USA - Noam Chomsky on the War on (Certain) Drugs

[Expat98]

When articles about the War on Drugs are posted on Drugs Forum, people will often reply with responses to the effect of, "Why doesn't the government realize the War on Drugs is not working?"

Well...there are those of us who believe that the policy-makers in the government realize very well that it's not working, but that they're using it as a screen to accomplish certain unstated objectives. To put it another way, the War on Drugs is working to accomplish its intended purposes, but those purposes are not what is publicly stated.

As Noam Chomsky said, "Internationally, 'the war on drugs' provides a cover for intervention. [i.e., U.S. intervention in foreign countries]. Domestically, it has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties."

If you're interested in this line of thought, there's no better place to start reading than with the writings of Chomsky. Some people love him, some people hate him, but even those who aren't his fans have to admit that he's one of the smartest people alive in the world today.

He's actually written quite a bit on this subject. Here's one brief interview from 2002. Original at http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20020208.htm

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On the War on Drugs

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Week Online
DRCNet, February 8, 2002

Week Online: 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.

WOL: 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.

WOL: 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.

WOL: 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.

WOL: 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.

Reputation Comments on this post:

	Nice find.
	Excellent read! Good post :-)
	Nice article
	Agreed. Policy-makers are not oblivious or stupid. They are well aware of what they are doing.

[Alfa]

Very interesting read!
Please add the RAND report to the file archive.

[enquirewithin]

Chomsky hasn't written very much specifically about the war on drugs, although his writing on Colombia, for example, is relevant.
He is an anarchist and does not support prohibition, although I don't think he has any interest in taking drugs at all.

[enquirewithin]

The Drug War Industrial Complex


Noam Chomsky interviewed by John Veit


High Times, April, 1998

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/199804--.htm


HT: You've defined the War on Drugs as an instrument of population control. How does it accomplish that?

CHOMSKY: Population control is actually a term I borrowed from the counterinsurgency literature of the Kennedy years. The main targets at the time were Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there was an awful lot of popular ferment. They recognized that the population was supporting popular forces that were calling for all kinds of social change that the United States simply could not tolerate. And you could control people in a number of ways. One way was just by terror and violence, napalm bombing and so on, but they also worked on developing other kinds of population-control measures to keep people subjugated, ranging from propaganda to concentration camps. Propaganda is much more effective when it is combined with terror.

You have the same problem domestically, where the public is constantly getting out of control. You have to carry out measures to insure that they remain passive and apathetic and obedient, and don't interfere with privilege or power. It's a major theme of modern democracy. As the mechanisms of democracy expand, like enfranchisement and growth, the need to control people by other means increases.

So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It's not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals. You have to "fight the everlasting battle for the minds of men," in their standard phraseology, to indoctrinate and regiment them in the way that armies regiment their bodies. Those are population control measures. This engineering or manufacture of consent is the essence of democracy, because you have to insure that ignorant and meddlesome outsiders -- meaning we, the people -- don't interfere with the work of the serious people who run public affairs in the interests of the privileged.

HT: How does the War on Drugs fit into this?

CHOMSKY: Well, one of the traditional and obvious ways of controlling people in every society, whether it's a military dictatorship or a democracy, is to frighten them. If people are frightened, they'll be willing cede authority to their superiors who will protect them: "OK, I'll let you run my life in order to protect me," that sort of reasoning.

So the fear of drugs and the fear of crime is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points out that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the spectrum for industrialized societies. On the other hand, fear of crime is far beyond other societies, and mostly stimulated by various propaganda. The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called "dangerous classes," those superfluous people who don't really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth. They have to be somehow taken care of.

HT: In some other countries you just hang the rabble.

CHOMSKY: Yes, but in the U.S. you don't kill them, you put them in jail. The economic policies of the 1980's sharply increased inequality, concentrating such economic growth as there was, which was not enormous, in very few hands. The top few percent of the population got extremely wealthy as profits went through the roof, and meanwhile median-income wages were stagnating or declining sharply since the '70's. You're getting a large mass of people who are insecure, suffering from difficulty to misery, or something in between. A lot of them are basically going to be arrested, because you have to control them.

HT: It's absolutely true, but how do you prove it?

CHOMSKY: Just by looking at the trend lines for marijuana. Marijuana use was peaking in the late '70's, but there was not much criminalization. You didn't go to jail for having marijuana then because the people using it were nice folks like us, the children of the rich. You don't throw them into jail any more than you throw corporate executives into jail -- even though corporate crime is more costly and dangerous than street crime. But then in the '80's the use of various "unhealthy" substances started to decline among more educated sectors: marijuana and tobacco smoking, alcohol, red meat, coffee, this whole category of stuff. On the other hand, usage remained steady among poorer sectors of the population. In the United States, poor and black correlation -- they're not identical, but there's a correlation -- and in poor, black and hispanic sectors of the population the use of such substances remained steady.

So take a look at those trends. When you call for a War on Drugs, you know exactly who you're going to pick up: poor black people. You're not going to pick up rich white people: you don't go after them anyway. In the upper-middle class suburb where I live, if somebody goes home and sniffs cocaine, police don't break into their house.

So there are many factors making the Drug War a war against the poor, largely poor people of color. And those are the people they have to get rid of. During the period these economic policies were being instituted, the incarceration rate was shooting up, but crime wasn't, it was steady or declining. But imprisonment went way up. By the late '80's, in terms of imprisoning our population, we were way ahead of the rest of the world, way ahead of any other industrial society.

HT: Who benefits from incarcerating young black males?

CHOMSKY: A lot of people. Poor people are basically superfluous for wealth production, and therefore the wealthy want to get rid of them. The rich also frighten everyone else, because if you're afraid of these people, then you submit to state authority. But beyond that, it's a state industry. Since the 1930's, every businessman has understood that a private capitalist economy must have massive state subsidies; the only question is what form that state subsidy will take? In the United States the main form has been through the military system. The most dynamic aspects of the economy -- computers, the Internet, the aeronautical industry, pharmaceuticals -- have fed off the military system. But the crime-control industry, as it's called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing industry in America.

And it's state industry, publicly funded. It's the construction industry, the real estate industry, and also high tech firms. It's gotten to a sufficient scale that high-technology and military contractors are looking to it as a market for techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so you can monitor what people do in their private activities with complicated electronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and urinalyses and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this superfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails, and just monitored to track when they do something wrong, say the wrong thing, go the wrong direction.

HT: House arrest for the masses.

CHOMSKY: It's enough of an industry so that the major defense-industry firms are interested; you can read about it in The Wall Street Journal. The big law firms and investment houses are interested: Merrill Lynch is floating big loans for prison construction. If you take the whole system, it's probably approaching the scale of the Pentagon.

Also, this is a terrific work force. We hear fuss about prison labor in China, but prison labor is standard here. It's very cheap, it doesn't organize, the workers don't ask for rights, you don't have to worry about health benefits because the public is paying for everything. It's what's called a 'flexible' workforce, the kind of thing economists like: you have the workers when you want them, and you throw them out when you don't want them.
And what's more it's an old American tradition. There was a big industrial revolution in parts of the South in the early part of this century, in northern Georgia and Kentucky and Alabama and it was based mostly around prison labor. The slaves had been technically freed, but after a few years, they were basically slaves again. One way of controlling them was to throw them in jail, where they became a controlled labor force. That's the core of the modern industrial revolution in the South, which continued in Georgia to the 1920's and to the Second World War in places like Mississippi.

Now it's being revived. In Oregon and California there's a fairly substantial textile industry in the prisons, with exports to Asia. At the very time people were complaining about prison labor in China, California and Oregon are exporting prison-made textiles to China. They even have a line called "Prison Blues."

And it goes all the way up to advanced technology like data processing. In the state of Washington, Boeing workers are protesting the exports of jobs to China, but they're probably unaware that their jobs are being exported to nearby prisons, where machinists are doing work for Boeing under circumstances that the management is delighted over, for obvious reasons.
HT: And most of these prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders.

CHOMSKY: The enormous rate of growth of the prison population has been mostly drug related. The last figures I saw showed that over half the federal prison population, and maybe a quarter in state prisons, are drug offenders. In New York State, for example, a twenty-dollar street sale or possession of an ounce of cocaine will get you the same sentence as arson with intent to murder. The three-strikes legislation is going to blow it right through the sky. The third arrest can be for some minor drug offense, and you'll go to jail forever.

HT: The Drug Czar's office estimates that Americans spend $57 billion annually on illegal drugs. What effect does this have on the global economy?

CHOMSKY: Well, the United Nations tries to monitor the international drug trade, and their estimates are on the order of $400 to $500 billion -- half a trillion dollars a year -- in trade alone, which makes it higher than oil, something like 10 percent of the world trade. Where this money comes and goes to is mostly unknown, but general estimates are that maybe 60 percent of it passes through US banks. After that, a lot goes to offshore tax havens. It's so obscure that nobody monitors it, and nobody wants to. But the Commerce Department every year publishes figures on foreign direct investment -- where US investment is going -- and through the '90s the big excitement has been the "new emerging markets" like Latin America. And it turns out that a quarter of US foreign direct investment is going to Bermuda, another 15 percent to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, another 10 percent to Panama, and so on. Now, they're not building steel factories. The most benign interpretation is that it's just tax havens. And the less benign interpretation is that it's one way of passing illegal money into places where it will not be monitored. We really don't know, because it is not investigated. This is not the task of the Justice Department, which is to go after a black kid in the ghetto who has a joint in his pocket.
HT: What do you think of the US policy of offering trade and aid favors to countries who promulgate so-called antidrug initiatives?

CHOMSKY: Actually, US programs radically increase the use of drugs. Look at the big growth in cocaine production that has exploded in the Andes over the last few years, in Columbia and Peru and Bolivia. Why are Bolivian peasants, for instance producing coca? The neoliberal structural-adjustment policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which are run by the US, try to drive peasants into agro-export, producing not for local consumption but for sale abroad. They want to reduce social programs, like spending for health and education, cutting government deficits by increasing exports. And they cut back tariffs so that we can pour our highly subsidized food exports into their countries, which of course undercuts peasant production. Put all that together and what do you get? You get a huge increase in Bolivian coca production, as their only comparative advantage.

The same is true in Columbia, where US "food for peace" aid, as it is called, was used to destroy wheat production by essentially giving food -- at what amounts to US taxpayer expense -- through US agro-exporters to undercut wheat production there, which later cut coffee production and their ability to set prices in any reasonably fashion.

And the end result is they turn to something else, and one of the things they turn to is coca production. In fact, if you look at the total effect of US policies, it has been to increase drugs.

HT: Well, anybody who looks into the history of American drug policies in this century...

CHOMSKY: I'm putting aside another factor altogether, namely clandestine warfare. If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US White House, it's secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to reinstate the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the mafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was tradeoff: Essentially they allowed them to reinstitute the heroin-production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship; they didn't want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the US reconstituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from.

That was the main heroin center for many years. Then the US terrorist activities shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out terrorist activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also need secret money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well if you need to hire thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren't many options. One of them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around Burma, Laos and Thailand became a big drug-producing area with the help of the United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations.
In Central America, it was partly exposed in the Contra hearings, though it was mostly suppressed. But there's no question that the Reagan administration's terrorist operations in Central America were closely connected with drug trafficking.

Afghanistan became one of the biggest centers of drug trafficking in the world in the 1980s, because that was the payoff for the forces to which the US was contributing millions of dollars: the same extreme Islamic fundamentalists who are now tearing the country to shreds.
It's been true throughout the world. It's not that the US is trying to increase the use of drugs, it's just the natural thing to do. If you were in a position where you had to hire thugs and gangsters to kill peasants and break strikes, and you had to do it with untraceable money, what would come to your mind?

HT: Where do you stand on drug legalization?

CHOMSKY: Nobody knows what the effect would be. Anyone who tells you they know is just stupid or lying, because nobody knows. These are things that have to be tried, you have to experiment to see what the effects are.
Most soft drugs are already legal, mainly alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco is by far the biggest killer among all the psychoactives. Alcohol deaths are a little hard to estimate, because an awful lot of violent deaths are associated with alcohol. Way down below come "hard" drugs, a tiny fraction of the deaths from alcohol and tobacco, maybe ten or twenty thousand deaths per year. The fastest growing hard drugs are APS, amphetamine-type substances, produced mostly in the US.
As far as the rest of the drugs are concerned, marijuana is not known to be very harmful. I mean, it's generally assumed it's not good for you, but coffee isn't good for you, tea isn't good for you, chocolate cake isn't good for you either. It would be crazy to criminalize coffee, even though it's harmful.

The United States is one of very few countries where this is considered a moral issue. In most countries it's considered a medical issue. In most countries you don't have politicians getting up screaming about how tough they're going to be on drugs. So the first thing we've got to do is move out of the phase of population control, and into the sphere of social issues. The Rand Corporation estimates that if you compare the effect of criminal programs versus educational programs at reducing drug use, educational programs are way ahead by about a factor of seven.

HT: But alarmist drug-propaganda programs like DARE and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America's TV ads have been found to increase experimentation among teenagers.

CHOMSKY: The question is, what kind of education are you doing? Educational programs aren't the only category. Education also has to do with the social circumstances in which drugs are used. The answer to that is not throwing people in jail. The answer is to try and figure what's going on in their lives, their family, do they need medical care and so on? This very striking decline in substance abuse among educated sectors, as I said, goes across the spectrum -- red meat, coffee, tobacco, everything. That's education. It wasn't that there was an educational program that said to stop drinking coffee, it's just that attitudes toward oneself and towards health, how we live and so on, changed among the more educated sectors of the population, and these things went down. And none of it had to do with criminalization. It just had to do with a rise in the cultural and educational level, which led to more care for oneself.

Reputation Comments on this post:

Nice to see some Chomsky, thanks for adding that

[enquirewithin]

The Drug War in Colombia

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1995----.htm



....Let's turn finally to the drug war, the pretext for all of this. Colombia became a major producer of cocaine in the late 1970s. Why? In fact, why do peasants in Latin America even bother to produce coca, apart from their own use, as they've done forever? The reasons are rooted in the social and economic policies imposed on the Third World. The rules dictate that they have to stop producing for their own needs, and turn export. And unlike the rich Western countries, they have to open their markets, specifically, to subsidized U.S. agricultural exports, which undermine domestic production. The local farmers are to become "rational producers" in accord with the precepts of modern economics, producing crops for export. And being rational, as they are, they turn to the crops that make the most money. Accordingly, coca production has just shot out of sight, helping to undergird "economic miracles." Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard, who has more recently been plying his trade in Poland and Russia, won his fame by setting things in order in Bolivia in 1985. Bolivia was in real trouble, but he instructed them in the proper free-market theory, and pretty soon all was fine, with good macro-economic statistics, and so on. There were also some side effects. One was that the "miracle" was relying very heavily on coca exports. Much the same is true in Peru.


Similar reasons lie behind Colombia's turn towards narcotrafficking. There were others as well. In 1988, the U.S. compelled coffee producers to break an agreement that had kept prices at some reasonable level. The price of coffee, Colombia's main export crop, fell 40%. When coffee prices collapse and half the children are already starving, people are likely to turn to where there are opportunities, thanks to the North American drug market. One major impetus for the huge increase in the flow of drugs is the free-market policies imposed on the Third World.


A second reason, somewhat narrower, has to do with U.S. drug policies. Their design has driven people from relatively harmless marijuana to hard drugs like cocaine, in ever more lethal form. Colombia shifted from producing marijuana to far more profitable and easily transportable cocaine.


Another question that arises about the drug traffic has to do with its scale. A recent study by the OECD - the organization of the rich countries - estimates profits from the international drug traffic at almost half a trillion dollars a year, of which over half circulates through the U.S. financial system. That suggests a way to deal with the drug problem: look at the place that is handling more than half the profits, U.S. financial institutions. What about Colombia? According to the OECD report, it receives about six billion dollars, which is 2 to 3% of what remains in the United States. "The big business is therefore in that country," the United States. I'm quoting from a review of the study by a member of the Andean Commission of Jurists and the Latin American Association of Human Rights, published by the leading newspaper in Mexico, Excelsior, which published the report of the OECD study that tells us where the drug business is really going on.


What about the banks that are handling over 56% of the immense profits generated by narcotrafficking, according to the OECD? That's presumably illegal. In 1979 the government launched Operation Greenback, targeting banks that were handling drug money, which is apparently not too difficult to monitor. Huge sums of money were suddenly coming into Miami banks just as the cocaine racket was picking up steam, so the Justice Department went into action. But not for long. The operation was called off in 1982 by the drug czar of the Reagan Administration, vice-President George Bush. We therefore lack any further information about the estimated $260 billion a year of drug money that flows through the U.S. financial system.
Other places are easier to investigate, like Panama. Recall that right after the drug war was announced again with huge fanfare by then-President Bush, the U.S. invaded Panama to protect us from the evil Hispanic narcotraffickers led by the arch-fiend Noriega. The invasion placed back in power the European elite of bankers and narcotraffickers. The new Attorney General and Treasury Minister, for example, had been directors of the First Inter-Americas Bank, which had been closed by Noriega because it was implicated in drug trafficking. President Endara, installed by the U.S. Army, along with his law firm, were also involved in the racket, it was reported. Since the invasion, Panama has grown as a narcotrafficking center, with perhaps twice as many narcotics flowing through as before.


One part of the drug racket is banking; another is the chemical industry. In 1989, in the six months preceding the announcement of the drug war the Colombian police found 1.5 million gallons of chemicals used for cocaine production, many of them with U.S. corporate logos on them. The CIA had reported that U.S. exports of such chemicals to Latin America far exceed any legal uses, while the Congressional Research Service concluded that more than 90% of the chemicals used for drug production come from the United States. So that suggests another way to deal with the narcotrafficking problem, if the war against drugs is a war against drugs, not something else.


Any discussion of substance abuse is seriously distorted if it avoids the leading killer, tobacco. The former head of the U.S. Office of Drug Abuse Policy, Dr. Peter Bourne, pointed out that the number of Colombians who die every year from substances produced in the United States far exceeds the number of North Americans who die from cocaine. The same is true here. Furthermore, unlike tobacco, cocaine is not subsidized by the U.S. government, except for the support we provide to the military who are involved in the racket, and isn't publicly advertised. There's no cocaine counterpart to the Marlboro Man. And Colombia does not strong-arm the U.S. into permitting aggressive advertising and distribution of cocaine, imitating Washington's behavior in Asia in support of its favored lethal substance. That is a major story in itself, which adds needed perspective to the narcotrafficking discussion, but I won't go into it here.....

________________________________


http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200412--.htm

from the introduction to Doug Stokes America's Other War: Terrorizing Colombia, Zed, December 2004


As Scott observes, reviewing many cases of U.S. military intervention and subversion, with each “there has been a dramatic boost to international drug-trafficking, including a rise in U.S. drug consumption.” At the same time, the lives of Colombian campesinos, indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians are destroyed with the solemn claim that it is imperative to carry out these crimes to prevent drug production and use. In extenuation, it could be noted that fostering drug production is hardly a US innovation: the British empire relied crucially on the most extraordinary narcotrafficking enterprise in world history, with horrifying effects in China and in India, much of which was conquered in an effort to gain a monopoly on opium production.

The official pretexts are confronted with massive counterevidence, and supported by no confirming evidence (apart from the declarations of leaders, which invariably speak of benign intent and are therefore uninformative, whatever their source). Suppose, nevertheless, that we accept official doctrine, and assume that the goal of the US-run CI operations in Colombia, including the chemical warfare that is ruining the peasant society, is to eradicate drugs. And let’s also, for the sake of argument, put aside the fact that US subversion and aggression continue to lead to increase of production and use of drugs. On these charitable assumptions, US operations in Colombia are truly scandalous. That seems transparent. To bring the point out more clearly, consider the fact, not in dispute, that deaths from tobacco vastly exceed those from all hard drugs combined. Furthermore, hard drugs harm the user, while tobacco harms others -- not as much, to be sure, as alcohol, which is heavily implicated in killing of others (automobile accidents, alcohol-induced violence, etc.), but significantly. Deaths from “passive smoking” probably exceed those from all hard drugs combined, and “soft drugs” that are severely criminalized, like Marijuana, while doubtless harmful (like coffee, red meat, etc.), are not known to have significant lethal effects. Furthermore, while the Colombian cartels are not permitted to place billboards in Times Square New York, or run ads on TV, to induce children and other vulnerable sectors of the population to use cocaine and heroin, there are no such barriers against advertising for the far more lethal tobacco-based products, and in fact countries have been threatened with serious trade sanctions if they violate the sacred principles of “free trade” by attempting to regulate such practices. An elementary conclusion follows at once: if the U.S. is entitled to carry out chemical warfare targeting poor peasants in Colombia, then Colombia, and China, and many others are surely entitled to carry out far more extensive chemical warfare programs targeting agribusiness production in North Carolina and Kentucky. Comment should be unnecessary.

[Ori]

Very interesting.
Although Noam Chomsky is only slightly concerned with the War on Drugs in his book Failed States, I found some infomation on this subject:

Chomsky p107. The "war on drugs" also had an important domestic component: much like the "war on crime," it served to frigthen the domestic population into obedience as domestic policies were being implemented to benefit extreme wealth at the expense of the large majority.

Is anyone aware of which writings Chomsky focuses on the issues of Drugs and Crime to a greater degree?

[Expat98]

Originally Posted by Ori

Is anyone aware of which writings Chomsky focuses on the issues of Drugs and Crime to a greater degree?

Well, there is this audiobook:

An American Addiction: Drugs, Guerillas, and Counterinsurgency in Us Intervention in Colombia

Also try doing various keyword searches on chomsky.info. There is a lot of info there.

[Expat98]

Originally Posted by Alfa

Very interesting read!
Please add the RAND report to the file archive.

Ok, I've got it ready, but I don't see a link for uploading it. Can someone tell me how to do it? Or do I even have access to add things to the file archive as a silver member?

[hh339]

He has written alot of books, they are all very interesting. I recommend them all.

[Heretic.Ape.]

Originally Posted by Expat98

Ok, I've got it ready, but I don't see a link for uploading it. Can someone tell me how to do it? Or do I even have access to add things to the file archive as a silver member?

in quicklinks simply go to add file under the archive part of the drop down menu. It will pretty much take you through the process from there

[enquirewithin]

Originally Posted by hh339

He has written alot of books, they are all very interesting. I recommend them all.

I agree. Chomsky is rightly known as one of the world's leading intellectuals (he was top of one list). He speaks the truth to power and many hate him for it. He is branded as a 'self-hating Jew' by the Zionists and an 'apologist for Pol Pot' (100% untrue) amongst other things by the right.

I don't think he has written any books exclusively about the way on drugs, but he often touches upon it.

[enquirewithin]

This is from Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (pp 33-34)(popularized by Hugo Chavez at the UN):

As the tragedies of East Timor and Kosovo unfolded in 1999, Turkey relinquished to Colombia its place as leading recipient of US arms. The reason is not hard to discern: Turkish state terror was by then a success, Colombia's was not. Throughout the 1990s and the new era of enlightenment, Colombia had by far the worst human rights record in the Western Hemisphere and was at the same time by far the hemisphere's leading recipient of US arms and military training, a correlation that is well-established and would be of no slight concern if it were known outside of scholarship and dissident circles.

Atrocities in Colombia include displacement of the population through chemical warfare (called "fumigation") under the guise of a drug war that is hard to take seriously. One of the leading academic authorities notes that "a provocative case can be made that US drug policy contributes effectively to the control of an ethnically distinct and economically deprived underclass at home and serves US economic and security interests abroad."18 Many criminologists and observers of the
international scene regard that as a considerable understatement. The analysis helps explain why the US-sponsored actions are carried out with ever greater enthusiasm and zeal even as they increasingly fail to achieve the alleged goal of dealing with domestic drug use, and why measures that are known to be far more effective, specifically prevention and treatment, are scarcely funded.

The governors of Colombia's targeted southern provinces, along with peasants and human rights activists, have proposed plans relying on manual eradication of coca and poppies and support for alternative crops, but to little effect. Meanwhile the land is poisoned by fumigation, children die, and the uprooted and scattered victims suffer from sickness and injury.

Peasant agriculture is based on a rich tradition of knowledge and experience gained over many centuries, commonly passed on from mother to daughter. Though a remarkable human achievement, it is very fragile and can be destroyed forever in a single generation. It is being destroyed, and along with it, some of the richest biodiversity in the world.

Campesinos, indigenous people, and Afro-Colombians are now joining the millions in rotting slums and camps. And with the people gone, multinationals can strip the mountains for coal, extract oil and other resources, and probably convert what is left of the land to ranching by the rich or agroexport in an environment shorn of its treasures and variety. Informed analysts and observers describe Washington's fumigation programs as another stage in the historical process of driving poor peasants from the land for the benefit of foreign investors and Colombian elites.

Like many other centers of turmoil and state terror, Colombia is part of an important oil-producing region, and a significant producer itself: much the same is true of Chechnya, Western China, the Central Asian dictatorships, and other places where state violence was intensified after 9-11 on the
pretext of a "war on terror," and with the expectation that there would be a nod from Washington.

Human rights organizations and the State Department agree that the overwhelming majority of atrocities in Colombia can be attributed to the military and paramilitaries, the "sixth division" of the five-division Colombian army, because of their close links, according to Human Rights Watch. The
proportion of atrocities attributed to the paramilitaries has been increasing as crimes are privatized in accord with neoliberal practice, a familiar development elsewhere as well: Serbia used private militias in the former Yugoslavia, as did Indonesia in East Timor, and Turkey in the southeast, and many other places. There is a corresponding privatization of international atrocities. Fumigation is being taken over by "private" companies consisting of US military officers under contract to the
Pentagon, also a pattern that is worldwide, and useful for evading accountability. Even if one were to give credence to the US arguments in favor of the drug war, the underlying assumptions are scandalous. Imagine the reaction to a proposal that Colombia or China should undertake fumigation programs in North Carolina to destroy government-subsidized crops used for more lethal products —which, furthermore, they not only must import at risk of trade sanctions, but for which they must allow advertising aimed at vulnerable populations.