[[[ Second Interview ]]]
Frank Herbert
16 January 1977
Port Townsend, Washington
What follows is a verbatim transcript of a taped interview
conducted by
Peter Sean MacKenzie of Frank Herbert at Mr. Herbert's home.
Ellipsis
indicates end of sentence or "unintelligible.".
Copyright (c) 1977, 1997 by Peter Sean MacKenzie. All rights
reserved.
**********************************************************************
(To photographer Don Anderson:)
I have a superb 43-86 zoom that would fit that camera. I picked it
up
in... I shot a roll with 12 lenses, selecting number and then
processing
and examining the negatives.
I haven't used it for about... where'd you get the adapter? Oh,
yeah.
That's the nice thing about that lens. You can virtually ignore
bellows
factors and use it.
(To MacKenzie:)
I was raised in Kitsap County (Washington). My dad was a whistle
punk in
the old logging days within 20 miles of here. What's a punk? They
used to
use donkey engines in the old steam engines and they'd have to
keep it out
of sight. Over a hill or down in the brush. The whistle punk stood
someplace where he could see the donkey engine and he had a
whistle and he
signaled when they were ready to pull the logs. In those days,
they just
put him in... he'd be in the third spot. Young kids usually did
it. I
think he was 14 or 15 years old. It was a summer job. Twenty-five
cents a
day (laughs).
I lived in the (San Francisco) Bay area for 15 years. I moved back
up here
seven years ago.
In the novel "Dune," what is the Landsraad?
Well, Landsraad is an old Scandinavian word for an assembly of
landowners.
It's historically accurate in that it was an assembly and the first
meetings of the legislative body - an early one, yes. The
Landsraad - it's
the landed gentry.
How do you pronounce "Atreides"?
What the difference how you say it? Pronunciation changes.
Language is a
very volatile subject. Spoken language, yes. Written language, not
as
much. But written language also changes. But the spoken language,
my god.
Accent, variations on pronunciation - a very volatile thing. So
what's the
difference how you pronounce it? The only thing I go by is I
pronounce a
man's name the way he pronounces it. I figure he should know.
(laughs)
Atreides is Atreus - the family Atreus out of Greek mythology.
(Editor's Note: From the American Heritage Dictionary: Atreus - a
king of
Mycenae [ancient city of Greece, located in the Peloponnese, a
peninsula
forming the southern part of Greece], father of Agamemnon.)
(Pronunciation)... That's missing the point.
What is your conception of "now"?
I think the only way you can deal with a mixed-up time sense which
our
society has, and a mixed-up sense of how the universe works... -
our
society today is absolutes. They're an odd list of figures - ...
is to
balance.
You're a surfboard driver. You're always hanging ten. That's the
attitude
you've got. The real question is how you deal with integrating a
past with
the now, so that you won't repeat the errors.
(MacKenzie cites the popular concept of linear time.)
Of course, you're thinking in linear sense. You're caught by
linear time.
(laughs) Time is a river... (laughs) nonsense!
(Regarding his living room bookcase, which contains every edition
in every
language of every book he's published:)
That is height of the publication collection. In other words, I
have to
have a copy of every book. You need it - I may get a query from
somebody
wanting a certain right to something I've written. I have the
negatives
right here.
"Dune" and some of the other books are in Japanese, Swedish,
Italian,
French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, I guess that covers
it. It's
not in Urdu yet. Urdu is an interesting language. Urdu is the
language in
the world where the first publication of softcover books have the
largest
first press run in the world. They think nothing, nothing at all,
of
running five million, 10 million copies on a first press run. The
books
would sell from 10 cents to 90 cents the last time I was there
(India).
If you're buying a dictionary, let's say. We have a four-volume
English-Urdu, Urdu-English dictionary. I think it cost 2.50 for
the four
volumes. Lousy printing quality.
(Regarding present developments on Herbert's estate:)
We put together a development of evolution concept which looks
like it was
just moved here. And we're moving along with it.
The hang-up that our society has is that our society's full of
people who
are light-switch conditioned. Flip the switch and there it is. And
the
world doesn't work that way; the universe doesn't work that way.
Our
universe works on the basis of seasons and evolution - that is,
you may
start out to make up one thing, but conditions change, so you
develop
another.
But we're within our boundaries with the development. We just put a
double-use house over the pool. The whole pool concept here is for
multiple use. Where you see carpentry, they're solar collectors.
There'll
be solar collectors on both sides. I intend to use the pool water
- 30,000
gallons - as heat storage to heat the greenhouse at night. We'll
overheat
the pool during the day - we generally swim in the mornings - we
can draw
20 degrees from 30,000 gallons at night to heat the greenhouse,
with a
little radiator and small pumps. We'll even have an alternative of
a small
windmill to run the pumps.
I have a plan downstream within the next five years of putting a
computer
in that little side room in there and running this house off a
computer.
That is, with sensors at every heat outlet for the furnace.
Controlling
every vent from the computer, among other things. We're going to
put a
chimney up that corner of the sunroof with a big Fisher stove
downstairs
with a shroud over it, and we will put a duct down the furnace.
We're
going to put a rather strong fan down in the duct at the bottom
because
fans work better pulling than pushing it. And we're going to put
another
higher-pressure fan in the furnace system. It wasn't so new a
furnace when
we got it.
We've cut the use of oil fuel in this house by a third. What we're
going
to do is monitor not only the big Fisher stove - the wood-burning
stove
downstairs - but the furnace itself and all the vents with a
computer.
Computers are beautiful for idiot work, you know - just sit there
and
listen for trouble.
I know a lot of buildings where they do this. We'll cut our fuel
consumption here by at last another 50 percent of what it's been.
But our
aim is to produce something that has a very high quality of life
but a
relatively low drain on the ... energy system.
I'm not aiming just as you, Pete. I'm aiming at people who make
crunch
decisions. And I don't want to say something to you that I can't
demonstrate. I'm not completely sure about all the things we're
going to
do. For example, we did a little experimenting with methane.
Methane's all
right for littler stuff, if you have a cheap way of compressing
it. You
see, you have multiple energy demands to balance. We drive a diesel
automobile. It's an expensive investment, but it's actually the
cheapest
car I've ever owned. I could sell it right now for more than we
paid for
it.
It (Mercedes Benz) has the lowest record of maintenance costs in
the
world. It's the most economical to maintain of any car in the
world. The
diesel fuel takes approximately one third the energy to produce
that
gasoline does. You'd have to get around 90 miles to the gallon of
gasoline
to match me in the ... fuel energy demands. The car will run
400,000 miles
and we'll have to replace it at that time.
We're having trouble getting a manufacturer in the United States
to pick
up on our windmill device. A buddy of mine and I sat down two
years ago
and decided we were going to completely redesign the windmill. So
we threw
out everything we knew about windmills - "We don't know anything
about
windmills." - and we asked ourselves, "What do we know about air
movement?"
I'm a pilot and I moved right into aerodynamics immediately. He
and I
built an initial model that got torn down - for the parts, I
needed the
bearings. We improved that and built another one. We made another
model to
test a new concept we had involved a way to build a port bottle.
But in
order to do that, we have a quantum leap in the use of wind for
power. No
doubt of it at all.
We have a mill that starts producing - well, depending on how you
build it
- it starts producing usable power at a five-knot wind. But, very
important, we'd still be using it, at full draw, at a 50-knot
wind. Other
windmills feathered out or were torn apart, but ours was still
producing
power.
We're having a great deal of difficulty getting a manufacturer in
this
country to go for it, to the point where we're just about ready to
go to
Japan.
Japan is desperate for energy. We're about ready to go over there
and say,
"We can't get anybody in the United States to do this. Here it
is." I
don't want to make a million bucks off it. I don't even
necessarily want
to get wealthy. I just want it produced because I know we need it.
I don't believe in fission power for the generation of electricity
- not
for the usual reasons. I would love to build a fission power plant
for the
generation of electricity. I know we have to find the energy
somewhere. I
say fission rather than fusion because I'm not sure about that
either, but
that's a different bag.
Breeder reactors are an act of desperation which are only going to
cause
us enormous trouble - ENORMOUS trouble. We are condemning our
great-great-great-GREAT-grandchildren, many times down, to cursing
us. If
this society goes ahead with breeder reactors, our descendants will
rewrite the history books to erase names. They will plow up our
cemeteries
to use the bones to make their china.
What's wrong with breeder reactors?
They're targets. We're going into a period of enormous social
unrest
worldwide. Right now, one person, one kamikaze - I say we're going
into
the time of the kamikaze. As yet we don't have a means of
preventing a
kamikaze from hitting his target; we can't even prevent a kamikaze
from
hitting a president.
Right now, one man with a light airplane loaded with explosives
could make
the entire downriver of the Columbia (River, major waterway
separating
Washington state from Oregon) uninhabitable - from Hanford over
here.
The thing that really gets me is not that we're going ahead with
breeder
reactors, but that we don't have anti-aircraft facilities and radar
facilities around all of our existing atomic plants. We don't have
such
defense systems around. It is absolute stupidity.
When you say that you have guards and protection systems around
these
plants, there's an assumption in that, that historically has never
been
accurate. This is, that all your guards and your protective people
- the
operative word, ABSOLUTELY - are trustworthy. That they will never
go
psychotic or anything like that. You're saying all of these things
- like,
"We don't have that kind of protective system."
Even then, who did the programming? Who did the software? (laughs)
What is
your janitor like?
What we're doing is committing ourselves to building a system
where we
need absolute protection. And we have no absolute protection. The
consequences of not having that absolute protection. The
consequences of
not having that absolute protection (Editor's Note: are worse)
than if we
just let it all go to hell and got by without the energy. Go back
to
burning wood, coal and all kinds of nasty things.
Weyerhaeuser (a huge wood-processing corporation headquartered in
Washington State), for example, developed a marvelous, relatively
low-cost
system for converting an attic in a city house into a greenhouse, a
thermopane greenhouse. A thermopane greenhouse in the attic of a
house has
some really nice pluses about it. One is, lots of times, even this
time
(of year) you have excess heat - a little fan will just draw it
down into
the rest of the house. Number two, you can grow your own winter
vegetables
and such. So you cut down on the trucking transportation coming in.
I'll tell you the other thing about why we're going to atomic
fission.
We're being lied to on the basis of the reason we're getting them
(the
nuclear plants). Great, big, Hitler-type, gigantic lies. The real
reason
is that you have a fixed market, people who won't use it. Under
those
circumstances, the higher the capitalization, the greater the
profits. So
the choice is being made for high capitalization ways of doing
this.
Take an alternative example, this windmill that we developed -
there's
marvelous resource along the ridges watering the Columbia River.
Because
our mill has high-torque at zero revolutions, it beautifully lends
itself
to pumping water. We could take downstream water from the Columbia
and
pump it with wind power back up existing damns and use the existing
hydroelectric system to a greater maximum output with this simple
windmill
that we designed.
The thing can be built gigantic. We could build them as high as
the World
Trade Center in New York if we wanted to.
That big?
Oh, yes. A hundred-story high windmill would be nothing to our
model. We
could have it in operation in five years. So we could beat the
demand (for
electricity). I don't see anybody is going to go (for it), given
the
capitalization system that we have for production of energy. I
don't know
that anybody would want to use this.
A man in Minnesota who developed a way to cut the use of natural
gas for
home heating approximately 25 percent in all the houses using it,
has been
five years trying to get it on the market. It's a simple damper
system.
You see, regulatory agencies tend to be taken over by the
industries
they're going to regulate. So a very cheap, a very simple damper
system
that would reduce the natural gas consumption 20 to 25 percent
nationwide
(and it's easy to install; a home mechanic could put the damn
thing in).
He's been five years trying to get a license. Two major cities in
the
United States - Mobile (Alabama) and Detroit (Michigan) - tested
it and
found it a beautiful operating system. It works. It does what he
said it
would do.
There seems to be a tendency by special interests in the United
States to
suppress new, workable technologies.
This is why we'll probably have to go to Japan (with the windmill
design).
The thing the consumer public in the United States has failed to
recognize
is that the interlocking directorates of oil corporations, steel
corporations and automobile manufacturers talk to each other.
(laughs)
What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the
country.
It might be, but not necessarily.
I wish General Motors would make a car that I could use. I have a
Mercedes
300 diesel. We get 25 miles to the gallon in town and 30 on the
road.
(Editor's Note: Miscellaneous data about Mercedes dealerships and
prices,
etc. omitted from transcript.)
The problem with propane and methane and the other natural gases
is the
energy used to compress them. Where methane really shines is in a
stationary condition. Let's say you have an internal combustion
engine to
run an electric generator. Methane is an ideal fuel for that if
you have
it available. You can take the coolant from your engine, from the
internal
combustion engine, and pipe it through your methane generator. It
just so
happens that this coolant is at an optimum temperature for gas
engines.
It's at an optimum temperature for getting the most methane gas
production
out of your methane engine. So you have a symbiotic relationship
between
the engine and the methane production.
You're sitting in one place; you don't need to compress it - you
can use
relatively low compression factors for storage of the fuel (times
ten
pounds). It's ideal for cities, for example. It'd be a great way
to go.
Alcohol may be a better way, I don't know. It depends on the group.
Let's take a look at modern day jihads. What lies ahead?
We're going to have a lot of violence and upset. It's no simple,
one
thing. One of the things that's involved is the information
explosion.
Computers are going to have more influence on the society that
involves
this world for the next 35 years, very likely, than fire did.
Computers
are going to make an enormous difference.
I'll go WAY out on a limb. I think you're going to see biological
linkage
between human and computer. The computer is going to enter all
phases of
life, including what we generally feel is our individual freedom.
The
minute you can make a simulation model of a segment of society,
then it's
predictable that you're going to be able to refine that down to
smaller
and smaller bits. So you're going to be able to tell eventually
what...
you'll have uses. You see, this is not a totally bad thing. You'll
be able
to tell what the energy demand of the city of Seattle will be.
You'll be
able to tell the energy demand of the Mount Baker district. You'll
be able
to tell what the energy demand of Pete MacKenzie will be.
But you will also be able to tell what you talk, how you can talk
Pete
MacKenzie into buying "X". What are his buttons, yes. Now, the
other side
of that coin is that, historically, whenever this has happened
people have
tended to grow calluses.
They're having trouble on television right now selling things on
television commercials.
Good!
(laughs) Yeah. (laughs) It's one of the untold stories. That
television
commercials are becoming less and less effective.
Why do you think that is?
Well, you get talked into buying something by the commercial. You
try it,
and it doesn't perform the way they said it would. About the
fourth,
fifth, sixth or seventh time that is, depending on your resistance
factor... (laughs)
It finally dawns on you.
(laughs) Yes. TV isn't all bad, oh no.
But the commercials are.
Not necessarily. It doesn't follow that because some are bad, all
are bad.
It doesn't follow that because many products are bad, all are bad
either.
(Beverly Herbert, Frank's wife, talks about toothpaste. MacKenzie
says he
uses Colgate, primarily because his mother once said her dentist
said it's
a superior product.)
Aha!
(Beverly: Well, dentistry has changed. Many of the new dentists are
advising not to use any dentifrice. Or, if you do use any, use a
very soft
dentifrice.)
I was about to bring up the fluoride thing. Human begins are
engaged in a
long-term, massive experiment, as I call it. We don't know how
long the
effect of fluoride in these forms is on our systems. Obviously the
middle-term use of fluorides doesn't seem to cause any trouble at
all. In
fact, it's helpful. It's cutting down the number of cavities. What
will be
in the long term? Is there a genetic effect? Will there be a
residual
peaking of some kind of physical problem because of this? We don't
know
yet.
By the time those questions are answered, it'll be too late.
Generally, they have been for centuries. I'm working in a book
that I'll
publish next year. It's called "The Dosadi Experiment." It
concerns a
massive psychological experiment on a large population without
their
informed consent. The implications are all around us. You see, you
can do
this in science fiction because you're talking about another world,
another people. It's way over there. (laughs) The reality comes
back
later.
This is an extremely interesting area to develop. A lot of people
think
science fiction is over, we've done everything. They remind me of
the 1890
congressman who wanted to close up the patent office because we've
invented everything. He really did. This is a true story.
(Note: A friend of MacKenzie, knowing the interview was to take
place,
asked MacKenzie to pose the following question. The friend
predicted
Herbert's answer would be "water.")
What's your favorite beverage?
Favorite beverage? My god, it depends what I'm doing at the time.
Sometimes I like beer, sometimes I like water, and sometimes I
like wine.
You know, the beverage you use depends on the condition you're in.
Are you
having a fine French dinner? You might want a 1961 Bordeaux.
Well, I'm not going to sip Gatorade with the President's wife.
Why not? It might be a hot day in Washington DC and you need to
replace
your electrolytes. So, it might be a beverage of choice, given a
particular condition. All of these questions are really out of
context
because they depend on conditions.
Is there some way we can unshackle ourselves from the agreements
we've
made with the universe and function more as ourselves rather than
as a
recorder that just plays back?
Oh, I think we function. We're more than playback. We're more than
playback because we have this other thing that's never been really
defined
- and I hope never is - called consciousness. We can see
ourselves. We can
even see ourselves as others see us sometimes.
We are products of this planet, in a sense, in a very real sense.
We are
conditioned by the planet. We live nine months in an amniotic
ocean where
our mother's chemistry is conditioned by the rhythms of the
planet. We're
animals who were conditioning to evolve on this planet.
We're not just bodies.
I'm not saying that. That is not an assumption of what I'm saying.
But I'm
saying this is a factor, a very important factor, in what I'm
talking
about. The chemistry of our mothers has a very important early
influence.
And the earliest influences tend to be the most important. ... I
don't
think there's any doubt whatsoever about this. We live to the
variation s
in the amniotic chemistry in our mothers for nine months.
You can dig a clam off the ocean beach out here and move it to a
saltwater
aquarium in Chicago. For awhile, it continues to operate on the
tidal
rhythms of its origin. Then it gets onto the tidal rhythms of
Chicago.
It'll come up where there's a high tide in Chicago. So it's
measuring the
movement of the moon and sun right now. A clam can sense it. We
are, as I
said one time, bivalves on the tide edge of the universe. We are.
We didn't come by the word lunacy by accident. In major cities,
the full
moon is when the police and fire departments are most alert, for
lunacy. I
did a small survey in San Francisco of bartenders. The bartenders
to a man
- and I got no deviation from this - had customers they only saw
during
the full moon. They're full moon people.
We vibrate to the rhythms of our planet, is what I'm saying. It'd
be
unusual if we didn't.
What were the contributions that your family made to "Dune"?
Bev kept the world off my neck when I was immersed in the book.
She helped
me find some resource materials. She keeps me well fed. People
call in the
morning when I'm writing. She tells them I can't come to the phone
now.
I have a very good friend in California, for example, Don ... , a
former
critic and book editor of the San Francisco Examiner, who used to
alert me
any time a book came along when I was doing research - here was
something
I might be interested in.
How much research did you do?
I did a year at the Library of Congress. I did about six years on
the
whole book ("Dune"). I leaned on Muslim and Arab history very
heavily. I
did an extensive study of Arab history. I also used the Library of
the
British Museum. I've lived in the desert. I was doing other things
during
those six years. Don't get the idea that was all I did. But I did
the
research over a six-year period (from 1959 to 1965).
How do you maintain that goal out there, with deadlines being in
terms of
years instead of hours?
Well, you really are loading the system. You're loading the
consciousness
and memory and so on. These labels are only approximate.
Your coffee is great. I wish I had the recipe.
Anybody can have it. Just go to Joseph Kittay at the Good Coffee
Co. (in
Seattle) and say, "I want a pound of that." (Literally, "Frank
Herbert's
blend.") We have to buy about 50 pounds at a time, but it keeps
well
frozen. We have several friends around here who buy it. In fact,
the next
time we go over (to Seattle) we're going to take their orders.
This is the cheapest way to buy coffee nowadays. It's not exactly
wholesale. But you buy it in large lots and you get a 10 to 15
percent
discount. Plus, a pound of this coffee - you use approximately
one-third
less than an equivalent amount of another coffee. So take that
amount off
the cost. An amount of coffee would cost you 3, let's say. So it's
really
the cheapest way to buy coffee.
If you want the stuff, just tell Joe you want my blend. I worked a
couple
years developing it. It tastes the way coffee smells. I did a
couple years
of research in wine-making, the wine industry. In California, I got
involved with making wine, studying it and discussing it until I
developed
a wine palate.
Julius (a friend) said something to me one time that really hit
me. He
said, "In western culture, most of western culture, it is
considered
effete, and somehow simple, to train the palate." To educate the
palate.
(laughs) And that's right, it is. We don't do it. It's economically
dangerous, too. Because if you have an educated palate, you demand
things
from the food industry which the food industry is not willing to
give.
(laughs)
What we did on the basis of that ... (study) was we bought 20
1/8th pounds
of coffee in San Francisco. And a little stainless steel drip
thing that
made one cup of coffee and we had tasting parties. We sat down and
made a
cup of coffee. And we each had mocha and then we would taste it
and try to
describe it. Was it chocolate-like in the sense of heavy body and
richness
that you'd expect from chocolate? Was it thin and acid? What was
it? You
reduced it to word. So that you could refer to it later. Then we
started
blending and working on that. A little acidy, a little dark roast,
a
little Viennese roast, changing the roast proportions. We finally
came up
with just a GLORIOUS blend that you had to make one cup at a time
because
it wouldn't keep. (laughs) It just goes to hell in a hurry. But
then we
got off of that and blended from that with a high proportion of
the rather
acid light roast or medium roast. The medium roast mountain coffee
which
is about 60 percent of this blend. Then we added heavier
increments of
some of the darker roasts. There are very small amounts of French
roast,
for example. It's for the bitterness, you see, which is kind of an
... for
the taste buds.
(MacKenzie has to excuse himself and asks Herbert where his
"facilities"
are.)
Over there. We call it "the euphemism."
Who is directing "Dune"? (Note: In references to a planned movie
based on
the book; this is VERY pre David Lynch.)
Alejandro Jodorowski. He's a Polish-Mexican. (laughs) He's a great
guy. I
have seen the script and it's a damn good script. I'll believe it
when I
see it.
Do you think it's going to measure up?
How do you know? How can you say at this point? I don't even know
if
they're going to complete it. In movie making, you believe the
movie when
it comes to your local house. Then you made a judgement. Judgments
are
very personal, too. So beforehand, what can you say? Well, once
they start
the major production - that is, when they get the actors on stage
- then
they have to bring me in as Technical Advisor. The last I heard it
was
being filmed in Algeria, but I don't know for sure.
I'm going to bring the entire Chinatown dancing dragon team to be
the
worm! (laughs)
By Shai-hulud, I think you've got it!
I don't know how they're going to do it. I don't really think
they've
decided yet. DeLaurentis damn near bought it, you know. In fact
there was
a scramble right after we got back from France this summer.
Then Jodorowsky must be a heavyweight.
Yeah. He's made a couple of movies that have made artistic
splashes: "El
Top", "Magic Month." He's also pretty much in demand in the United
States
today.
Is the "Dune" trilogy complete?
I thought it was. But now there's a lot of pressure for me to come
back to
it. I'm not reluctant to do it, but I wouldn't do it JUST because
people
want me to do it. I've got to want to and I've got to have a
concept that
lends itself to a really good story.
The thing that attracts me is, say, coming back to the character
of Leto
3,500 years later. (Regarding Leto's apparent immortality:) Not
completely, but very long-lived.
I have this theory that heroes are bad for society, human society.
And
that superheroes are super bad. Some of the stuff that Kennedy
did, for
example, is just coming out. The problem with heroes and
superheroes is
that we don't question their decisions.
(Speaking of heroes:) How do you handle people's reactions to your
success?
The role patterns are very fixed in our society. I taught at the
University of Washington for awhile. And the first to two classes
I had to
shatter all of those illusions. Say "shit" four or five times, you
know?
And sometimes even worse. You really have to do things that break
up the
patterns.
I worked for awhile last week to try and get a woman to run for
president
of the Science Fiction Writers of America. Not because I'm a great
women's
libber or anything else, but because I think the conditioned
differences
between men and women in our society are so great that we tend to
create,
by the time people are 20 years old, two different species. Not
that they
really are two different species, but the difference in
conditioning is
such that there are ways of looking at our universe that are very
different, given the difference of the sexes.
So I was being very selfish. I wanted that other look at the
organization.
But I couldn't get any takers.
(Photographer Don Anderson brings up the subject of drugs as a
recurring
theme in Herbert's work.)
We as a society, as a species, tend to have a very unwholesome
relationship, a very deadly relationship, with drugs. There is
only one
drug in our society where, if you really get an addict and you
cold turkey
that addict, you are condemning the addict to death. He'll die
every time
- and that's alcohol. Not heroin, but alcohol.
Heroin very seldom kills an addict on cold turkey. It's a rough
go, but he
doesn't die of it. But a real alcoholic will die every time.
Also, there are some misinformations in our society about drugs.
It's
recently been discovered, something that if you just thought about
it for
awhile - that I did a long time ago and I've been writing about it
for a
long time, pecking away at it - you'd see that of course this is
true.
If you cannot stop all of the drugs from getting into the country
and you
capture party of them, you merely raise the price of what remains
on the
street. And that's our real problem in this country. It is not
that people
are using drugs, but that they are ripping off society to support
their
habit and the profits are going to organized crime.
The major source of addicts in our society - three-fourths of the
new
addictions - are literally created by existing addicts turning on
other
people to get a market to support their own habits. There's an
easy way to
cut down three-fourths of the new addictions in this country, and
that's
take the profit out of it. You don't eliminate the problem, you
just
reduce its dimensions.
It's a medical problem. It's a medical, sociological, psychological
problem. It's not a criminal problem.
How would you feel about, as a solution, distributing junk to
junkies for
free?
Free, or for 50 cents at the local drugstore, yeah. I would think
that
would be a major way to cut the dimensions of the problem. But, of
course,
you have transactional relationships between that portion of the
bureaucracy which justifies its existence by there being bad
people who
use it, you see, and they who protect us from the bad people.
They're not
protecting us. They're making the problem worse.
So you have the ... (drug law enforcement agencies) in a sense,
unconsciously in league and sometimes overtly in league with
organized
crime. And the profits are enormous. You know what happened to the
heroin
they confiscated in the "French connection"? It disappeared from
the
police property room in New York City.
The profits are so enormous they can buy the sister of a reigning
monarch.
They can buy diplomats and their unexaminable pouches. The Korean
embassy
has been deeply into this trade all over the world. They can buy
police
forces in the major cities in the United States. They can buy
border
guards along a whole string of the border.
I mean, you offer five men two million dollars to bring in a load
that
will make you 50 million. That's a small piece off the top.
And we should have learned the lesson with Prohibition. One of the
things
we did with Prohibition was we put enough capital in the hands of
organized crime that when we eliminated Prohibition, they could
turn to
something else, which was the hard drugs. Unless you can stop all
of it,
unless you can absolutely lock up the ... (pushers), and get all
of it off
the street, our methods, if they weren't so terrible in their
results,
they would be humorous. They're ludicrous.
And the public's been lied and lied and lied to about the effects
of the
system. What we have is an open-ended system on the price an
addict will
pay for his fix. That means we'll never discover the top limit of
what
he'll pay. They'll pay your life, your mother's life, all your
possessions
- anything that they can get their hands on.
You see, the hard drugs are not the problem. It is the crime to
support
the hard drugs business that's the problem. So the enormous lies
that have
been told to this society by an entrenched bureaucracy which is
maintaining its own self-justification by increasing lies.
What is that bureaucracy?
It's the drug enforcement agencies. They see themselves as a
quasi-military police force which is protecting us from the
terrible demon
at our borders. And they know damn well they can't keep it all
out. Every
time they take some off the streets and catch it at the border,
all they
do is raise the price. They put increasing pressure on the addicts
to
commit greater crimes, to get more money to support their habits.
There are some weird things going on in our society and this is
one of the
weirdest, because we went through this with alcohol in
Prohibition. But
this hard drug business is really outrageous. We are creating new
addicts.
Seventy-five percent of the new addicts are being created by the
system.
And changing that system, taking the profit out of it, wouldn't
eliminate
the problem. It would merely reduce it to more manageable
proportions,
where we could begin to handle it as a medical and psychological
problem.
We can't handle the problem AT ALL given its present dimensions.
The
unholy alliance between that part of the bureaucracy which is
supposed to
be protecting us from this and organized crime is THERE.
What are your plans?
I'll do some kind of another book. I have a couple of ideas. I'm
working
on this place so that we'll eventually have a seminar centers.
We're
trying to be as constructive as possible.
I would like to leave a legacy: a world that's slightly better
than the
one I found.
Don wanted to take some pictures. Why don't we take a little walk?
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1998-1999, Andrew Lovette.
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