Chomsky on Drugs and Terror

Alternet has a quick interview with Noam Chomsky called Noam Chomsky on the Drug-Terror Link. Several questions are asked about the U.S. government’s latest attempts to link drugs with terror. He reminds us that, in fact, the connection is there, but mostly that the U.S. has been a huge proponent of drug operations throughout the world since World War II.

<q>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.</q>

He goes on to discuss the U.S. involvement in Colombia’s civil war, which is done on the pretext of stopping the flow of drugs. The repression of the Colombian government over its people is supported, once again, by an enormous influx of U.S. weapons and funds:

<q>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.</q>

As far as the legitimacy of the U.S. attacking Colombia in order to staunch the flow of drugs (which has already been done a few times), he posits this thought experiment:

<q>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.</q>

What about the effectiveness of the drug war in the first place? Don’t policymakers know it won’t work? And if they do, then why do they do it?

<q>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. … 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. … 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.</q>

Sounds like Chomsky isn’t too surprised by Bush’s new gulags.

Alternet has an earlier article about Colombia called Bush to Fund Colombia War Effort, which discusses in more detail the future of U.S. involvement in Colombia.