assigned the responsibility for the Precursor Liaison Program, and the precursors for PCP were made a high priority.

From an enforcement viewpoint, the results of the stepped-up program are encouraging. Several significant points worth noting are:

(1) The number of PCP laboratory seizures during 1977 was 42 per cent higher than the combined totals of the previous two years.

(2) The number of dosage units removed in conjunction with the laboratory seizures was 209 per cent higher.

(3) Total DEA and DEA Task Force removals during 1977 nearly equaled the combined total of the two previous years.

(4) Total DEA and DEA Task Force arrests for PCP were 60 per cent above arrests reported for 1975 and 39 per cent above those reported in 1976. Simply, the numbers of individuals arrested for PCP has nearly doubled.

An example of a Task Force is the Washington District Office PCP Task Force which has been fully operative since January 1, 1978. The area State police departments, county police units, and Metropolitan Police Department, as well as DEA, have officers detailed to this group. In the first six months of operation, they have arrested 20 defendants, seized eight operating labs of various sizes, 39 firearms, vehicles and a large amount of PCP and PCP crystal worth in excess of $1.5 million on the street. These labs were all directed toward supplying to Washington, D.C. metropolitan area with PCP.

Special Action Office/PCP

DEA is now directing a new program-Special Action Office/PCP-to focus exclusively on combatting the escalating abuse and manufacture of PCP nationwide. SAO/PCP is an expanded enforcement effort directed toward decreasing the availability of PCP in the United States through the location and seizure of the source clandestine labs and prosecution of the highest level violators. SAO/PCP draws upon every area of expertise within DEA and also requires the utilization of State and local law enforcement agencies. The initial phase of SAO/PCP began June 1, 1978 and will run until October 1, 1978. In order to be able to evaluate the impact of SAO/PCP, the program coordinators developed quantitative criteria based on previous quarters' arrest, lab seizure and drug removal statistics by which to measure their progress. In this fashion, as SAO/PCP is in operation, monthly statistics can be measured against projected figures. It was projected that at the conclusion of this 4-month phase of SAO/PCP:

17 clandestine labs would be seized;

5.1 million dosage units would be removed;

118 significant violators would be arrested;

SAO/PCP, in its first three months alone, has exceeded the anticipated level of enforcement activity:

21 labs were seized;

approximately 5 million dosage units removed;

130 individuals have been arrested.

SAO/PCP has outlined certain objectives which are currently being pursued. These include:

(1) Upgrading and expanding the Precursor Liaison Program mentioned above,

(2) Upgrading and expanding field investigative expertise dealing with clandestine labs,

(3) Influencing State and local enforcement agencies to coordinate their PCP enforcement activities with DEA, and

(4) Developing an intelligence system specifically directed at PCP clandestine labs.

Training

DEA has included PCP in its training program. The various training programs can influence State/local law enforcement agencies' operations as DEA's training division is required to insure that clandestine lab investigations, emphasizing PCP, is a significant part of the program. Updated training on clandestine laboratories is included in DEA's in-house Advanced Agents Training School and Basic Agent Training School.

Regulatory

At the same time that the DEA operational and support elements were giving the PCP program added attention, the agency also moved to more tightly control

the manufacturing and trafficking of this drug by rescheduling PCP from Schedule III to Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act.

Following the control of PCP in Schedule II, immediate steps were taken to thwart further clandestine manufacturing. On May 17, 1978, two of the immediate precursors of PCP, phenylcyclohexylamine and PCC (piperidinocyclohexane-carbonitrile), were placed in Schedule II of the Controlled Substances Act. This is the first time that DEA moved to control an immediate precursor. The two precursors would generally be found only in illicit laboratories, since either is a step in the manufacture of PCP from raw material to finished product. In the past, the clandestine lab operators synthesized the manufacture of PCP to a point just short of the actual drug, thus avoiding legal grounds for prosecution for producing PCP. After making certain that they were not under surveillance, the chemists would then complete their work. Control of these substances now allows enforcement action against operators prior to their obtaining the final "marketable" product, PCP.

DEA has been aware of the abuse of PCP analogs for about three years. One of the first to appear on the street was TCP (thiophene). Because TCP was manufactured solely by street chemists for abuse purposes, DEA moved to place this analog on Schedule I. Effective October 25, 1978, two additional analogsN-ethyl-1-phenylcyclohexylamine and 1-(1-phenylcyclohexyl)-yrrolidine-will be placed into Schedule I.

DOJ coordination

During June 1978, representatives of DEA met with the Department of Justice, Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section. This meeting was held specifically to discuss DEA's expanding efforts with regard to PCP and request DOJ support. Ancillary to this meeting, DEA's various Regional Directors were directed to meet with corresponding U.S. Attorney's Offices to discuss DEA's PCP enforcement efforts.

PREPARED STATEMENTS

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. NORMAN Y. MINETA, A REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA

Mr. Chairman, Members of the Select Committee, while I am most pleased to have this opportunity to speak before you today, I certainly wish the news I bring were less disheartening. I am here because I represent the 13th Congressional District in California, an area which includes a substantial portion of San Jose. San Jose has been called the PCP capital of our country—a dubious distinction I would be pleased to forgo. I have come to tell you about the PCP problem in my district, and what efforts are being made to deal with it. I hope this hearing and my participation in it will help focus attention on this problem, a problem that is almost literally "frying" the brains of our nation's youth.

PCP has found a burgeoning market-in schools, homes, and at street corner hangouts in at least 39 states-since it was first used to get high in 1967.

PCP was first synthesized in the mid-fifties and then was manufactured and tested on humans as a surgical anesthetic under the Parke-Davis trade name "Sernyl." Although Sernyl was an effective anesthetic, patients who used it experienced disturbing side effects. Early in 1965, Parke-Davis took the drug off the market and suggested that its use on humans be discontinued. In 1967, Parke-Davis reintroduced the drug as Sernylan, billing it as an animal anesthetic and tranquilizer, and cautioning that it was for veterinary use only.

PCP first came to public attention in San Francisco in 1967 when about 5,000 of what were referred to as "Peace Pills" were distributed at a rock concert in Haight-Asbury. The physician and toxicologist at the Haight Free Clinic, Dr. David Smith, reports that the clinic was flooded with users experiencing bad trips, and they didn't know how to treat it. After that experience, word went out among the drug-wise about the bad effects of PCP. Few sought PCP as a drug of choice, and usage entered a dormant stage. But since it is so easily manufactured and cheap to produce, dealers began selling it under other names like "THC", "Cannabinol", or in combination with mescaline, psilocybin, or LSD. But PCP is no longer a drug of deception; it has come out of the closet. According to Theodore Vernier, Director of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Detroit, PCP is clearly the drug of choice among white suburban teenagers. In 1976, the average age of first use was 19. In March of 1977, the age had dropped

to 14. Last year, the National Youth Polydrug Study found that one-third of the youngsters in drug abuse programs had tried it. The Drug Enforcement Administration has stated that in the last four years PCP has become a major drug of abuse, overtaking LSD as the big hallucinogen on the street. Federal officials estimate that nearly 7 million people, most of them from 12 to 25, have tried PCP. Last year alone, the drug sent at least 4,000 of its users to hospital emergency rooms, took 100 lives, and triggered an untold number of strange suicidal or homicidal acts.

Users rarely inject liquid PCP. More likely, they spray the liquid or sprinkle crystals of PCP on plants such as marijuana, tobacco, mint, or parsley and smoke it. The drug can also be snorted or pressed into tablets or capsules for oral use. Although it was originally used as a booster or additive to other street drugs, in recent months, at least 2 the users of PCP have been taking the drug as their sole means of attaining a high.

Reactions to PCP are totally unpredictable. Psychotic reactions to PCP mimic the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia with hallucinatory voices, and combative or self-destructive impulses. The drug can also give users a distorted sense of their own bodies; people feel their arms or legs growing or shriveling. Users may suffer from slurred speech, inability to walk, jerky eye movements, and grimacing. Acute toxic reactions can last up to a week after a single dose. Taken in larger doses, PCP can induce seizures, coma, and death. Its unpredictability makes caution and moderation virtually impossible.

PCP users engage in significantly more self-destructive behavior in the form of overdoses and suicide attempts than users of other drugs. Even in low doses, PCP has been found to intensify and aggravate preexisting overt or latent psychotic tendencies. While LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin are true hallucinogens, and produce a consistent hallucinogenic high, PCP produces a series of drastically different responses at various levels. Acts of spontaneous irrational rage are far more common among PCP users than among users of other drugs. Some 20 percent of the reported deaths due to the drug are directly caused by overdose. But the vast majority of PCP-related deaths stem from the drug's behavioral effects. Most accidents occur when users try to engage in normal activities such as driving and swimming while coordination and perception are distorted. These accidents are rarely attributed to PCP. Emergency room personnel and coroners, unaware of the effects and extensive use of PCP, often fail to conduct tests to establish its presence in suspicious homicides, suicides. and accidents.

What draws people to a drug that seems to lack any redeeming social value, even to the drug-wise pioneers of the Haight-Asbury? Foremost, it is cheap. It offers the biggest kick for the least amount of money. Secondly, it is versatile in administration: it can be taken orally, intranasally, intravenously, intramuscularly, or smoked. Third, it is powerful in small doses and is easy to traffic. But primarily, people use PCP for the same reasons they use other drugs: to get high, relieve boredom, escape, fantasize, to feel powerful, to make some kind of spiritual connection, or simply because it is there and everyone else is doing it.

Most official reports of drug use in the past have lumped PCP with other hallucinogens, making trend detection from such services difficult. Moreover, the patient admitted for emergency treatment based on PCP-induced bizarre behavior is more likely to be diagnosed as acutely schizophrenic than as having a toxic drug reaction. Nevertheless, there are a number of converging lines of evidence suggesting increased use.

Last year the National Institute on Drug Abuse conducted a national poll of young people between 12 and 17 and found that some 753,000 of them, or 6% of the total testing population, have used PCP. The figures represented a 3% increase over 1976. Among young adults aged 18 to 25, 14% of the testing population reported having used PCP, and that represents a 4% increase over the previous year. Last year alone, the number of youths trying PCP nearly doubled.

PCP is a popular street drug in Santa Clara County. It appears under a variety of street names. Seizures of PCP in San Jose during 1977 were up more than 100 times what they were in 1975, and arrests for possession also showed a huge increase.

In 1976, San Jose police said PCP used in local schools had risen so sharply in the past two years that it was then second in use only to marijuana. There

are at least four layers to the PCP distribution system in the schools, beginning with the "factories," illicit chemical laboratories which synthesize it by the pound. Next are the major dealers who purchase crystal by the ounce. They sell it by the gram to intermediate dealers who are the connections to the street dealers. The street dealers usually buy the crystal already rolled into homemade joints. Students in local schools sometimes pool their money, buy a joint for $5 to $10, smoke it before school, during recess, or during their lunch break, and then are high for the rest of the day. I can only imagine what that is doing to their ability to gain anything from their education, or what its effect is on classroom activities and the drop out rate in high schools.

Intermediate dealers buy PCP for $65 to $70 a gram, getting 25 joints to a gram. That's about a 230% mark-up, and it's causing even some heroin dealers to get into the PCP business.

Of course, other criminal activity is associated with PCP use. For example, in December 1976, burglary and narcotics detectives teamed up to smash a suspected dope-for-stolen property operation. Property taken in burglaries was being sold or traded for narcotics, including PCP. According to some officials, the severity of crime has definitely increased with use of PCP. In burglaries, for example, strange and erratic behavior is exhibited. They go to greater extents when high on PCP. They don't just rip something off, they destroy the home or threaten to kill someone.

Dr. Barbara Arons, Chief of the Valley Medical Center's psychiatric unit in San Jose, has warned that PCP may be more dangerous than LSD. A year ago, she reported seeing an average of 10 PCP patients a week. One man admitted to Valley Medical Center had smoked a joint laced with PCP and in his hallucinations became Jesus Christ. He went into the bathroom, and broke a shower pane. He says he wanted to eat the glass so he could die for our sins like Jesus Christ. He swallowed a jagged piece of glass, nearly four inches long and a quarter of an inch thick. By the time he went into surgery the glass had gnawed a bloody path deep into his intestines. Another San Jose couple has been confined to a mental hospital after extensive use of PCP. They started having delusions, and now they think they are Jesus and Mary. That will be their reality for the rest of their lives.

There are other horror stories: one man murdered his parents, another stabbed a tiny baby to death, another ripped out his eyes with his own hands. Users themselves die not only from massive overdoses, but also from what is called "behavioral toxicity." People fall from great heights, burn to death, drive their cars into large stationary objects, or drown in a few inches of water because they couldn't recognize the danger, or couldn't cope with it, or simply because they were too high to do anything about it, even move.

The ease and low cost involved in the creation of PCP makes it an attractive venture for dealers. With a couple of years of college chemistry and some fundamental equipment, an amateur "cook" can turn an investment of $500 for starting materials into a profit of nearly $150,000 in street sales. In a California drug raid last December, federal agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration working with local enforcement officials seized upwards of 900 pounds of the drug worth over $50 million from a single illicit operation. Los Angeles Sheriff's deputies closed 3 illegal labs making PCP in 1975. By 1977, 500 labs had been closed-and these are just the ones that were caught.

Some of you may have read an article in the July 13 issue of Rolling Stone entitled "Moonwalk Serenade," chronicling a reporter's on-site investigation of PCP use in San Jose. In East San Jose, the mode of stoned locomotion caused by PCP is known as the moonwalk, thus the title of the article. Last fall, officials estimate there were 500 dealers of PCP in San Jose.

Project DARE (Drug Abuse Rehabilitation and Education), opened its doors in San Jose in July, 1974, as a unique program offering vocational training and job placement services to former drug users. DARE now has expanded to include a program for treatment of abusers of heroin, PCP, and other drugs, as well as providing education and awareness to the community regarding the issue of drug abuse. The DARE PCP Unit is one of the few in existence in the United States. DARE's PCP Unit, which I had the opportunity to visit this past weekend, approaches the PCP problems in Santa Clara County from three angles: (1) treatment for PCP abusers, including individual, group, family and crisis counseling; (2) community education and awareness through workshops for parents, edu

cators, staff of other agencies and the interested public; presentations in schools and other private and public agencies, and a public relations campaign to inform and eduacte the public about the drug problem; and (3) a research project which is taking a comprehensive look at the scope and depth of the PCP problem in San Jose.

While the final results of that study will not be completed for several weeks, I would like to share with you some preliminary results which were presented to me this past weekend.

Project DARE has sampled 1,964 students in the San Jose public school system, representing 2.9 percent of the 67,724 junior and senior high school population grades 7 through 12. I would like to request that the following two pages of graphs be inserted in the record as part of my testimony.

The first graph demonstrates that in comparison to a number of other drugs, PCP represents a proportionately smaller problem than alcohol and marijuana. 1.1 percent of the senior high students and 0.9 percent of the junior high students revealed that they were regular users of PCP. That means that 1,354 students currently attending San Jose schools fall into this group. As Project DARE pointed out to me, however, youngsters with chronic drug problems are not likely to even be in school.

The second graph reveals that both senior and junior high school students have observed a dramatic increase of PCP usage in the last year.

The third graph reveals the tremendous increase in PCP use by ethnic group. The highest increase has been among black youths. The critical increase in the last year reveals graphically the escalation of the problem.

The last graph indicates responses to a question concerning the best way to stop using drugs if a serious problem exists. The high percentage of those responding that they should "just stop" indicates an unrealistic assumption that a person with a serious drug problem can just stop. Clearly, those using drugs must have more realistic information about what they are doing to themselves. It is clear to me that PCP is a growing and serious problem and a problem that we must begin to address. Since PCP has no recognized human medical use, it should be reclassified among the most dangerous drugs, alongside heroin, in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. Second, the penalty for the manufacture or sale of PCP should be increased. Third, PCP must be acccorded priority attention by federal law enforcement officials. Simultaneously, drug abuse treatment and prevention resources, including massive educational campaigns, should be redirected to deal with this most hazardous drug.

I understand that Senator Bentsen will be speaking to you here today about his bill, S. 2778, the PCP Control Act of 1978. His bill would increase the criminal sanctions for the unauthorized manufacture, distribution, or possession of PCP. The measure would also render the clandestine manufacture of PCP much more perilous by controlling the sale and transfer of the chemical piperidine, a necessary ingredient in PCP. In addition to stating my support for this measure, would like to emphasize the need for PCP treatment facilities such as Project DARE. It is my belief that we need to treat both ends of the problem-the precursors and the users.

In many ways PCP represents the typical drug problem America will face in the 1980's and beyond. Instead of clandestine shipments of narcotics being smuggled across the nation's borders, small laboratories-manufacturing illicit, easily produced, highly profitable, psychoactive chemicals-will be tucked away on inconspicuous city and suburban streets and in rural areas.

We have become a nation of people for whom "getting high," be it with drugs or alcohol, has become as common a recreation as Sunday picnics and the Fourth of July. The fact is that the great majority of Americans are currently drinking, smoking, sniffing, snorting, chewing, or eating something that has been classified as a drug.

The reasons behind our seemingly limitless tradition of drug consumption are simple. All of us enjoy feeling good, and with the current sophistication of chemical technology, our neighborhoods are being flooded with a bedazzling array of drugs that produce sensations that people like. And we are buying them by the ton. While adults subscribe to more traditional substances-alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and a plethora of easily obtainable prescription drugs, a younger generation seems to have chosen a mysterious chemical called PCP as their drug of the Seventies. In my view this substance merits all of the resistance we can offer.