Interviewer: John, you’ve been an editor for a very long time, and I imagine that you’ve worked with writers who have used various drugs to stimulate their writing.
John Bennet, New Yorker editor: Mostly caffeine and tobacco, and drugs of that nature. And simple hysteria.
I think it’s pretty hard to really write a complicated piece of writing if you’re hallucinating. That’s not to say that many of these writers haven’t done that in the past. But when they’re actually producing, they rely on caffeine, which is of course a drug.
Most writers I know write better than they’re able to write. That’s to say if it’s a good writer, he or she can write a great piece. But they do it by dent of great personal sacrifice. They tend to adrenalize themselves, whether it’s with caffeine or with just simple hysteria or panic, into this highly agitated state, whereby they are able to produce writing of the quality that they want to produce — that otherwise they feel they can’t produce.
And in general I must say it’s a rather destructive process to watch, when you work with writers who essentially have nervous breakdowns every time they have to write a piece. Which means it’s really a damnable profession, writing, because most people who are writers tend to be miserable — at least when they’re writing.
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Bennet, exchanging words with Sasha Weiss, story editor for the New York Times Magazine, in his joint interview with Oliver Sacks for The New Yorker Out Loud (Bennet’s remarks start at around 19:30 in the audio above).
You’ll find Sacks’s longer takes on this stuff in his highly acclaimed new memoir On the Move, which I plan to pick up in the coming weeks.
“More police, more jails, more stringent penalties. Increased efforts at interception, increased publicity about the evils of drugs — all this has been accompanied by more, not fewer, drug addicts; more, not fewer, crimes and murders; more, not less, corruption; more, not fewer, innocent victims…
Legalizing drugs is not equivalent to surrender in the fight against drug addiction. On the contrary, I believe that legalizing drugs is a precondition for an effective fight. We might then have a real chance to prevent sales to minors; get drugs out of the schools and playgrounds; save crack babies and reduce their number; launch an effective educational campaign on the personal costs of drug use — not necessarily conducted, I might add, by government; punish drug users guilty of harming others while ‘under the influence’; and encourage large numbers of addicts to volunteer for treatment and rehabilitation when they could do so without confessing to criminal actions…
I do not believe, and neither did [the American founders], that it is the responsibility of government to tell free citizens what is right and wrong. That is something for them to decide for themselves. Government is a means to enable each of us to pursue our own vision in our own way so long as we do not interfere with the right of others to do the same. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, ‘all Men are… endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed.’ In my view, Justice Louis Brandeis was a ‘true friend of freedom’ when he wrote, ‘Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasions of their liberty- by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning. but without understanding.’”
I am certainly in Friedman’s liberty-centric camp. Nonetheless I think arguments against the drug war can rest securely on several other foundations, including the fact that this generations-long “war” has been a fundamentally disruptive, rather than pacifying, force for our society. Johann Hari, whose new book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the Drug War is next on my reading list, shared the following insight about one of the most orderly people on the planet, the Swiss:
Switzerland, a very conservative country, legalized heroin for addicts, meaning you go to the doctor, the doctor assigns you to a clinic, you go to that clinic every day, and you inject your heroin. You can’t take it out with you. I went to that clinic — it looks like a fancy Manhattan hairdresser’s, and the addicts go out after injecting their heroin to their jobs and their lives.
I stress again — Switzerland is a very right-wing country, and after its citizens had seen this in practice, they voted by 70% in two referenda to keep heroin legal for addicts, because they could see that it works. They saw that crime massively fell, property crime massively fell, muggings and street prostitution declined enormously…
The arguments that work well in persuading the people we still want to reach are order-based arguments. I think the Swiss heroin referenda are good models for that. Basically, what they said was drug war means chaos. It means unknown criminals selling unknown chemicals to unknown users, all in the dark, in our public places, filled with disease and chaos. Legalization is a way of imposing regulation and order on this anarchy. It’s about taking it away from criminal gangs and giving it to doctors and pharmacists, and making sure it happens in nice clean clinics, and we get our nice parks back, and we reduce crime. That’s the argument that will win. And it’s not like it’s a rhetorical trick — it’s true. That is what happens.
Hari continues, reflecting on the even more dramatic example presented by the Portuguese experiment:
In 2000 Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of extraordinary. Every year they tried the American way more and more: They arrested and imprisoned more people, and every year the problem got worse…
They convened a panel of scientists and doctors and said to them (again I’m paraphrasing), “Go away and figure out what would solve this problem, and we will agree in advance to do whatever you recommend.” They just took it out of politics. It was very smart…
The panel went away for a year and a half and came back and said: “Decriminalize everything from cannabis to crack. But” — and this is the crucial next stage — “take all the money we used to spend on arresting and harassing and imprisoning drug users, and spend it on reconnecting them with society and turning their lives around.”
Some of it was what we think of as treatment in America and Britain — they do do residential rehab, and they do therapy — but actually most of it wasn’t that. Most of it, the most successful part, was really very simple. It was making sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. It consisted of subsidized jobs and microloans to set up small businesses.
Say you used to be a mechanic. When you’re ready, they’ll go to a garage and they’ll say, “If you employ Sam for a year, we’ll pay half his wages.” The microloans had extremely low interest rates, and many businesses were set up by addicts.
It’s been nearly 15 years since this experiment began, and the results are in. Drug use by injection is down by 50%, broader addiction is down, overdose is massively down, and HIV transmission among addicts is massively down.
Compare that with the results in the United States over the past few years.
Like I said, I’m on the same page as Friedman. These guys are too:
Interviewer: Why have you been less interested in writing about drugs than you have about drink? Does it have to do with how you grew up? Your father hasn’t exactly avoided booze as a subject.
Martin Amis: Yes, he’s a serious drinker. Drink, like sex, tells us an extra thing about someone. It strikes me more and more that we don’t really know much about each other, even people we know well. We keep so much hidden. You put the 10% on display: the rest is all secret. And when people are drunk, you find out another 10%; and when you discover what someone is like intimately, you discover another 10%, or maybe more.
Interviewer: I don’t know if drugs give you another 10%. Sometimes I think drugs remove something.
Martin Amis: Or obscure the original 10%, yes. In my early novels, people smoke dope and stuff, but alcohol is something everyone has an attitude towards, especially in New York where it seems everyone has stopped drinking.
Interviewer: Smoking, too.
Martin Amis: You’re more efficient when you don’t drink. But also you keep that other 10%. Someone from New York said to me not long ago, ‘You produce an awful lot, are you a workaholic?’ I said, ‘No I’m an alcoholic.’
In fact I’m not an alcoholic, but drink is present every day of my life in those few glasses of wine at the end of the day. When people say that I often think it means a few bottles. Funnily enough, a mild hangover is often a good start in order to write. I think the reason writers do drink a lot, almost without exception — American novelists, if they’re not Jewish or alcoholics — is that writers have time to recover. You haven’t got to get up the next morning. And perhaps, more than most people, you do want an escape from yourself.
While its original text is not available on the web, this exchange was recently reenacted at the PEN World Voices Festival by Amis, John Freeman, and Anatol Yusef.
“First of all, please don’t confuse my position with that of people who are indifferent to drugs. I’m not indifferent to drugs. I think I’ve been quoted as saying if I could turn a single latch which would make all the drugs disappear from the face of the earth, with the exception of here and there, a vineyard in Bordeaux, I would turn that latch.
Now, you say is it inconsistent for a conservative to take my position. I don’t think it is, because a conservative seeks to be grounded in reality. That which works is quantifiable; that which simply does not work, isn’t. If you were to pass a law requiring people to go to church on Sunday, it wouldn’t work. Under the circumstances, you would eventually simply withdraw such a law. My position on drugs is that our drug laws aren’t working, and that more net damage is being done by their continuation than would be done by withdrawing them from the books. This, as I say, should not be confused as a sanction for drugs. Drugs are a form of escapism, and the damage in taking them is not by any means self-limited. It damages other people also. For that reason, the question is: How do you diminish the net harm done by drugs?[…]
Anybody who becomes an alcoholic, which is probably the primary curse of this country, in my judgment, is morally stigmatized by permitting himself to get into that condition. That is not an argument for prohibition. Adultery is widely practiced. So is fornication. You can simultaneously say it’s morally wrong, but we’re not going to tell the police to open the doors of every motel to find out whether the people inside have marriage licenses.”
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William F. Buckley, speaking in an interview on Richard Heffner’s The Open Mind on August 6th, 1996.
More on various vices:
Richard Burton discusses how alcohol pushed him to the brink of death
Noam Chomsky explains what the lottery can teach us about the drug war
Former addict Will Self reflects on the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman
Jeremy Paxman: Do you understand [Philip Seymour Hoffman’s] involvement with drugs?
Will Self: Well addiction’s no respecter of persons. You know there’s hardly anywhere you can point a finger, high or low in our society, and not hit somebody who’s got addiction issues. Heroin is a drug that we associate most strongly with addiction, but people can be addicted to all sorts of things. I think the fact that heroin was involved with his death is what people find very shocking, largely because of the image that heroin has in our culture…
The old sawhorse of whether the fact he was such an amazing actor was in some way connected to his drug use – or the pressures of his life led to his drug use – I dare say that’s in the mix, but you know, you can go to any poor or deprived part of our country, and throw a stick and you’ll hit somebody who’s got a heroin habit.
JP: It’s interesting, it’s often represented as a sort of loser’s drug, which is the environment that you are talking about there. By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser.
WS: No, and as I say, you will find heroin addicts in every walk of life. But I think in America, in particular, there’s a very strange culture surrounding opiate drugs, which is the broader family of drugs of which heroin is one.
JP: What’s heroin like?
WS: You’re asking me personally?
I think that for people who don’t have a kind of need to be anesthetized, it probably is experienced as, yes, euphoric, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel a pull towards taking it again.
One of the strange things is that most of the people watching us now, at some time or other, will take medical diamorphine, which is heroin. And if they’re in pain, they’ll experience simply the removal of the pain.
JP: But it’s not instantly addictive though.
WS: No, it takes a fairly concerted effort to get addicted to opiate drugs, so you can say that people who do become addicted, maybe they’ve got a predisposition to it, but they have to make some decisions. They have to kind of decide to take it…
JP: But apparently he spent 20 years clean.
WS: Yes, that may well be true. Of course we don’t know whether he had other addictive behaviors that, so to speak, kept the addiction dormant.
I think that the way this story is being reported suggests this idea that addiction’s like a kind of ugly spirit that was cowed and pushed into the background, and then it reared up again in that way. I’m not sure that’s a very useful approach; it seems a rather medieval perception of it. But we don’t know what lead to him being in that situation. Again, very sadly, and this is only supposition, often with people who return to using heroin after a long period of abstinence, they can’t judge the dose. This happens quite frequently…
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Will Self and Jeremy Paxman, talking last week on BBC Newsnight about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I recommend watching the remainder of this five minute interview for two primary reasons. First, Self is one of the more naturally expressive cultural commentators out there — and not only that, he’s a former heroin addict. Because of this, we must be extremely careful when weighing his words on this topic, especially those on the question of whether Hoffman’s creative genius was tied to his drug use, given that this riff could be a thinly veiled absolution of Self’s own related sins.
While I understand those who may take it this way — as a bit of self-justification designed to soften any critiques of his parallel personal history — I am inclined to take Self’s analysis as instructive, if also with a large grain of salt. His experience with the stuff colors his perception of it, sure, but it also means he knows more about it than I do. This is why the testimonies of sinners are always more powerful than those of saints: only they can say “I’ve been there” with a straight face.
I think it is also worth commending both Self and Paxman for the sobriety and gravity which they lend to this topic. So often, untimely celebrity deaths mark occasions for saccharine tributes and tabloid prying. So rarely do we recognize what we’ve lost and what we can learn. Yet notice how Paxman says “By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser”; his voice registers the brilliance of Hoffman, the brutality of his demise, and how these two facts combine to cast a piteous shadow over the entire event. Hoffman’s death is devastating because he was a father, a son, and one of the most incandescently brilliant actors of our time. But it is also a moment for reflection because tragedies, unlike happy endings, are also the most dramatic lessons.
Questioner: There was a recent article written by Alexander Cockburn in which he wondered if prohibition was 100% bad. In it, he mentioned that there were some public health benefits [to prohibiting alcohol]. I was wondering if you think that’s irrelevant, or–
Noam Chomsky: Well prohibition cut down on the use of alcohol, and alcohol’s very destructive. I mean it’s much worse than marijuana.
Questioner: So then do you think marijuana or other drugs should be legalized?
Noam Chomsky: I don’t think there’s an obvious answer. I think these are things you have to be cautious about and experiment with. So take, say, marijuana: I think there’s a reasonably good case for decriminalization…
Last time I saw figures – five or ten years ago – they were listed as 60 million marijuana users, with no overdoses. That’s not too bad a record. It’s certainly not good for you beyond some very limited use. But the same is true of everything. It’s true of coffee; it’s true of tobacco; it’s true of red meat.
But overwhelmingly in these instances the right answer is education. Edifying the populace. I think that’s just obvious. Tobacco is a very striking case in the United States.
[Points to questioner] I suspect that not many of your friends smoke cigarettes.
I haven’t seen a student come into my office wanting to smoke for twenty years. It’s just not done among wealthy, educated people anymore. It’s still prevalent among older people who didn’t shake the habit, and it’s very common among younger people who are poor…
Tobacco use in the U.S. became very sharply class-based, just on the basis of education.
And the same has been true of other things. So take, say, red meat. There’s no criminalization of red meat, but consumption is going way down among most groups, simply because of education – people learning some about the potentially harmful effects of it.
And I think that’s true of everything. Take, say, the lottery.
The lottery is a highly regressive tax… You take the towns in Massachusetts, and you ask how much money people spend on the state lottery: the answer is predictable based on levels of education and income. The lower the education and income, the more they spend on the lottery.
I mean, in the town where I live nobody would waste a cent on the lottery. It’s like giving your money away; that’s what the state lottery is. But poor and uneducated people do it.
So what it amounts to is a highly regressive tax. That’s why there’s a ton of advertising for it — it’s a terrific way to soak the poor.
Well, should you make it illegal? Well… I don’t think it should be legal to advertise it, frankly, any more than you should allow ads for marijuana on television. But I don’t think you should criminalize it, either.
What I think you ought to do is exactly what’s done in every sector of educated people: get people immediately to understand that you’re throwing your money away, that this isn’t good for you. If you want to throw your money away, throw it in the ocean.
When people understand that, there’s not going to be any lottery anymore. And I think the same is true of every way of harming yourself…
If there are people who want to experience or do this stuff, alright, well they ought to be allowed to do it. On the other hand, it should be a rational decision – something that people are in a position to make a reasonable choice about. And that requires understanding, and education, and recognition of the consequences, and so on.
I mean, that’s ultimately the answer to drugs.
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I’ve transcribed these comments from a press conference with Chomsky that took place on March 4th, 1997. Watch this section below.
In the summer of 2008, I sent the following email to Noam, with whom I’ve communicated pretty regularly since I was 14. (His answers are bolded.)
Sent: Friday, July 04, 2008 10:40 PM
Dear professor Chomsky,
1. What do you do or ponder during independence day? What do you think about the idea that we should adhere to morality over country?
A day like all others. Morality should come first. That’s even written into the law (following illegal orders, etc.). Of course, general principles like these cannot be absolutes. One can always conceive of exceptions.
2. Do you think marijuana’s tendency to inspire subversive attitudes would be another reason for government opposition to it? Do you think it will be decriminalized?
I don’t think marijuana inspires subserve attitudes. Rather, passivity. Government opposition has a long history. Like prohibition generally, it’s been contrived to control “the dangerous classes.” Some day I presume it will be decriminalized, as it becomes a norm for the educated and privileged classes.
3. Have you ever tried marijuana? If not, why not?
Never tried, never was tempted. Just not how I live my life.
A few years later, in the Spring of 2010, I asked him the following as part of a larger discussion:
3. I know it’s a personal question but I am interested in the answer: do you, or did you ever, smoke tobacco or drink alcohol?
I did smoke a pipe a long time ago. I often take a drink in the evening.
Looking at it now, I like that answer about the pipe. It, like the phrase “take a drink,” strikes my ear with the tenor of a certain generation of mid-20th century academicians — a group which is sadly dwindling in number.
Someday I plan on publishing the rest of my exchange with Noam, barring he tells me I shouldn’t. All in all, it’s a staccato conversation stitched together over hundreds of emails traversing nearly every subject matter about which I’ve ever been curious. In retrospect, it’s one of the most valuable mentorships I’ve had, despite the fact we’ve never met.
Below: NC in his pipe-smoking days.
As a short postscript to those words on Chomsky, I think it’s worth linking to a recent interview with Norman Finkelstein which was published last week on Znet. Though Finkelstein isn’t my favorite source, he nevertheless is spot on in this description of why Chomsky is so admirable.
You’ve mentioned Professor Chomsky a few times in this interview — a man I intend to interview in the future. I know he’s been a good friend of yours for many years. What do you most admire about him?
Everyone admires his brilliance but that’s a commonplace. And also, that’s the throw of the dice, God was very generous to him when it came to his mental capacity. Though of course… Professor Chomsky is a perpetual motion machine. He is an indefatigable worker. But that’s not what I admire most about him, that as I said is discipline which of course I respect, the throw of the dice which is fortune.
The thing that I admire most about Professor Chomsky is he is an absolutely faithful person, he will never betray you. He’s constitutionally incapable of betrayal. To the point that he will defend friends even though I think he knows they’re wrong, but he won’t ever betray you. And he has a sense of moral responsibility that’s just kind of breathtaking…
Check out more from Chomsky, this time talking about some more personal matters, in the link below:
