[[[ 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?
-------------------------------------------------------------
1998-1999, Andrew Lovette.
-------------------------------------------------------------He interrupted her. Close at hand is a stable where two beautiful ponies are kept. They are snowy white, and are consecrated to the goddess Ku-wanon, the deity of mercy, who is the presiding genius of the temple. They are in the care of a young girl, and it is considered a pious duty to feed them. Pease and beans are for sale outside, and many devotees contribute a few cash for the benefit of the sacred animals. If the poor beasts should eat a quarter of what is offered to them, or, rather, of what is paid for, they would soon die of overfeeding. It is shrewdly suspected that the grain is sold many times over, in consequence of a collusion between the dealers and the keeper of the horses. At all events, the health of the animals is regarded, and it would never do to give them all that is presented. On their return from the garden they stopped at a place where eggs are hatched by artificial heat. They are placed over brick ovens or furnaces, where a gentle heat is kept up, and a man is constantly on watch to see that the fire neither burns too rapidly nor too slowly. A great heat would kill the vitality of the egg by baking it, while if the temperature falls below a certain point, the hatching process does not go on. When the little chicks appear, they are placed under the care of an artificial mother, which consists of a bed of soft down and feathers, with a cover three or four inches above it. This cover has strips of down hanging from it, and touching the bed below, and the chickens nestle there quite safe from outside cold. The Chinese have practised this artificial hatching and rearing for thousands of years, and relieved the hens of a great deal of the monotony of life. He would not have it in the scabbard, and when I laid it naked in his hand he kissed the hilt. Charlotte sent Gholson for Ned Ferry. Glancing from the window, I noticed that for some better convenience our scouts had left the grove, and the prisoners had been marched in and huddled close to the veranda-steps, under their heavy marching-guard of Louisianians. One of the blue-coats called up to me softly: "Dying--really?" He turned to his fellows--"Boys, Captain's dying." Assuming an air of having forgotten all about Dick¡¯s rhyme, he went to his place in the seat behind Jeff and the instant his safety belt was snapped Jeff signaled to a farmer who had come over to investigate and satisfy himself that the airplane had legitimate business there; the farmer kicked the stones used as chocks from under the landing tires and Jeff opened up the throttle. ¡°Yes,¡± Dick supplemented Larry¡¯s new point. ¡°Another thing, Sandy, that doesn¡¯t explain why he¡¯d take three boys and fly a ship he could never use on water¡ªwith an amphibian right here.¡± Should you leave me too, O my faithless ladie? And years of remorse and despair been your fate, That night was a purging. From thenceforward Reuben was to press on straight to his goal, with no more slackenings or diversions. "Is that you, Robin?" said a soft voice; and a female face was seen peeping half way down the stairs. HoMElãñÔóÂÜÀ³ó
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