Noam Chomsky on the Drug-Terror Link
By Philip Smith, DRCNet
February 14, 2002MIT professor Noam Chomsky has long been one of the nation's most
implacable critics of US foreign policy and domestic inequity, as well as its
highly-concentrated mass media. Lauded by the New York Review of Books
as "America's leading radical intellectual," Chomsky has authored dozens of
books on US policy in the Middle East, Latin America, the former
Yugoslavia and East Timor, among others, as well as "Manufacturing
Consent," a scathing critique of propagandistic corporate media.
A proud anarchist – he defines anarchism as "a tendency in the history of
human thought and action which seeks to identify coercive, authoritarian,
and hierarchic structures of all kinds and to challenge their legitimacy, and if
they cannot justify their legitimacy, which is quite commonly the case, to
work to undermine them and expand the scope of freedom" – Chomsky is a
legendary American political dissident whose campus appearances regularly
bring out thousands of students. We spoke with the distinguished linguist
and essayist from his office at MIT.
Philip Smith: During Sunday's SuperBowl, the drug czar's office ran a
series of paid ads attempting to link drug use and the "war on terrorism." If
you use drugs, the ads said, you support terrorism. What is your take on
this?
Noam Chomsky: Terrorism is now being used and has been used pretty
much the same way communism was used. If you want to press some
agenda, you play the terrorism card. If you don't follow me on this, you're
supporting terrorism. That is absolutely infantile, especially when you
consider that much of the history of the drug trade trails right behind the
CIA and other US intervention programs. Going back to the end of the
second world war, you see – and this is not controversial, it is
well-documented – the US allying itself with the French Mafia, resulting in
the French Connection, which dominated the heroin trade through the
1960s. The same thing took place with opium in the Golden Triangle during
the Vietnam War, and again in Afghanistan during the war against the
Russians.
Smith: The cocaine trade is the primary given reason for US intervention in
Colombia's civil war. In your opinion, to what degree is the drug angle a
pretext? And a pretext for what?
Chomsky: Colombia has had the worst human rights record in the
hemisphere in the last decade while it has been the leading recipient of US
arms and training for the Western Hemisphere and now ranks behind only
Israel and Egypt worldwide. There exists a very close correlation that holds
over a long period of time between human rights violations and US military
aid and training. It's not that the US likes to torture people; it's that it
basically doesn't care. For the US government, human rights violations are a
secondary consequence. In Colombia, as elsewhere, human rights violations
tend to increase as the state tries to violently repress opposition to inequality,
oppression, corruption, and other state crimes for which there is no political
outlet. The state turns to terror – that's what's been happening in Colombia
for a long time, since before there was a Colombian drug trade.
Counterinsurgency has been going on there for 40 years; President Kennedy
sent a special forces mission to Colombia in the early 1960s. Their proposal
to the Colombian government was recently declassified, and it called for
"paramilitary terror" – those are their words – against what it called known
communist proponents. In Colombia, that meant labor leaders, priests,
human rights activists, and so on. Colombian military manuals in the 1960s
began to reflect this advice. In the last 15 years, as the US has become more
deeply involved, human rights violations are up considerably.
On a more serious point, suppose that the drug pretext were legitimate.
Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does
Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They
are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More
Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from
cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that.
Smith: Domestically, state, local, and federal governments have spent tens
of billions of dollars on the "war on drugs," yet illicit drugs remain as
available, as pure, and as cheap as ever. If this policy is not accomplishing
its stated goal, what is it accomplishing? Is there some sort of latent agenda
being served?
Chomsky: They have known all along that it won't work, they have good
evidence from their own research studies showing that if you want to deal
with substance abuse, criminalization is the worst method. The RAND
report did a cost-effectiveness analysis of various drug strategies and it
found that the most effective approach by far is prevention and treatment.
Police action was well below that, and below police action was interdiction,
and at the bottom in terms of cost-effectiveness were out-of-country
efforts, such as what the US is doing in Colombia. President Nixon, by
contrast, had a significant component for prevention and treatment that was
effective.
US domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and
policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance
abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and
the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are
associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of
certain substances is a technique of social control. The economic policies of
the last 20 years are a rich man's version of structural adjustment. You
create a superfluous population, which in the US context is largely poor,
black, and Hispanic, and a much wider population that is economically
dissatisfied. You read all the headlines about the great economy, but the
facts are quite different. For the vast majority, these neoliberal policies have
had a negative effect. With regard to wages, we have only now regained the
wage levels of 30 years ago. Incomes are maintained only by working
longer and harder, or with both adults in a family working. Even the rate of
growth in the economy has not been that high, and what growth there is has
been highly concentrated in certain sectors.
If most people are dissatisfied and others are useless, you want to get rid of
the useless and frighten the dissatisfied. The drug war does this. The US
incarceration rate has risen dramatically, largely because of victimless
crimes, such as drug offenses, and the sentences are extremely punitive.
The drug war not only gets rid of the superfluous population, it frightens
everybody else. Drugs play a role similar to communism or terrorism,
people huddle beneath the umbrella of authority for protection from the
menace. It is hard to believe that these consequences aren't understood.
They are there for anyone to see. Back when the current era of the drug
war began, Senator Moynihan paid attention to the social science, and he
said if we pass this law we are deciding to create a crime wave among
minorities.
For the educated sectors, all substance abuse was declining in the '90s,
whether we're talking about cocaine or cigarette smoking or eating red meat.
This was a period in which cultural and educational changes were taking
place that led the more educated sectors to reduce consumption of all sorts
of harmful substances. For the poorer sectors, on the other hand, substance
abuse remained relatively stable. Looking at these curves, we see that what
will happen, it is obvious you will be going after poor sectors. Some legal
historians have predicted that tobacco would be criminalized because it is
associated with poorer and less-educated people. If you go to McDonald's,
you see kids smoking cigarettes, but I haven't seen a graduate student who
smoked cigarettes for years. We are now beginning to see punitive
consequences related to smoking, and of course the industry has seen this
coming for years. Phillip Morris and the rest have begun to diversify and to
shift operations abroad.
Smith: Many ardent drug reformers are self-identified Libertarians. As an
anarchist – I assume it is fair to call you that – what is your take on
libertarianism?
Chomsky: The term libertarian as used in the US means something quite
different from what it meant historically and still means in the rest of the
world. Historically, the libertarian movement has been the anti-statist wing
of the socialist movement. Socialist anarchism was libertarian socialism. In
the US, which is a society much more dominated by business, the term has
a different meaning. It means eliminating or reducing state controls, mainly
controls over private tyrannies. Libertarians in the US don't say let's get rid
of corporations. It is a sort of ultra-rightism.
Having said that, frankly, I agree with them on a lot of things. On the drug
issue, they tend to oppose state involvement in the drug war, which they
correctly regard as a form of coercion and deprivation of liberty. You may
be surprised to know that some years ago, before there were any
independent left journals, I used to write mainly for the Cato Institute
journal.
Smith: What should be done about drug use and the drug trade?
Chomsky: I agree with RAND. It is a problem. Cocaine is not good for
you. If you want to deal with substance abuse, the approach should be
education, prevention, rehabilitation and so forth. That is what we have
successfully done with other substances. We did not have to outlaw
tobacco to see a reduction in use; that is the result of cultural and
educational changes.
One must always be cautious in recommending social policy because we
can't know what will happen, but we should be exploring steps toward
decriminalization. Let's undertake this seriously and see what happens. An
obvious place to begin is with marijuana. Decriminalization of marijuana
would be a very sensible move. And we need to begin shifting from
criminalization to prevention. Prevention and treatment are how we should
be addressing hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
Philip Smith edits The Week Online for DRCNet.org.
Mitayo Potosi
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