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Government Involvement with Science And Art
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By Noam Chomsky and Ollie Mikse
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Switching topics a little bit, Harold Varmus and other intellectuals have been appointed as chairs of the Presidential Counsel of Advisors for Science and Technology for the Obama administration. What role does this counsel essentially play and have they influenced legislation in the past at all?
Take a look at modern science and technology, like computers, the Internet, satellites, lasers, buying things at Wal-Mart—which comes from trade which comes from containers. Anywhere you look, you'll find major contributions of the state sector to the advanced economy. That came from scientists in the early post-war period who persuaded the government to pour a lot of money into developing fundamental science. You could argue that maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, but what was interesting about it was that it was done in a way that demonstrated their fear and hatred of democracy. They didn't come to the public and say, "Look, you guys should pay more taxes so maybe your grandchildren will have a PC." What they said was, "The Russians are coming and we've got to defend ourselves so we need a huge military budget." You can see it at MIT. This is one of the main places where it happened. In the 1950s and 1960s, MIT was maybe 90 percent funded by the Pentagon. But it wasn't doing military work, it was developing the advanced economy of the future.
If you look at the years since, Pentagon funding has declined. It hasn't disappeared, but it's declined and funding from the National Institute of Health and health-related funding has gone up. Why? Because the cutting edge of the economy of the future is biology-based, not electronic based. So the public is being ripped off in a different fashion.
Take a walk around the area near MIT. What you see are startup firms in genetic engineering, bioengineering, biotechnology, and the big guys like Novartis who feed off the public trough. They want the public to pay the cost of research and development while they get the benefits. If you look back 50 years ago, what you found were small startup and electronic firms feeding off of funded technology.
That's the way the economy works, but it was initiated by far-sighted scientists and I suppose the advisors today are doing the same thing. They have an interest in science—a lot of them are real scientists and want serious scientific work going on—but they've got to have the same concerns as Obama. If the investment community doesn't like what you're doing, you're out of business because they're the guys who own and dictate policy, so you've got to have an eye on that.
Is that one of reasons why recently in England David Nutt, who was the government advisor on drugs and marijuana, was fired? Because he didn't agree with government policy?
It certainly looked like that. Actually, the marijuana case is very interesting. Why is marijuana criminalized? It's comparably less dangerous than alcohol and massively less dangerous than tobacco. If you look at deaths from substances, way out in the lead is tobacco with millions of deaths all over the place. Tobacco not only harms the user, it harms everyone else, so deaths from passive smoking and being around people who smoke are way higher than deaths from hard drugs.
The next most lethal substance is alcohol in terms of deaths, but also alcohol harms other people. Alcohol makes people violent. A lot of domestic abuses are from alcohol. Drunk driving kills people. So, alcohol is not only extremely harmful for the user, but for everyone else, too. But it's not criminalized. When you get down to marijuana, it's probably not good for you, but coffee is not good for you either.
I don't think there's been a single overdose of marijuana recorded in how many millions of users, but that's the one that's criminalized. The reasons for it go back to racism. Look at the history of marijuana criminalization. It started early in the last century—Mexicans were using it. Most prohibitions have been geared towards the "dangerous classes," poor working people and so on. When prohibition ended, there was a big government bureaucracy left and they had to have something to do, so they started to call Senate hearings on marijuana. The American Medical Association testified and said there's nothing wrong with it, but they were disregarded. There were a few scare stories that it makes people insane and makes people criminals, so then comes the big marijuana scare.
In 1971—there have been studies of this—not only the government, but the whole elite sector from right to left had two big problems. One was that young people were getting out of control; they weren't disciplined. There were studies from the liberal sector saying we have to do something about these institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. They're not doing their job. Kids are thinking too much, they're too free, they're out of control, so there was a "law and order" campaign. There was another problem. By around 1970, criticism of the Vietnam War was getting beyond legitimate bounds.
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