things like tranquilizers and the like, become very, very dangerous substances. I don't care who says that they are not.

We have found that the interaction, the chemical interaction, that exists is a danger to the health, and it is a danger to the safety of the people. The advocates of the use of marihuana, those people often say, "Well, you know, most people take a cocktail when they come home at night." Well, the single cocktail is not as disorienting as a single joint. People can take a cocktail and even with the drunkometer or whatever those machines are that they use to test for the alcohol in the blood, they are not disoriented the way they are disoriented when they smoke a joint.

For young people to smoke marihuana while they are driving or before they drive is something that is a danger to the health and safety of others as well.

Mr. REID. I have read somewhere if you take a drink of alcohol, the alcohol is completely gone from your system within 12 hours. In marihuana, it takes 24 hours or longer to disappear.

Mr. WOLFF. I might tell you concerning the THC that is in marihuana, that medical evidence has proven the fact that it takes 5 to 6 days for the THC in the marihuana to be dissipated.

Mr. REID. That's what I meant to say, 5 or 6 days. That was a slip of the tongue in there. But these drugs will just not leave the system. They stay there.

Mr. WOLFF. Marihuana is accumulated in the fatty tissue of the body. That is why there is disorientation. The brain is a fatty tissue. That's why they say a lot of people are fatheads.

Thank you.

Mr. EVANS. Thank you, Mr. Wolff.

Mr. Coughlin?

Mr. COUGHLIN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to join in certainly expressing our appreciation for your coming forward and expressing your feelings in this. And I totally agree with you in your belief in the importance of drug-abuse education.

And I guess my only single question is: Is there a drug-abuse education system in the school in your district?

Mr. REID. My youngest son said they have come around occasionally, but it is totally insufficient for what it should be. And I think that there should be much more heavier emphasis, and the education system should go beyond the school for anybody caught smoking pot. This is the one point that I want to bring across.

A young boy should not be criminalized because he is smoking pot. I don't think he should be made a criminal. But he should be challenged if only in the manner that is required to take a course in drug abuse. And this way, he will not have a bad name the rest of his life.

But if he takes this course, it has worked with alcohol, with drunken drivers, it should work with marihuana and drugs. And if it helps only two or three, it has paid for itself.

Mr. COUGHLIN. I suggest that one of the things you can do, and it would be very important to do, is work with your parent-teachers association or whatever facility you have for obtaining input into the school system in Georgia to try to improve the drug abuse education

programs in the school. Because I think it is a terribly important thing.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. EVANS. Thank you.

Mr. Reid, in listening to you and talking about decriminalization of marihuana, in your experience, what would be your opinion in the event that we did decriminalize marihuana? What would we be talking about as the target of the illegal? Would it be those people under 18 years of age which could not legally get marihuana? Would that not be the case?

Mr. REID. Well, if you educated the child to the point that pot was bad--now, I am not saying that in decriminalizing it, I don't mean that you should stop a person who is selling the drug. I think if a person is caught with an ounce of drug or more ounces of pot should automatically receive sentence and, of course, go through the trial and everything. But sentence should be automatic.

Mr. EVANS. But I am talking about your kids when they started using it at a very early age. If you had it decriminalized so that people over 18 years of age could use it, you would still have sales illegally to the people under 18, would you not?

Mr. REID. Well, I agree with you, sir. Maybe I am putting itMr. EVANS. I understand the education point that you are making, and I agree with you totally on that. But even people who are advised like myself and some of the others about the evils of smoking choose to use tobacco. So that some people could still continue to use marihuana.

Mr. REID. Maybe I am using the wrong word. I have always thought of a criminal as a person who goes out and robs and steals. We should find a new word possibly. Call it a misdemeanor or such. I don't think a person caught with marihuana, regardless of how small, should get off scot-free and not even spanked.

Mr. EVANS. You might wish to know that Mr. Wolff has a bill that is called the citation diversion bill, which, should it be passed through Congress, would do exactly what you are pointing out.

Mr. REID. That is the point that I would like to make. Because to call a young boy 13 or 14 years old because he has been caught with pot a criminal, that doesn't help the situation any.

Mr. EVANS. I think all of the committee agrees with you on that point. And I might say at this point that we have to move on to the other panel.

Mr. Reid, we appreciate very much your willingness to come forward. We appreciate your testimony. It should be helpful to us in analyzing and dealing with this problem.

Thank you very much.

Mr. REID. Thank you for inviting me.

Mr. EVANS. At this time, I think we should take about a 5-minute or 10-minute break, and then we will start with our next panel. [Whereupon, a recess was taken.]

Mr. EVANS. I would like to resume the hearings.

At this time, we will have our actually third panel now which was originally scheduled as our second panel. I am very pleased to have

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with us Sheriff Ray Wilkes of Bibb County, Sheriff Cullen Talton of Houston County, and Sheriff Cary Bittick of Monroe County.

Gentlemen, welcome. And we appreciate your appearance. And I would like if you will take the oath so your testimony will be under oath.

[Sheriff Wilkes, Sheriff Talton, Sheriff Bittick were sworn by Mr. Evans.]

Mr. EVANS. Mr. Wilkes, if you would leadoff and make whatever statement you would for the record.

TESTIMONY OF RAY WILKES, SHERIFF, BIBB COUNTY, GA.

Sheriff WILKES. Thank you very much. My name is Ray Wilkes. I am sheriff of Bibb County, Macon, Ga. And I have been in law enforcement for the past 28 years come October 4, 1980.

I appreciate the opportunity of being asked to come before the committee, which is the first time I have ever testified before such a committee. And I feel that maybe this is a door that is opening that we may have been opposed to in the past, but it is a good door, and to be able to talk with people who make laws and have the responsibility in Washington is good.

I don't know that I have any answers that haven't been given before on the drug problems. But I have some views that I would like to pass on.

I watched the drug problems beginning in the midsixties when we heard in California about LSD, hallucinogenics, and other drugs. I guess we probably sent to the State laboratory everything from graphite to Teley's tea, thinking it might be LSD. We didn't even know what to look for that they called LSD back in the old days. It was a long time before the California scene moved to the East.

And we began about 1970 in this area to experience the drugs. Our drugs came on the scene, I think, probably with the Byron, Ga., pot festival which brought thousands of young people into our community. It was estimated from 250,000 to maybe 300,000 people for a big rock concert. After that, I don't think we ever had any trouble identifying drugs. We have had drugs since that time.

We have watched the escalation of the drugs go through until we stopped long ago worrying about the people as far as the criminal aspect that were using drugs. We have just tried to concentrate on the people who were selling drugs. And at times the arrest of drug dealers, the smaller drug dealers now, is used only to try to get to larger drug dealers.

So we have seen a change in the climate all over the United States. But what I feel like has happened to us, I feel that we have dropped into a state of apathy; that we have developed into a state of acceptability, that no longer do we really feel that there is anything that can be done about the drug problem. We have kind of accepted it as how strong do we have to be to accept the decay that happens to our young people in the community and still survive?

How we are really losing is the problem. It looks to me that you lose a whole generation of young people because you never really accept the responsibility of getting tough on drugs. Most of the answers

have been, "Let's get tough on drugs by getting more judges and more prosecutors." But it seems to me that the Federal Government has got to accept their role and responsibility of dealing with the drug dealers. We are not only dealing with organized crime now, but we are dealing with foreign governments. We are dealing with foreign governments out of other countries that infiltrate our coastline, that infiltrate our rural areas, that bring in drugs where a sheriff in a county may only have, conceivably, three officers, three deputies.

We have just tried a case in our Federal courts which was of such magnitude that these people cracked the plane up in the Panama Canal Zone with $60 million worth of cocaine. And these drugs were coming to south Georgia.

The drug ring was able to buy a farm for $300,000 in order to have a place to land an airplane. We never have been able to deal with this type of problem. It is a problem that is not only local, but it is a national problem.

My feelings are that the Federal Government has got to now change the law or consider changing the law to where the Armed Forces of the United States and some of the sophisticated equipment that they have will be used to help local law enforcement, State and Federal.

Back in the fifties, I spent a week one time in a room with some Federal agents. And we were going over maps. And the maps were on a big roll, a paper roll, that we had to look at the map with magnifying glasses. I don't know whether they got the maps legally or illegally, but they had had a U-2 plane that flew over a part of Georgia that covered 5 miles wide and 50 miles long taking pictures. And we were looking for liquor stills. It was photographed in the wintertime. There was no foliage on the trees. And we could actually see liquor stills operating. That was made from a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment and cameras in the fifties.

Now, we are into the eighties, and we are dealing in the intercoastal waterways of Georgia to where shrimp boats are no longer shrimp boats, but they have met a freighter or mothership and come in along the coast loaded with drugs. And we have the equipment to come in and fly night flights over those areas.

Drugs come in at night. They have got all types of equipment in the military that they could tell us if there was just something wrong with the situation or give us the photographs they made to where the experts in those areas would be able to say

We are having a lot of activity in here. This is the third time that we have seen boats in this area that have no reason to be there, or this is the first time that we have seen an area that is cleared off that has the capability of landing an airplane there of a certain size.

Now, I don't see that that conflicts with the point of law with the Armed Forces. I am not asking them to take over our enforcement. But I am asking them to fly airplanes constantly, getting in flying time, if they were just exercising on some of the routes, that would help law enforcement by being able to fly over certain areas. And they need to operate the cameras and be able to give us what other methods that they have.

It doesn't seem that farfetched to me. It seems like when a sheriff's office is dealing with a foreign government and dealing with high seas

and dealing with sophisticated airplanes, somebody has got to come in that can help us.

Gentlemen,

that is basically the only statement that I have that I would like to make.

Mr. EVANS. Mr. Bittick?

TESTIMONY OF CARY BITTICK, SHERIFF, MONROE COUNTY, GA.

Sheriff BITTICK. I have been the sheriff in a small county in the middle of Georgia for 19 years. And I, like Ray, have seen drugs go from zero, when the only thing you ever heard of, the first time I ever heard it, was when they came back from Vietnam with it and brought back one little pack of marihuana with them, up to where we are today.

Drugs are worse now in my county than they have ever been before, and we have worked drugs, we have tried to work drugs. In a small county of 13,000, 15,000 population like I live in, you can't get somebody to come in from another place like Atlanta and GBI send somebody in or somebody move into the county and him be able to buy drugs. They know everybody in the county. I know everybody in my county. And people that deal in drugs know everybody in my county. That is not going to be the answer. It is almost impossible or would be impossible for me to hire somebody as a deputy sheriff in my county and put him out there buying drugs, because the person that I would be willing to put credence in his testimony if he got on the stand to testify that he bought drugs from somebody, they wouldn't sell the drugs to him because they knew him to start with and knew him to be straight.

And that is the situation we are in in small counties. We have got the same type drugs in small counties you have got in the big cities. We are on the Interstate Highway and probably have more drugs there than you do in some other small counties that are not on the interstate highway. I think that has been one of our problems all along. So that's where we are in the small counties in Georgia. We have got the same drugs they do in New York or anywhere else.

Mr. EVANS. Thank you, Sheriff Bittick.

Sheriff Talton?

TESTIMONY OF SHERIFF CULLEN TALTON, HOUSTON COUNTY, GA.

Sheriff TALTON. I am Cullen Talton. I am sheriff of Houston County. I have been sheriff going into my eighth year. We have a big airbase in Warner Robins Air Force Base, which employs some 20,000odd people and has numerous Air Force personnel. We have all different types of people in our county, but I don't think that attributes to our drug problem any more than it would to any other community. In fact, we are glad to have them there. And I feel that we are just like every other community all over the United States. We all have our problems.

What I am concerned about is our young people. It is alarming to me the amount of drugs being used by young people in our communities. We are talking about our future generations. And if something is not done to the people that are supplying these drugs-and I