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.
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:
“In the 1870s and ’80s, the Twain family spent their summers at Quarry Farm in New York, about two hundred miles west of their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Twain found those summers the most productive time for his literary work, especially after 1874, when the farm owners built him a small private study on the property. That same summer, Twain began writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. His routine was simple: he would go to the study in the morning after a hearty breakfast and stay there until dinner at about 5:00. Since he skipped lunch, and since his family would not venture near the study—they would blow a horn if they needed him—he could usually work uninterruptedly for several hours. ‘On hot days,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats, and write in the midst of the hurricane, clothed in the same thin linen we make shirts of.’
After dinner, Twain would read his day’s work to the assembled family. He liked to have an audience, and his evening performances almost always won their approval. On Sundays, Twain skipped work to relax with his wife and children, read, and daydream in some shady spot on the farm. Whether or not he was working, he smoked cigars constantly. One of his closest friends, the writer William Dean Howells, recalled that after a visit from Twain, ‘the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.’ Howells also records Twain’s difficulties getting to sleep at night:
In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and he had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.”
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From the section devoted to Mark Twain, one of the finest Americans to ever breathe, from Mason Currey’s book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work.
