White House Press Release
Remarks By The President At U.S. Conference Of Mayors
The White House
Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release May 21, 1997
Remarks By The President
At U.S. Conference Of Mayors
State Floor
10:30 A.M. Edt
The President: Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor -- Mayor
Helmke and other officers of the Conference of Mayors. General
McCaffrey, Mr. Vice President, to members of the Cabinet and the
administration, all of you who are here, first, let me thank you for
participating in what, as Mayor Daley said, is a fairly unprecedented
long-term, consistent effort at cooperation with all these federal
agencies to try to work through a united approach to this issue.
It occurred to me as I was coming here that one of the
things I ought to say is that all the objectives that all of us have
for our country depend in part on our being able to give our children
a drug-free future. I came here saying that I wanted to be President
because we needed to change America for the 21st century to make sure
opportunity would be available for all people -- it's by definition
not there for people who are too paralyzed to take advantage of it --
to make sure that all citizens would be responsible contributors to a
community becoming more united. Drugs divide America in all kinds of
ways that you're very familiar with, and by definition, represent
irresponsibility.
And I wanted our country to be a leader in the world for
peace and freedom and prosperity. And it's hard for America to lead
when we're fighting all the time over the drug issues. And we
certainly do. I just got back from a trip to Mexico, Central America
and the Caribbean, and each stop along the way it was a big point of
our discussions.
So it's important that you're here. A lot of you were
just at the Presidents' Summit of Service in Philadelphia. We said
we were going to try to create communities in which every child in
this country by the year 2000 would have a safe place, a decent,
healthy start in life, access to a good education and marketable
skills, a mentor trying to help him or her, and have a chance to
serve themselves -- our children. We can't do any of that unless
these kids have a drug-free future. So this is very, very important.
Before I get into the substance of my remarks, I'd also
like to say a special word of thanks to someone who has worked with
you on our behalf for over four years now. This is Marcia Hale's
last day on the job, and I think we ought to say to her she has done
a magnificent job representing the Mayors. (Applause.) Thank you.
She leaves for London tomorrow. She's going to work for a great
American company, and as nearly as I can tell, she will soon be in a
position to support me in my old age. (Laughter.) And so we wish
her well.
Let me say that, also, I want to thank all of you for
the work you've done with the Attorney General and with our other law
enforcement officials in trying to drive down the crime rate. We can
be very pleased with what has happened when we've had more police,
more punishment, more prevention in our communities with a
community-based strategy. One of the chiefs of police I met today
said that
the Cops program had been the best thing the federal government had
done in his 37 years in law enforcement, and I appreciate that.
(Applause.)
You all know that the crime rate has dropped for five
years in a row, and we learned last week at the annual observance at
the Law Enforcement Memorial that we had the fewest number of police
officers killed last year in the line of duty in 35 years. And all
those are good signs.
We've also had some success in the fight against illegal
drugs. Monthly drug use today is about half of what it was 10 years
ago. But what we have to face is -- and I was glad General McCaffrey
said what he did -- is that we have had this anomalous situation in
America for the last several years where crime is going down but
crime among juveniles is going up. Drug use among young adults,
which used to be -- that used to be the biggest problem category --
18 to 35, going down, drug use among juveniles going up. And that is
the thing, I think, that is plaguing all of us.
This report you have given, I think, is very, very
instructive about what we can do, and I want to talk a little more
about what we can do together. But I think it's also important to
point out that this problem is the problem of every American citizen.
It goes beyond the responsibilities of even the President and the
Attorney General and the Drug Czar and the Dea and the Mayors and the
people who are involved in prevention and treatment. Our society
cannot say on the one hand we want to have a tough and tolerant
attitude toward drugs, and on the other hand send a very different
message every time there might be a little money to be made out of
it.
And I want to say specifically, there have not been
consistent and unwavering messages. You know, a lot of you have
experienced in your communities the increasing allure of heroin among
young people. We've seen a lot of communities where cocaine use goes
down, heroin use comes up. For most people in our generation -- a
lot of you are younger than I am, but most of you are about my age --
we all grew up thinking heroin was the worst thing in the world and
there were these horrible images associated with it -- strung-out
junkies lying on street corners in decidedly unglamorous ways. But
we now see in college campuses, in neighborhoods, heroin becoming
increasingly the drug of choice. And we know that part of this has
to do with the images that are finding their way to our young people.
In the press in recent days, we've seen reports that
many of our fashion leaders are now admitting -- and I honor them for
doing this -- they're admitting flat out that images projected in
fashion photos in the last few years have made heroin addiction seem
glamorous and sexy and cool. And if some of the people in those
images start to die now, it's become obvious that that is not true.
You do not need to glamorize addiction to sell clothes. And American
fashion has been an enormous source of creativity and beauty and art
and, frankly, economic prosperity for the United States, and we
should all value and respect that. But the glorification of heroin
is not creative, it's destructive; it's not beautiful, it is ugly.
And this is not about art, it's about life and death. And glorifying
death is not good for any society. And I hope that we have all come
to recognize that now, because none of us are going to succeed unless
all of us work together on this problem.
Let me say that I also recognize that we have more to do
here. The balanced budget agreement that we have reached with the
Congress, and which received overwhelming support from members of
both parties in the House of Representatives last night -- I am very,
very proud of it -- will allow us to continue to increase our efforts
to work with you to do our part of the job. And I agree with what
Mayor Daley said; we have a lot of things to do here, including
improving the coordination between what we do and what you do.
Among other things, General McCaffrey has succeeded in
making the case for $175 million advertising campaign which will be
leveraged with private sector resources to give our children the hard
facts about drugs. I think that is very important. We have a lot of
evidence that drug use does go down or up depending upon the absence
or presence of certain messages and certain cultural environment
about it.
There are also two other things I'd like to mention
because they were mentioned specifically, Mr. Mayor, in your plan.
First, we have some good news to report in our progress about
methamphetamine. Last year, we targeted this increasingly popular
drug as a special focus for our efforts. Meth has a devastating
effect on those who use it. It is produced in clandestine labs which
carry an enormously high risk of fire and explosion. The Congress
supported our efforts by enacting the Comprehensive Methamphetamine
Control Act, establishing new controls over the chemicals used to
make meth and strengthening penalties for trafficking in those
chemicals.
Now a year later, we are releasing a one-year progress
report. First, seizures of dangerous drug labs used to manufacture
meth are up 170 percent in one year alone. Second, the use of
methamphetamine is down in key western cities; and eight of the 10
cities where meth use had been skyrocketing it's dropped between
seven and 52 percent. So this shows you that if we work together we
can actually turn the tide in problem after problem after problem.
A second focus of our efforts -- and, again, one that
you mentioned in your report -- involved a vigorous crackdown on
money launderers. We know that without a steady stream of laundered
cash the drug trade will wither. Today, the Treasury Department will
take three steps to further cut off the cash. We will require
currency exchanges, check cashers and other money services to
register with the Treasury Department. We will require more
businesses to report suspicious activity under penalty of law, and
will require the transfer of funds overseas above $750 to be reported
to federal law enforcement. We know this will cut back on money
laundering. It will require some efforts at compliance, but it is
worth doing. We know if we can get to the money, we can get to the
problems very often.
Finally, let me ask your help in trying to get the
Congress to pass the kind of juvenile justice bill we all know that
we need. Organized gangs, armed to the teeth, prowl too many of our
streets and threaten too many of our communities, and are part of the
drug problem. I have proposed comprehensive legislation, modeled on
what is working in Boston and many other cities present in this room
and around the country that will protect our children better from
violence and give local communities the capacity to have safe streets
again.
The plan will add prosecutors and probation officers,
keep schools open longer to keep children off the streets. And we
know an awful lot of the problems young people have occur in the
first few hours after they get out of school and before they can be
home with their parents. It will also require child safety locks on
guns -- right now, we protect aspirin bottles better than we protect
guns. And it would extend the provisions of the Brady Bill to
juveniles who commit serious violent crimes; they wouldn't be able to
buy a gun when they turn 21.
The legislation passed in the House of Representatives
contains tougher penalties and more prosecutors, but only about a
dozen states qualify. It does not do anything on prevention. It
does not make all states available for extra prosecutors and
probation officers. And it does not deal with the child safety locks
or extending the coverage of the Brady Bill to juveniles who commit
serious crimes.
Now, I believe we ought to get a good juvenile crime
bill here that can be actually used in the way the Crime Bill of 1994
and the Cops program are being used by you on the streets. We want
to give you something you can use. This bill, like the other ones,
was largely written by local officials telling us what should be in
the bill. So I do not want this to be a political issue, I do not
want this to be a partisan issue. I tried to do this in a very
straightforward way, based on what those of you who labor in this
vineyard every day told me was the right thing to do.
So I hope that you will help us do that, continue to
make progress on meth, continue to make progress on money laundering.
I assure you we will review your plan and your recommendations very
closely. And, again, let me say I also hope you will help us remind
the people in your communities that if we want our kids to be drug
free, we've all got to work hard to send the right signals.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
End 10:45 A.M. Edt