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Hi. I'm Senator Lawton. Child's in the United States Capitol is where the Congress does its work and the work we do touches the lives of everyone in the country and countless others around the world. The Lawton child's update will give you a look inside Congress to see what the debate here means to us at home in Florida.

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I hope you'll join me for the Lawton Child's update. Oh, mhm. Uh huh. Okay. Okay. Uh huh. Yeah, yeah. Mhm. Okay. You. Hi. I'm Lauren Charles, and this is the Law and Charles update. The New Year always brings with it the promise of a fresh start.

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It's a chance to tackle tough problems with a sense of resolve. That's the way we begin 1987. And we start with something a lot more compelling than just a set of resolutions. Just two months ago, Congress enacted a pair of laws each aimed at dangerous chemicals in our society.

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One of these laws was a major new anti drug package. It's intended to shut the door on drug pushers and to open the door for rehabilitation for drug victims. Later in this program, we'll take a look at one of the most notorious chemicals in modern America.

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It's called Crack Cocaine, and we'll see if it's damaged the lives of some promising young people. It's a painful story, but it's well worth watching if it keeps even one young person from the foolish notion that crack is worth a try. But first, let's take a look at another kind of poison their industrial waste products.

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And after years of storage and pits and dumps around the country, they're seeping into the water we drink and the air we breathe. Congress has just reauthorized the Superfund law. It's a program first passed in 1980 designed to clean up toxic waste sites. The country was shocked 10 years ago when we heard about Love Canal near Niagara Falls.

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It was a subdivision built on top of a former waste dump. The dump had never been cleaned up, and the chemicals were poisoning the people who live there. The Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, told us the problem was even bigger than we thought. The estimated that in the year 1980 we produce £126 billion of toxic waste.

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That's enough to fill the Superdome in New Orleans to the roof every day. Some of the untreated sites we found are under tennis courts, church parking lots, farms and pasture land. Some estimates said there was as many as 50,000 such sites around the country. The new version of Superfund is much tougher than the original.

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It tells EPA how many sites have to be cleaned up and how soon it has to be done. The program is five times larger now than when first passed. It targets specific amounts to clean up specific dump sites. Many of these sites have chemicals that are poisons waiting to kill.

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They stay dangerous for decades, and the harm they can do ranges from cancer to birth defects. The problem is that we used to think putting waste in the ground was enough. It's not over the years. The chemicals eat through the earth and into the groundwater. The water works its way into the rivers and the streams and the lakes that generate our supply of drinking water.

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Some chemicals are so volatile that they actually rise and their fumes poison. The air. EPA found that even when the chemicals were dug up, dried and burned they produced other poisons equally harmful. This is a nationwide problem, and it's been a serious problem in Florida. Where we have discovered is, um, now at least 60 toxic waste sites around our state.

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One of these is in Tampa. At the peak oil come. It will take $2.5 million to make this land safe again. Motor oil from hundreds of thousands of Hillsborough County cars was dumped here for 25 years. Nothing wrong with dumping at the time or so we thought.

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But then the company sought to re refine the oil by combining it with sulfuric acid and heating it until all the impurities were removed. The impurities, the leftover by products of this process. They then dumped into a pit. But the by products turned out to contain heavy metals and PCBs, and they seeped into the aquifer, sending carcinogens into the water.

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Fred Stroud, from the Atlanta regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency, tried to explain to me what a PCB is. PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls. They were, uh, produced for the electric industry. For transformers, there are stable compound that is not affected by heat, which makes them extremely extremely efficient for use in the transformers.

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That also makes creates the problem in the environment because they are so stable they don't break down so that they have a half life you might save over 50 years. And in that 50 years time, they accumulate in the fat tissues of fish of of people.

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Anybody who who eats the fish can then in turn, accumulate this PCB in their body. In fact, uh, large concentrations of PCBs are found in breast milk in some parts of the country. The PCB itself is a known carcinogen, so it's important that we clean these things up and destruct them in a manner that's environmentally safe.

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Mm. Bob Thompson of the Florida Department of Environmental Regulation is the state's project officer. At the peak site, the peak oil company received waste oils from gas stations, crankcase oil, a lot of automobiles. They ran the waste oil through a re refining operation, where they combine the oil with sulfuric acid and heated the material to drop out all the impurities.

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The byproduct of it was placed into this sludge pit. All the impurities from the oil have been concentrated into the sludge that's in that pit. The pits about 100 ft by 100 around 7 ft deep or around 3000 cubic yards of sludge. High concentrations of heavy metals as well as PCBs.

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The material has leaked into the groundwater, contaminated this official aquifer and appears to be contaminating. As far as this official, RQ figured out, I mean that you're talking about below about 15 ft below ground top 15 ft. I mean, it would be the sufficient official. Aquifer is extremely contaminated, right?

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You Did you say there's a plume that's going down there? Definite polluting? The groundwater direction is to the in Southwest, and it covers about three acres of grossly contaminated groundwater. The groundwater is actually stained black from the material. It's leached from the pit beyond what we call the black and foamy contaminated ground water.

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The water is clear or an amber color, but is still contaminated with organic material and metals below the sufficient lock for them to Florida. And there's right there's a clay layer or a confining layer between the two aquifers that varies in thickness between 20 and 65 ft.

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Um, it appears that there may be a break in that confining layer preventing contamination to go through. There has been a break where material appears to be getting down to the Floridian aquifer we've seen in a couple of wells in the area. Um, some low level but significant amounts of organic material, organic contaminants.

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What you think is coming from here. Probably the state of Florida has been working with the P A. To eliminate the problem. Fred Stroud explained how the sludge pit containing 3000 cubic yards of contaminated waste was sealed off. We went ahead and authorized an immediate removal.

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Uh, signed our delivery order back in September 85. And we decided since we didn't know that much about the bottom part of the pit, we didn't know how much we'd stir up the PCBs and the other organic. So we decided to drive this sheet piling around it.

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And it serves two purposes one to stop the outward migration of the pollutants. And the others will use this as a large mixing area. This stuff will have to be mixed up before we can incinerate it. Yeah, uh, we just had that test pilot in here this week earlier.

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Well, do you think that what you've got driven now will stop any further leaching into or not? Is it down? It just minimizes that we don't have the answer. Since we really don't know, we drove it till we hit the clay and then we stopped. You put in there.

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You're in effect. You've driven it through the surface aquifer, right? Like I said, he goes down about 15 ft and hit that play. Once the pit was surrounded by a containment wall. The next step was to get rid of the sludge. For the first time ever, a new infrared burner came into play.

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Well, what they do, they have to have pretty much of a solid material. We'd mix it up with lime and get it where we could feed it into this. But they call it infrared process. They have a primary unit that heats it up to about 1500 degrees and drives off the volatiles that that will have the PCBs in and the other organics.

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It then goes into a secondary chamber where the temperature is raised to 2200 degrees, and that gives you the total destruction of all the organics and as we end up with is a cloud of steam carbon dioxide, oxygen, a little water and out of the primary thermal.

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You described that or yes, it's scrubbed when it goes out, and that's part of the thing. We the process we did here. We did some continuous air monitoring during the trial burn and taking a lot of analytical data to assure that this is a safe and how efficient process.

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How did the trial burn go As far as instantaneous readings? It looks real good, but it takes two or three weeks to get some of the organic data back. This $3 million mobile unit was rolled onto the site in November. It burns 85 to 100 tons of sludge each day.

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And because it does the job with infrared heat of 2200 degrees, there's no smokestack belching pollution into the air After the burner does its job, the harmless ash is mixed with the soil. I'm told you could even build a house over the site when they finish, and the mobile unit can be hauled to another waste dump and start its work all over again.

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There's no question Florida and the EPA or doing pioneer work, and the money invested in this project will mean a better and safer life for all of us. We'll be back in a moment when you lend a helping hand, you give yourself away, becoming something so much more than could ever say.

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This is John Denver asking you to make your united way pledge now because thanks to you, it works for all of us. The United Way. Won't you give today the way? Bring happiness again. Mhm crack cocaine hidden Florida and it really hit hard last spring. I've never seen any drug that could have such a devastating impact, and, frankly, it scared me to death.

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Since that time I've been working to lessen this whole on our young people. We put together a slide show to go into all of the school systems in Florida during the first month of school last fall. That presentation was designed mainly to alert parent teacher organizations to crack cocaine.

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Now, in an effort to get the attention of our young people, we put together a video on crack cocaine, which is patterned after some of the music videos young people love to watch on television. This video is meant to be shown to every Florida student in junior high and senior high school.

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If your son or daughter hasn't seen it, please contact me, and we'll make sure they get the chance. We're going to take a look at that video right now. Once you've seen it, I know you'll join me in the effort to educate Florida's youth about crack cocaine.

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Mhm me. Run right. The war, The face you show me scares me. So I thought that, yeah, I could call your blood. But now the landlocked clear enough. Mhm. Yeah. Knife. Not pretty, Even though mm. I try so hard to make it so I thought, Yeah, cold distress.

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How did I have? Mhm. Yeah. Now I'm stuck. It was yourself. Yeah. Do that. Get away. Yeah. Said you traveled in white. You stole my were with Yeah, Yeah. Tell me with confidence by Yeah, you tricked me with Sure there's now by yeah yourself and live without you because you're so far.

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Yeah. I can feel I can't escape the Centene ears. No. All right. There's a guns to protect. And here comes that same that time. Never Mm, yeah. Today. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Mm. Crack cocaine. The most dangerous drug in the United States. Today. I'm Senator Lawton Child's, and I'm not here to preach to you, but I want to introduce you to some folks your age that have been involved with a crack and are lucky enough to have lived to tell about it.

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We travel to state this year talking to young people so that you can hear their experiences firsthand. And the first thing I wondered was, Why did they try crack to fit in, kind of to have your little clique? And either you use drugs or you don't?

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I just went with the crowd that I was hanging out with and after, um, the powder coke was out that everybody was into buying the crack. First time I tried it, I was hooked on. I'll never forget that feeling for the rest of my life started.

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I just want to have fun, you know? Then all the fun was gone. It wasn't even. It wasn't even good times anymore. Really? Because I know I never touch that stuff again because it got me here. And I don't like I said. I never had about any kind of record till I got on cocaine.

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And when I got on it, yeah, when all down here most of the young people we spoke with had a story of rapid personal decline. Once they've taken that first hit, most tell a story of severe weight loss, drastic personality change and big trouble with the law as a direct result of crack usage.

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I was doing really good in school and and I don't know, just one thing led to the other. And you know, the next thing I knew I was doing cocaine, and that's the first time I smoked cocaine. And it was it was really because I wanted, I guess, a new thrill because I mean, I I done cocaine and everything and it was like, Well, here's something new, you know, this is something different, you know?

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And it was said, It's so different. It's so much better and everything. And you know, I wanted to try it, and when I tried the first time I tried it, I was hooked on it. I'll never forget that feeling for the rest of my life, and you know, it's just something that you'll never forget because, I don't know.

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Just the feeling I get this was the high that Yeah. I mean, I just run the first time I did it, just like from my head to my toes. I just went, I don't know. I just I started doing a lot of base rock with my friends and things like that, and I got to the point where, you know, I didn't have any money and everything, and I didn't have my job.

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So I was stealing checks from my mother and I was forging checks, and I ended up having about 22 counts of forgery against me. There was times where I've done so much cocaine that I thought it was really close to death. But, I mean, that's the worst part of it is coming down because you you keep wanting so much, you know, you always want more and more.

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And then when you come down, it's like could you ever get a high? That was like the first one that you I don't think so. Mm, I think the first time I'll never forget that. It's just the first time you never forget and right when you do it right.

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When I did, I was hooked on it, and I started started doing pot at first just during the week. And then it came to an everyday basis where I was doing it all day, every day, just like going to school. And I get high before school after school during lunch at school any time I could.

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That's when I started looking for another way, because pot just wasn't covering all the hurt that I had. And I started turning and looking for other friends. And the friends that I found were people that were freebasing cocaine. I remember the first night I did it.

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I was There was a mirror right in front of me and a free based cocaine, and there was a mirror there and I looked into the mirror and I felt this. I don't know. It's a good film, but it's it's the worst. When I came down and I remember looking at myself and telling myself, Hey, this is the best.

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This is what I need to do, and it was like giving me this false sense of power like I'm doing cocaine. I'm doing something that nobody else is doing. You know, none of the other kids does cocaine. I'm doing cocaine. I can I can be the top on the school.

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I can show all the other drug is that I'm number one. What did the crack due to your body? I mean, what physically I mean, what? Well, I was about, I don't know. I was about £185 football player and and it just took me down to about 100 and 4100 and £45.

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I lost over 30 40 like, close to £50. Almost. Could you function as an athlete then? Or I was I mean, none of my clothes fit. I couldn't do anything. I I was in track. That's another thing. I was in tracks, and, uh, I had a chance to be, you know, one of the state champs in track.

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And one day, I just because of the cocaine, I had a real bad attitude and and in class and the teacher, she kicked me out of the class and told me to go to the office. And cocaine was just telling me Go, you know, leave school, just go and I knew how to track me that day.

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I knew it and I left anyway, and I just It's like Right then I knew my hopes and my dreams were gone. I blew up everything and just a split second decision. My whole life was down the drain and I wasted. I wasted all I've gained.

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I mean, practicing every day ever since, like the seventh grade going there, lifting weights and running and everything. And I blew it away just in a split second decision because of some drug and stole my life and stole everything. I was the junior class president. I was involved in a peer counseling class, had been a varsity wrestler ever, Ever since I was a freshman and I started doing cocaine when I was about 15 or 16, I did powder cocaine for about a year, and I was into free base really heavy for about six months.

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I thought that, you know, since I was doing drugs and since I could be high and be in front of teachers and, you know, say speeches to the class and everything, I thought it was okay because nobody knew, You know, I could run these class meetings and I'd be so high a lot of times I forget what I just said, and I figured it was okay because everybody, you know, nobody really realized it.

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And if they did, nobody said anything. It stayed the same for a while to where I could just I could handle, you know, you know, doing cocaine and kind of keeping an undercover and doing the dealing. And then once I started getting, like, really into debt and started my problems started getting worse.

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I started realizing that I needed more to get high. I started realizing that I wasn't staying high as long as I used to. I started. I started doing cocaine till five o'clock in the morning. I'd be doing cocaine. You know, I just never stopped. And after a while, you know, it started to where I was carrying a gun.

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And I really, really got to like that excitement of having having that power, you know, being like like this quote big dealer. I got arrested down in West Palm Beach with the gun, and it was it was an automatic weapon. You know, I got charged with that, and I think at the time, it's pretty much I wasn't thinking about anything because early on in the night I got ripped off.

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I didn't I didn't have any money. I didn't have anything to buy the drugs with. And I had set up a deal with this with this with this guy that was a known dealer. And I told him to meet me and have the drugs, and I remember getting out of my car and just walking towards him, remember?

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I didn't have any money, you know, my whole my whole thought was just I was I was gonna shoot this guy if I had to. You know, if if it comes to that, I'll go ahead and do it as long as I get my cocaine. At the time I was on cocaine, remember it?

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It was really twisted, but my whole thought pattern was that all I wanted the guy to do is get the drugs in his hands. I kept saying, you know, let me see him, you know, let me have, you know, let me see where they are. Because all I wanted to do was you know, if I had to shoot the guy didn't want to have to go through his jacket every time I'd get in trouble Or like when I got arrested.

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The next day I went out and did drugs, so I never had a chance to sit down and think about My God. What am I doing to myself? The effects of crack cocaine being that it is smoked rather than snorting are somewhat different because it goes into two important organs in your body prior to getting to the brain, and by smoking it, it goes directly into your lungs.

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The fact that crack or cocaine is a local anesthetic as well as a stimulant, compounds the problems of this drug. For example, you get Novocaine, which is a local anesthetic that the dentist uses is very similar to cocaine. Now, when it goes into your lungs, it does the same type of thing.

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It numbs your lungs once it goes into your lungs. It goes directly to your heart after that and again has a numbing effect on your heart, and it finally reaches the brain. Not only does it have the local anesthetic effect, but it also stimulates the release of what's a substance called adrenaline, which is a chemical in your body that helps you to be more stimulated when you get scared.

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You generally release adrenaline so that you can run faster or fight harder if you're in trouble. So again we get all this release of adrenaline in your body. And because it's released so rapidly when it gets to your heart, it could tend to make your heart do one of two things.

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One is that because there's so much adrenaline around the heart area, it makes your heart go into what's called an arrhythmia. It's an irregular heart because your heart isn't used to having all this adrenaline right around it. So your heart just starts beating so much faster and irregularly, and eventually it could get to the point where your heart would actually stop because of that, and you would die and go into what's called a cardiac arrest.

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Another problem is that because not only does it increase the stimulation of adrenaline, but it also blocks adrenaline from going back into your nerves so that it can be reused now if you keep taking different crack doses for days or a couple of hours or whatever, you'll continue to deplete all the adrenaline from your nerves.

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And eventually you could get to the point where you just won't have any adrenaline left or enough adrenaline left to make your heart continue to beat. Finally, the drug gets to your brain and again because it's a local anesthetic and a potent stimulant. You get that euphoria from the stimulant effects of cocaine.

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But also you get to a point where it shuts off the med gallery system in your brain, which is actually responsible for telling your lungs to go ahead and breathe. So what happens is you shut this off and your lungs no longer breathe anymore, and you die of what's called a respiratory arrest.

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The ultimate danger with crack cocaine is obviously death. We must remember that drugs are used to save lives, not take lives. So if you have the choice of experimenting or not, please say no to crack cocaine. I've seen my friends die from Coke, and I've seen people friends of mine get shot and killed, and I've seen it all, and I always thought it would never happen to me.

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And here I am. It just takes you over and I would be doing a hit crying at the same time because I didn't want to do it. And it just it does things to your head, and it just it will leave you like this Eventually, you know, it'll bring you to your knees, and it's just no good.

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When I went into the hospital, I weighed £90 and I was John just, you know, I was real sick and I had gone into a coma and went blind for three days, and I lost, like, six months that I can't really piece together. I don't know what happened, but I remember waking up in the psychiatric hospital.

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I pray and pray and pray if I just get one more chance. It's a sad story. Crack is a killer. The people we've seen are the lucky ones. Many have died from crack. There's no treatment for crack overdose. Death comes in the form of heart failure.

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When the user overdoses, it's not a pretty sight to watch someone die from crack. The thing is, you never know when it's going to happen. In addition to facing the fiscal, financial and mental problems caused by crack addiction, users are going to be faced now with the new laws were introducing to make it even tougher.

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Should you get caught with crack cocaine? It will ruin your life if it doesn't kill you first. But I can't make that decision not to use crack for you. That's a choice that you have to make for yourself. Are you going to live the lie? Yeah.

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Mm hmm. I can feel I can't escape the That's our program for today. I hope you'll join me again. Next time for the Lawton Child's update. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. Uh huh. Oh, thank you. Mhm. Yeah. Mm.