These answers must be full, well-developed responses. Label each question with the corresponding number. Use what you’ve learned about writing and paragraphing to make sure your answers are clear, concise, and well-developed.
- Pay close attention to the tone of the text. What is Chomsky’s tone? How is he using tone and diction (word choice) to evoke a reaction from the reader and make a point?
- Write your response to the text in a fully developed paragraph (100+ Words). What does it evoke in you? What did you think of Chomsky’s ideas? examples? arguments? Do you agree with him/disagree with him
- Drug Policy as Social Control
by Noam Chomsky -
In the typical Third World society, like Colombia, or India, or Mexico, or Egypt—they are all
more or less the same—there is a sector of great wealth, enormous wealth, there are large
numbers of people who live somewhere between suffering and misery, and then there is a sector
who are just superfluous; they’re of no use, that is, they don’t contribute to profit. So you just
have to get rid of them somehow.
Every Third World society has the same structure, and that structure is now being, imposed
on the United States. Inequality is growing, a large part of the population, probably a majority, is
declining in earnings, wealth is enormous and very concentrated, profits are going through the
ceiling. They have never had such profits before and a large part of the population is useless.
Unskilled labor in urban slums, which happen to be mostly black and Hispanic, the superfluous
people.
In these circumstances what do you do? Well, you have to do the same thing they do in the
Third World. You have to get rid of the superfluous people, and you have to control the ones
who are suffering. How do you control them? One of the best ways of controlling them is by
increasing fear, and hatred, and making them hate each other and fear the superfluous people.
That’s the way it’s done everywhere, and it’s happening in the United States. That’s where the
drug war fits in.
In the United States the drug war is basically a technique for controlling dangerous
populations internal to the country and doesn’t have much to do with drugs. That’s always been
true. It goes back to England in the nineteenth century when they made gin illegal and kept
whiskey legal. There was a simple class reason for it. Gin was the drink of the working class and
whiskey was the drink of the upper class. This is a way of controlling the working class people.
When alcohol prohibition was instituted in the United States, the purpose was to close the
saloons in New York City where immigrants and working class people came, but nobody
stopped anyone from drinking in the rich suburbs. In the case of marijuana, the marijuana
legislation introduced right after prohibition ended started in the border states but it was aimed at
Mexicans. Nobody even knew what marijuana was, it was just something the Mexican
immigrants used and therefore it had to be criminalized so you could control the Mexican
immigrant population.
The so-called drug war was started in the 1980’s and it was aimed directly at the black
population. None of this has anything to do with drugs. It has to do with controlling and
criminalizing dangerous populations. It’s kind of like a U.S. counterpart to “social cleansing.”
Poor black males are criminalized the most by the drug war. The number of black men in the
criminal justice system is enormous. That criminalizes a dangerous population. What about the
population which is declining in earnings and jobs? They’re frightened. The more you can
increase the fear of drugs and crime and welfare mothers and immigrants and aliens and poverty
and all sorts of things, the more you control people. Make them hate each other. Be frightened of
each other and think that the other is stealing from them. If you do that you can control people.
And that’s just what the drug war does.
If we wanted to stop drug use in the United States there’s an easy way to do it: educational
programs. They work very efficiently, and they have made a big difference to the extent they
have been used. Among the more privileged sectors, my children, probably yours, the use of
drugs has been declining for a long time and so has the use of every other substance. My students
don’t smoke, don’t use drugs, consumption of coffee is going down. In the United States,
cigarettes are a class issue now. Students at universities almost never smoke cigarettes. But if
you go to a poor section of town, you’ll see a lot of teenage kids smoking cigarettes. It’s a class
issue, just like the use of drugs, just like the use of alcohol. This comes through changes in
perception and understanding.
But today educational programs are on the decline; they’re being cut back. The circumstances
driving people to use drugs are intensifying. There’s more poverty and fewer jobs, lower wages
and fewer support systems. That’s what’s driving people to drugs and that’s where the problem
lies. But it’s not being approached because the drug problem has been converted into a means of
social control.
It’s like when you turn on the television today, you hear all sorts of attacks on welfare
mothers, even from some liberals. The idea is to get working people on the opposite side of the
welfare mothers. The wages of working people are going down, their lives are getting worse, and
their children are not going to have even the opportunities they had. So what do you do? Do you
tell them, “We’re trying to harm you”? Or do you tell them, “Welfare mothers are stealing from
you”? Of course, you tell them welfare mothers are stealing from you.
Thus, if some teenage girl was raped and has a child, she’s stealing from you, so you hate her.
That’s why they’ve made the welfare system so harsh and cruel, increasing cruelty and fear.
These are all methods of social control. They’re used everywhere.In a country like the United States, where you can’t really send out the paramilitary forces to
murder people, as they do more and more in the Third World, you rely more heavily on
techniques of social control. That’s basically what the drug war is all about. - FLLOW MLA
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