I thank the committees of jurisdiction, and I thank the leadership from the majority side and from the minority side. Mr. Speaker, this is a bill that effectively gives our drug enforcement leadership the tools that they need to continues…
I thank the committees of jurisdiction, and I thank the leadership from the majority side and from the minority side.
Mr. Speaker, this is a bill that effectively gives our drug enforcement leadership the tools that they need to continues this fight.
Twelve years ago, much like Mr. Doyle was just talking about his tenure here in the House being defined by his extraordinary work in the area of autism, in many ways mine has been defined over the last 12 years by fighting methamphetamine production in the Southeast, particularly in east Tennessee, where it surfaced in the late 1990s after coming to this country, really, in terms of production, in about 1993. It surfaced first in California. Then it came to the mountains of east Tennessee.
Much like moonshine did two generations earlier, it was a clandestine process where citizens would put together the chemicals to make it. It stunk really bad, so they would do it out in the middle of the mountains and the hills, and they would get as far away from urban centers as they could; but because the drug is so deadly and addictive, it encroached on other areas.
We saw, frankly, the States that took the leadership take ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from behind the counter. They made it harder to get. They enforced a lot of rules at the State level, and it really knocked back the domestic production of methamphetamine. We still have a huge problem of methamphetamine coming in across the border, particularly through the transit country of Mexico, but this has helped us greatly combat the production.
In east Tennessee, we formed the Southeast Tennessee Meth Task Force, which is a premiere local, State, and Federal partnership because methamphetamine production can't be combated exclusively at the State and local levels. It just simply can't. They didn't have the resources to surveil it. It became a toxic site where it was made, and they didn't have the resources to clean it up, so we formed this partnership. It grew to become the East Tennessee Meth Task Force, and now it is a premiere statewide task force.
We have had tremendous success in combating methamphetamine production in Tennessee, but we have to continue to modernize the laws, including adding a Federal component, in order for drug professionals to be able to keep ephedrine and pseudoephedrine out of the hands of people who are addicted to methamphetamine, because they produce this most of the time for use. As a result, this is just a deadly, deadly disease out in the hinterland of America, and we have got to fight it. This bill is another step in the right direction.
Congressman Gordon from Tennessee and I have been working together. Congressman Cooper from Tennessee and I passed a bill a few years ago to actually create Federal grant support for the children who are taken out of meth homes because when a meth home is infected by this plague, many times the children become wards of the State, and there was little help there at the State level as well.
So if this plague of methamphetamine has not come to your hometown, unfortunately, it will soon, and it's something that requires a Federal component.
This is a good bill. I urge the entire House to stand together and pass this piece of legislation, thanking the committees of jurisdiction and the original sponsor, Mr. Bart Gordon of Tennessee.
