Congress right on meth budget
In the 4 1/2–page statement Scott Burns delivered to a House subcommittee on Tuesday, he sounded convincingly like an ally in the battle federal legislators are waging, for their constituents, against methamphetamines.
Sixteen years as a rural Utah prosecutor taught Burns what a “uniquely destructive” drug meth is, he assured members of the subcommittee on Criminal Justice, Drug Policy and Human Resources.
As co-chairman of President Bush’s Synthetic Drugs Interagency Working Group, he laid out the funding commitments that the White House has made to the effort and some successes that have been recorded. Drug use among eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders, for example, is down 17 percent over the past three years.
But subcommittee members would have none of it. Knowing a thing or two about twisting facts and figures, representatives dressed the administration down for an inadequate commitment to the meth conflict.
Burns’ enthusiasm notwithstanding, the White House is proposing significant cuts in programs intended to help states and communities respond to a phenomenon that threatens their health, properties, children and environments. One Justice Department initiative would absorb a 60 percent cut under the president’s plan. A program that underwrites local law-enforcement agencies combating meth in especially plagued regions would be wiped out.
“Stop cutting the budget for methamphetamine and back up the Congress,” subcommittee Chairman Mark Souter, R-Ind., admonished Burns.
If the most outspoken critics on the panel had been Democrats, the episode might have passed for partisan gamesmanship.
But it was the president’s fellow-Republicans who dwelled on the troubles their constituents and neighbors are suffering at home from a drug menace that began on the West Coast and in the Southwest and has migrated eastward.
Neither Burns, nor even the president, has the kind of relationship with home folks that members of Congress have. Compared with the national government, they are reasonably accessible to voters, who avail themselves of the tighter lines of communication.
When communities experience the tragedies associated with meth – property crime, identity theft, property destruction, serious endangerment of children, environmental degradation – they call upon their elected state and federal lawmakers for action. Indeed, many states are responding, from stepped up law-enforcement resources to tighter controls over the easy-to-get retail products used to manufacture meth.
If that were all the reaction necessary to curb meth use and its consequences, the appropriate federal role would indeed be minimal.
But as local enforcement efforts make headway against home-cooking operations, international trafficking is picking up the slack along corridors that stretch from Mexico to Canada, putting Spokane and similar communities right in the path of the menace.
Moreover, rampant identify-theft crimes associated with meth use corrupt commercial and financial transactions at the national level.
The independence and political backbone demonstrated by several GOP lawmakers this week is compelling evidence of how serious the meth problem is, and how important it is that the White House cooperate.