As we traveled throughout the United States in our subcommittee, we had people come and testify and show us pictures of how they looked before using methamphetamines. And when we would see them, sometimes maybe a year later after using them, maybe 7 months later, they looked like a ghost of themselves.

As one young man said to me, and I shall never forget it as long as I live, it is embedded in the DNA of every cell in my brain, he said, when I went out there to simply get a high, I went and I got high over and over again. I would stay up for days. Stay up for days. And he said, I got high. Man, I thought I was on cloud nine. He said, then there came a time when I tried to get off and it was very difficult to do it. He said, but I finally licked it. But he said, then I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, self, will you forgive me? And he said self said back to him, yeah, I forgive you. And then he said something

that is embedded in the DNA of every cell of my brain. He said but my body wouldn't forgive me. My body that now looked about 10 or 15 years older with all kinds of sores all over his body.

So we must continue this fight. It is a very important fight. It is a fight for the soul of America. So often what happens is that people look at the drug war, if you want to call it that, the efforts to stop drugs, as a negative issue. But let me tell you something, there are too many lives that are being robbed every day, too much potential. When we think about our children and we think about people who are living a wonderful family life and doing well, the one thing that can suck the blood out of them, suck the life out of them and their communities is drugs.

So I applaud Mr. Baird and all of our colleagues who have made this methamphetamine war effort their effort. For I have often said that our children are the living messages we send to a future we will never see. But the fact is, if we do not address this issue now with prevention, intervention, and treatment, they will never see that future either.

And so I would hope that all of the Members of this great House will vote in favor of this legislation and that when methamphetamine week comes around that we will not just think of the rural areas and what is going on there with methamphetamines, but we will think about all our efforts dealing with drugs, all kinds of drugs, and remind ourselves that we are determined to make sure that this element, that this negative element, that this poison of death does not invade our communities. And if it does, that we will stand up and fight with everything we have got, as if our lives depended on it, because they do.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague, the gentleman from Georgia, as well as my colleague, Representative Davis from Illinois, and I thank Representative Baird from Washington for bringing this bill up, H. Res. 556.

I am a physician Member of the body, and I see, and I did in my practice, of course this has been 4 years ago, a lot of drug addiction unfortunately, and this methamphetamine issue, Mr. Speaker, has reached exponential and unbelievable proportions.

When some of us were in college, Mr. Speaker, I do not know if you remember this or not, but I certainly do, to study and cram for a test at the last minute, there were always these little pills floating around the fraternity house that you could take. It would literally allow you to stay up all night, and you had an accelerated sense of awareness and could not sleep, and sometimes you literally could go through a whole calculus textbook and do a whole semester's worth of work in one night and think that you were going to go in and ace the test. That rarely happened. That sense of euphoria was there, Mr. Speaker, but when you got that final grade back, that A you thought you had made might more often was a C- or a D. But that was then and this is now.

Just listen to this little bit of background and why this idea of Representative Baird's of having a National Methamphetamine Prevention Awareness Week is so important.

Methamphetamine is a highly addictive, man-made drug that can be, and I remember you just swallowed a pill, but today can be injected, snorted, smoked and, of course, ingested orally. It causes these feelings, Mr. Speaker, of euphoria that last up to 24 hours, psychotic behavior, auditory hallucinations, mood disturbances, delusions, paranoia, potentially causing the user to experience homicidal or suicidal thoughts, as well as violent behavior, brain damage.

The scary part about this is it is so easily made, as the previous speakers have talked about, and these clandestine labs in these homes are a lot of times in rural areas.

Mr. Speaker, I represent a fairly rural area, northwest Georgia. I have one county in particular who are a great people. I will not mention the name of the county because they do not deserve, I do not think, to be overly criticized because they are working really hard to try to solve this problem in the northwest, but it is a huge problem, and I wanted to take an opportunity in particular, and in this instance I will name names.

One of my constituents, she is a real estate agent, works hard, single parent. Her name is Betty Brady. When I was in that county recently, Betty gave me a book that she had written, and it was just kind of a small paperback, almost a syllabus. It was the first time, Mr. Speaker, that she had ever made any attempt at authoring a book. That was not her profession. She is not a professional writer, but she wrote that book talking about her daughter Jennifer.

Jennifer's now, thank God, recovered fully from her methamphetamine addiction. She is 24 years old, young lady who is working very hard in the community now, with an outreach, working with law enforcement, talking in school, trying to bring awareness, just as this bill is going to do and why I am so much in favor of it. But it is a heartrending story of this perfect child. They have a son as well and this little perfect daughter, you know, the apple of their eye, and then all of the sudden she fell in with the wrong crowd and got into this methamphetamine addiction and just about destroyed her life. As Betty says in the book, so many of this young lady, her daughter Jennifer's friends did lose their lives, either by getting too much or main-lining something and then going into respiratory depression or whatever.

I am just shocked when I read some of the statistics, Mr. Speaker, the fact that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime reports that more than 30 million people around the world use methamphetamine-type stimulants, a number that eclipsed the combined global use of cocaine and heroin.

That is the problem that Representative Baird is so aware of and why this H. Res. 556 is such an important thing to do, so that people like Betty Brady that are out there in the trenches struggling to make youngsters aware, this will be a week where they can really bring that focus and get into the schools and let people know that this is highly addictive. This is not just the speed that truck drivers used to take so they could drive to the west coast without stopping. This is something that is a very, very serious drug.

I thank the gentleman from Georgia, my colleague, Representative Westmoreland, for letting me take a few minutes and just talk about this, and I commend Representative Baird. We are fully supportive of it, and I am sure that an overwhelming majority, if not unanimous, vote on this is in order.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Res. 556, a resolution expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that a National Methamphetamine Prevention Week should be established to increase awareness about methamphetamine and to educate the public on ways to help prevent the use of this damaging narcotic. Methamphetamine, or meth, has become the most dangerous drug problem of small-town America.

Meth is a highly-addictive and treatment-resistant drug produced from readily-accessible materials found in every local hardware or drug store in America. The explosion of this very destructive synthetic drug has already taken a brutal toll on children, families and the environment in my district in Minnesota and across the Nation. Dealing with the enormous economic and social effects of meth--whether it is diverting tax dollars from already-strapped county budgets, or devoting manpower hours to locate and clean up remote meth labs, or treating meth addicts at the local hospitals and clinics--consumes our society's resources at an astounding rate.

A daunting challenge of the meth epidemic lies in the very nature of this drug; it is a highly addictive substance that is considered to be the most treatment-resistant of all illegal drugs. Many people get hooked after only one use, and some recent studies have demonstrated that meth causes more damage to the brain than heroin, alcohol, or cocaine. Meth use not only modifies behavior in an acute state, but after taking it repeatedly, the drug also literally changes the brain in fundamental and long-lasting ways. Helping meth addicts is a very difficult and expensive proposition, because 30 days of treatment is often not enough. This all-consuming addiction is harmful not only to the user, but to that user's children, who are robbed of nurturing parents and a secure home; nationwide, approximately 3,200 children were present during the seizure of meth labs last year alone.

Our health care and social services systems need more funding for prevention and treatment, because only by breaking that cycle of demand can we bring lasting change to the entire community. Parents and educators play a vital role in encouraging young people to make the right decisions, because many children do not understand the inherent risks associated with experimenting with the drug. Preventing drug use is the first step to avoiding drug addiction, and H. Res. 556 will provide the opportunity to dedicate one week out of the year to engage students and children in discussions and activities that will underscore the importance of living a meth free life.

Like many of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, I am very concerned about the threat that the meth epidemic poses to local communities in my Congressional district and across the Nation. Earlier this year, I introduced the Methamphetamine Eradication Act (H.R. 4763), which is a balanced, comprehensive federal approach to addressing problems related to meth abuse. As a Co-Chair of the Congressional Rural Caucus' Meth Task Force, I will continue to work with my colleagues in Congress to increase public awareness and to find a bipartisan solution to the meth epidemic.

The Federal Government must be a more effective partner in the fight to eliminate the threat posed by meth. By establishing a National Methamphetamine Prevention Week, we can give our local communities the opportunity to highlight their meth-related activities and take pride in their response to the scourge of this drug.

Mr. Speaker, I too would like to add my congratulations to Congressman Baird for H.R. 556.

First of all, the good news. In many parts of the country, cocaine and heroin are being diminished rather rapidly. The bad news is that the reason in many cases this is happening is simply because methamphetamine has come in. Methamphetamine is cheaper. It is more addictive. If we had a map here, we could see the sweep of the growth of methamphetamine from the southwestern part of the United States all the way across the country, and now maybe just a few States in the northeast are somewhat preserved from having to battle this problem. But, of course, that problem is going to be coming in their direction.

The State of Nebraska recently released a study which indicated there were 22,000 people addicted to methamphetamine. In the State of Nebraska, that would be equivalent to about the eighth or ninth largest community in the State of Nebraska. A study in Arkansas recently indicated that the average meth addict will cost the State of Arkansas $47,500, in view of crimes, children in foster care, time in prison and so on. So if you multiplied that out, 22,000 people by $47,500, you are talking about over $1 billion in a State with 1.7 million people. So it is a significant, huge problem.

Just as an example of one of the more innocent victims, a child born to a mother addicted to methamphetamine will usually cost anywhere from $700,000 to $1.7 million to get that child from birth to age 18 because of the devastation and the defects the methamphetamine has caused in that child, not to mention the amount of pain the child goes through.

So as has been mentioned earlier, there really is not one answer to this problem. It has to be multifaceted. And, really, we are looking at three things.

Number one is education. And as Congressman Baird mentioned, the scary thing is that the age is getting less and less and less. So you have to start in about the 3rd or 4th grade letting kids know what this is, what is in it. You also have to educate parents, because parents are the number one determinant as to an attitude that a person is going to have towards substance abuse.

So for every dollar that we spend at the front end in education and prevention, it has been proven that we save $10 or $15 at the back end in terms of the devastation that the drugs cost. So we have to spend more in prevention, we have to spend more in education, and I think that is something this body needs to keep in mind.

Secondly, law enforcement. The number one law enforcement tool we have for methamphetamine is the drug task forces, and this is funded primarily by the Byrne Grants. Last year, we zeroed out the Byrne Grants. And we fought with every fiber that we had here to get about two-thirds of that funding back, but it wasn't enough. So we have to make sure that the Byrne Grants are fully funded, because again, in the White House budget, they have been zeroed out this year. We absolutely have to have those.

And the last issue is treatment. It has been proven that drug courts are much more effective than throwing people in prison. We have so many people who are simply addicted and they are sent to prison. A drug court enables them to be tested twice a week, they get treatment, and they can usually hold their families together and pay taxes. So we think these are all things that are very, very important.