DOCUMENTATION: DIALOGUE WITH LAROUCHE
Drug Legalization:
Who Is Fooling Whom?
Following Presidential pre-candidate Lyndon LaRouche's Sept. 11, 2002 campaign webcast (published in EIR, Sept. 20), many listeners sent in e-mail questions and comments. The transcript of this interchange on the policy of drug legalization, was supplied by www.larouchein2004.com.
Dear Mr. LaRouche:
Yesterday I watched and listened with great interest to your 3 hr. 24 mins. Sept. 11, 2002 address.
It was extremely encouraging to hear somebody speaking out against the blind acceptance of official "truth."
Your analysis of the roots behind the present conquest and destruction of the Middle East was particularly enlightening.
I wish you success in your candidacy, and more urgently, success in influencing the current administration to desist from further conquest.
Now, being such an open-minded person as you are, I ask you to consider a different viewpoint on the "War on Drugs." I am in agreement with your published articles about the potential dangers to health posed by the abuse of narcotics. However, I ask you to consider the much greater dangers posed by the lunatic "War on Drugs," along with the possible "real" motivations behind such a "War."
I call to your attention, firstly, the suppression of cannabis and hemp, historically used for the efficient manufacture of a wide range of textiles, and offering medicinal (especially analgesic) properties which are bordering on the miraculous. Even if one is opposed to the recreational use of cannabis (which I am not), one should "follow the money" when questioning the motives behind the suppression and demonization of the substance, tetrahydrocannabinol (thc). Who gains from the criminalization of a natural wonder-drug? Answer: the colossal pharmaceutical industry, with its huge lobbying investments. This is a completely ruthless industry, hell-bent on increasing profits at the expense of public health. As President, I urge you to adopt a "public policy" approach to this industry, giving incentives to develop otherwise "loss-making" therapies such as a cure for AIDS (which would currently be disastrous for pharmaceutical companies selling horrific chronic symptomatic therapies). If cannabis were freely available, the pharmaceutical industry would lose billions of dollars, especially in the analgesic sector, and patients would suffer far less. If you cannot take all this in with one swallow, then please at least consider the absurdity of depriving cannabis (and its obvious and proven pain-control properties) to terminally ill patients who are in agony. Thank you.
Next, I ask you to consider the relative "merits" of alcohol (currently legal except in Islamic republics), and cannabis (currently criminalized everywhere except in a handful of tiny countries). Alcohol is a much more dangerous substance in terms of its toxicity, dehydrative effects, liver-damaging effects, consciousness-altering effects—including the huge danger of driving under its influence, and its propensity to cause addiction. Yet, alcohol is legal. The U.S.A. tried to ban alcohol in the 1920s with utterly disastrous consequences. Fact is, the market will provide anything, even if it is illegal. But by making something illegal, all you accomplish is to hand that market over to the exclusive control of criminals. So in the 1920s, organized crime flourished under this bonanza handed to them by Prohibition.
Why is cannabis perceived as "leading to harder drugs"? As a free thinker, Mr. LaRouche, you should be able to work that one out. Because the people selling cannabis are criminals, with an incentive to lead their customers to more addictive and expensive drugs.
Finally, I ask you to consider the current "War on Drugs" in the context of 1920s Prohibition against alcohol. What is really going on today?
1. The market for cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs is totally unregulated and exclusively in the hands of ruthless criminals.
2. The quality of product delivered to the population is thereby also totally unregulated.
3. The CIA is coordinating this trade, and Latin America is being bombed to hell as a deception to cover this up.
4. The CIA launders drug money and uses the proceeds to fund Special Access Projects ("kill power" as you rightly call it).
5. The U.S.A. has just installed a puppet government in Afghanistan, which has resumed the largest opium production in the world.
Anyone who thinks the "War on Drugs" is a benevolent attempt to "save our children," has been successfully brainwashed by the Vulcans to whom you so eloquently refer. Are you willing to consider that maybe you, too, have been brainwashed on this issue?
Drug abuse is bad. Drug use is a private matter. Giving drugs to children is criminal. Using drugs as an adult is a personal choice. Making drugs illegal is a totally counterproductive process, handing the market over to criminals, and not curtailing drug use. Please, Mr. LaRouche, I ask you to open your mind on this issue, as you have so nobly done in respect of other difficult issues. Thank you.
LaRouche Replies
On the portion of your message pertaining to the subjects of use of and control of traffic in cannabis: I, first, state a summary of aspects of the matter which you had not taken into account. After that, I reply to your questions seriatim.
In general: The post-1930 promotion and use of cannabis and ergotamine/LSD, was launched from London by the self-described "utopian" circles of followers of the 19th-Century Thomas Huxley—associated with H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Satan-cultist Aleister Crowley, and a younger generation including Aldous and Julian Huxley, and George Orwell. The practice of mass-indoctrination in use of cannabis, and synthetic ergotamine LSD, was launched, with a leading role by the British psychological warfare organization known as the London Tavistock Clinic and associated circles. The popularization of cannabinol, LSD, and other strongly psychotropic drugs, including the highly destructive use of Ritalin among primary and secondary students, are intended to replicate the fictional role of "soma" depicted in Aldous Huxley's cult-novel, Brave New World.
The U.S.A. and Canadian use of these practices was pioneered in Los Angeles, Hollywood, and left-wing circles, and in Canada locations, during the 1930s and 1940s-1950s, through circles associated with Aldous Huxley and with the London Tavistock Clinic and Tavistock Institute. During the post-war decades, this work was promoted through the Department of Defense's Special Warfare division, including projects such as "Delta Force." The post-war "Beatniks," and the orchestrated cult of Elvis Presley, are typical of the pilot-projects used to prepare the way for the "rock-drug-sex youth-counterculture" launched, like a rocket, with the appearance of the "Beatles" on the Ed Sullivan Show.
These, including the "Unification of the Sciences" project which Bertrand Russell launched at the University of Pennsylvania, in 1938, were some of the stepping-stones to a sweeping mass-change in U.S. culture, from a productive society, to an increasingly decadent, "post-industrial," consumers' society over the interval which coincided with the U.S. War in Indo-China, 1964-1972.
Look back to the cultural paradigm of U.S. social and intellectual life over the course of the successive intervals, 1933-1945 and 1945-1964, and compare the standards of culture during those earlier periods, with the successive phases of transformation in popular habits and outlooks during the 1964-2002 interval. Compare this with the collapse of the U.S. economy's ability to produce for its own needs, here at home, over, especially, the 1972-2002 interval leading into the presently roaring outburst of a pent-up world economic, as well as monetary-financial depression. Today's induced trend, ever deeper into a utopian cultural paradigm, has been, economically, one of the greatest abominations in modern history. Judge the cannabis sub-culture by that yardstick, and the truth of the matter begins to be clear.
Finally, before coming to your series of questions, consider the following. An even relatively mild form of marijuana, produces a significant change in mental state after one or two inhalings of the smoke. Any user could note that, especially at first encounter. These effects impair certain aspects of the cognitive and related mental powers of the user significantly, for the moment, until those effects wear off. Taking into account that all of the claims for benefits of such habits are either greatly exaggerated in today's realities, or scientifically false, why should anyone wish the stuff, unless they wished to "enjoy" the specific, damaging psychotropic effects? The fact is, that apart from the effects of habituation as such, no one would wish to smoke the stuff, unless it were precisely those "escapist" psychotropic effects which were desired. Admittedly, similar psychotropic effects are produced by habitually prolonged participation in currently faddish, "dionysiac" dance-crazes; but that comparison, the fact that quietly smoking a "joint" is less offensive to the neighborhood, is a rather poor excuse for preferring marijuana "joints."
Who Are the Criminals?
Question 1: The market for cannabis, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs is totally unregulated and exclusively in the hands of ruthless criminals.
Reply: The latter generalization is largely true, on the condition that you intended to include as "ruthless criminals" such folk as George Soros and the head of the New York Stock Exchange [Richard Grasso]. However, these criminals do maintain a brutally tight control of the market.
Question 2: The quality of product delivered to the population is thereby also totally unregulated.
Reply: Your heart is in the right place, but your sweeping generalization would open you up to the drug-traffickers' rebuttal, that you are misstating the facts. In the case of the 1980s crack-cocaine epidemic, the Contra operation dumped that ugly stuff into a market specially created for that purpose. There is also a large "quality" market maintained for "regular customers," especially regular users of marijuana among the well-to-do. Thus, in the trafficking, we have a case in which all things are true, because nothing is consistently true by the generality of the trafficking itself; all contrary generalizations, are often wrong when stated as generalizations. What is true about the market as a whole, is that in a "post-industrial," "consumer" society, the product is not the purpose of the trafficker, only the revenue is. In that sense, you are partly right, but too simplistic.
Question 3: The CIA is coordinating this trade, and Latin America is being bombed to hell as a deception to cover this up.
Reply: Not true. For one thing, massive intervention by agencies of the U.S. government protects major sources and routes, sometimes in favor of George Soros and his friends. Those in the U.S. State Department, as, for example, under Secretary Madeleine Albright, backed George Soros and institutions such as the Inter-American Dialogue in overthrowing governments which threatened to interfere with the flow of cocaine and other drug-revenues into such hands as those of the head of the New York Stock Exchange. The Peru government of President Fujimori was overthrown, under Albright, as a favor to drug-traffic promoter George Soros. A similar action, in aid of the coke traffickers, was just recently conducted in Bolivia.
Question 4: The CIA launders drug money and uses the proceeds to fund Special Access Projects ("kill power" as you rightly call it).
Reply: Your reference to the "CIA" errs in being simplistic. Take the California "crack cocaine" case, in which cocaine donated by a Colombia drug cartel to the Bush-Ollie North Contra operation, was conduited, by a special warfare project, in the form of "crack," into "ghetto communities." The operation was not run by the "CIA" as such; it was run by that utopian gang which Eisenhower described as a "military-industrial complex," the same crowd behind "Cheney's Chicken hawks" today.
Question 5: The U.S.A. has just installed a puppet government in Afghanistan, which has resumed the largest opium production in the world.
Reply: Precisely. The previous such puppet-government, installed by the succession of National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Vice-President George Bush, et al., was of the same nature. Without the proceeds of the massive narcotics production in Afghanistan, the relevant strategic military operations of 1977-1981 National Security Advisor Brzezinski, and the relevant Iran-Contra operations could not have been funded as they were. Also, the New York financial market depends significantly on proceeds of Colombia and other illegal narcotics trafficking. The U.S. government thus promotes the international drug-traffic, in various aspects, and in various ways, on the one hand, while maintaining a relatively token anti-drug operation, which is never permitted to become "too successful."
The `War on Drugs;
You Wrote: Anyone who thinks the "War on Drugs" is a benevolent attempt to "save our children" has been successfully brainwashed by the Vulcans to whom you so eloquently refer. Are you willing to consider that maybe you, too, have been brainwashed on this issue?
Reply: Mistake! The War on Drugs was a response to a terrible drug problem, which was a threat to the U.S. population, and that of Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia as well. However, my enemies within the National Security Council, and elsewhere, and a corrupt element in the Justice Department, ruined the program, intentionally. In effect, by the second half of 1980s, these elements in our own government, and accomplices in our own financial community and foreign governments, had turned the program into a farce. (Often, to my knowledge, the small fry received huge sentences, while the bigger fish were often let off, or were given informant status in the witness protection, or similar programs. The DOJ, for example, was keeping a scalp-hunters' score in which the number of years served and money alleged by those convicted, rated the prosecutors and enforcement agencies.)
Have I been brainwashed, on this? Not a chance! I know all the (actual) principal frauds in the game, including the practices of the courts and law enforcement. On some of these, you are right; but, as the saying goes, you, apparently, do not yet know the half of it. It would take days to inform you of what your account misses. My associates and I have published much on this over the past quarter-century. It could be fairly said, that we "wrote the book"[1] about all leading aspects of the war on drugs, and how that drug-trafficking came into being since the British East India Company organized the U.S. side of the trafficking in opium, back during the 1790s, and since the circles of Wells and Russell introduced the U.S.A. youth-drug-culture's mass phase, from England, as part of the post-President Kennedy cultural-paradigm-shift, approximately 1964.
Thank you for asking. Best wishes,
—Lyndon
[1] Dope, Inc.: The Book That Drove Kissinger Crazy (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992).
