From the Easy Chair

The Drug War

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 166-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161DJ206

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161DJ206, The Drug War, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 318, July the sixth, 1994.

Douglas Murray, Otto Scott, Mark Rushdoony and I will now turn to another subject, the drug war.

I think when the history books of the latter part of the 20th century are written some 40 and 50 years from now a great deal of attention may be given to the drug war. I think the attention will be due to the fact that the drug war has been so deadly to the freedom of the people and to our laws. The drug war has been used to destroy our freedom. It began under Bennett as drug czar and has continued and accelerated.

In the name of seizing drugs, a man’s car, boat, plane, house or whatever can be confiscated even if not a trace of drugs are found. This is the kind of thing that has been taking place. The court has ruled, the Supreme Court, that the properties of those who are innocent should be refunded, but it has not happened. We have created a super agency which is now a menace to our freedom. So the question is: Is it worth the price?

Now in the Bible drugs are dealt with in that what the law says, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” the word is in the Septuagint, pharmacoi from whence we get our word pharmacy. It has reference to a poisoner, someone whole sold drugs that could be used to affect the minds of people or to kill them.

So certainly we, as Christians, would have to say we would like to be against drugs. But if a state is using drugs to enhance its power and to strip the people of their liberties, it is a very, very difficult decision. What should we do?

Douglas?

[ Murray ] Well, drugs have become the new weapon of mass destruction, cultural destruction. The coast guard says that they are only interdicting or stopping about 10 to 15 percent of the drugs that actually enter the country. Periodically, usually it is just before budget time when Congress is going over the budgets of the drug enforcement agencies and so forth, there is always magically a big drug bust and they were heralding one today where they stopped two tons of cocaine from coming into the country. And two tons is a miniscule amount. It is nothing. They are shipping hundreds and hundreds of tons into this... into his country. I mean, people have no idea the magnitude of this operation. It is big, big business. And it is world wide business. There is a large number of countries that our tax dollars go to in foreign aid and we are absolutely... we are actually subsidizing our own destruction in this country and it gives rise to what was it? {?} said that if we give them enough rope they will hang themselves. And we are doing exactly that. We are hanging ourselves with this drug thing.

The ... the effectiveness of the drug war has waned in the minds of the public and I thought it was very coincidental that about the time that they came up with the confiscation laws, they didn’t start out with the confiscation laws right away. The drug war started a few years before that and when they began to realize, when the officials began to realize that the public was coming to the realization that the drug war was not effective, it wasn’t slowing things down, that the average person in the street knew somebody’s kids who were on drugs or knew somebody, a business acquaintance or associate that was on drugs, that is when they... they became afraid that Congress was going to cut off their money.

So that is when the confiscation thing came up, because that was the ... going to be the new method of funding. And now it is the preferred method of funding. They don’t have to worry about what Congress is going to do anymore, because they now have the ultimate weapon of funding themselves. And it is going to be a self perpetuating bureaucracy. It is just a perfect set up. And, you know, it goes right back to the... to the axiom that if you want ... if you ask government to get rid of something you will automatically get more of it. And it doesn’t make any difference what it is, whether it is drugs or teen pregnancy or ... or unwed mothers or whatever. If you ask the government to reduce the numbers, you will automatically get more of it. And there is ... I don’t think there are any exceptions to that rule that I have seen in anything that the government has attempted to do.

[Scott] Well it began a long time ago, really, before the drugs. It began with permitting the IRS to collect taxes by violating the Constitution. First of all, by forcing the citizenry to provide evidence against themselves, secondly, by giving the agents the authority to write out an arrest warrant on their own and, third, giving them the authority to confiscate in the name of collection, and forcing the citizens to prove that the confiscation was unjust or incorrect. All of these are upside down inversions of Constitutional rights and restrictions on government. And when these continued through the years without any real objection by the courts or the people, they expanded the method into the drug agency and they expanded from the drug agency to virtually every other agency in the government, the fish and game authority, the EPA, the whole bureaucracy now is empowered to confiscate at will.

One fellow lost his boat because he had one fish over the limit. They took the whole boat. Took the whole boat. They have taken planes. They have taken homes. Now if some individual applies for a mortgage and overstates his assets in order to get the mortgage, he can lose his home even after he pays for it for committing an offense on a federal document. So it has gotten beyond the drug war. But the drug war has been the excuse to expand it everywhere. It is like cancer. It is like bureaucratic cancer running loose.

[ Murray ] Well, they saw that it worked so well for the IRS. Why not replicate it in all the other agencies? But it still goes back to the thing that... these agencies become self perpetuating and self funding. They no longer have to rely on appropriations from Congress to run their operations.

[ Scott ] Well, it is interesting that so little has been said. The newsletters have written about it. I wrote about it on one occasion and David Knowles called me and had lunch with me. The ... there have been others that have written about it. There are now newsletters that don’t do anything else, but tell you of the latest wrinkle. And we have... we are running into the business of money laundering which nobody is ... can quite define. We are also ... we also have a problem with telephone and computer privacy and fax privacy where the latest head of the FBI says that he wants to have the ability to listen to any conversation at all, any electronic conversation.

Well, it is a rather strange thing when the government official believes the has a right to eavesdrop on the conversations of the people and says this without being reproached, without any editorials, without the ACLU which is a great fraud. It is only concerned with evidences of Christianity. It uses blood hounds to find that. It is not interested in any genuine liberty as a people. It is staffed by individuals who have never been associated with any liberty on anyone’s part except their own. But under the rubric of drugs, drugs has been the one word that has really thrown a veil of permission over all these terrible things. And the Supreme Court sits there. That is not a court. Courts are supposed to protect the liberties of the people.

[ Rushdoony ] Courts now protect the liberty of the state.

[ Scott ] They expand the authority of the state.

[ M Rushdoony ] Well, the whole idea of a war on drugs may not be possible because drugs are essentially a moral problem. They have been around for a long time. We are here in the gold rush country and any historical part of town they will point out when the Chinese section wherein when the opium dens were. Opium came over with the Chinese. I don’t know what was available before that. Marijuana has been around for a long time. It was very common, I know, in the music industry many, many years before a lot of people even knew what it was.

We hear a lot about educating children about drugs. A child would have to be rather dense not to have gotten the message by now about what drugs do and that drugs are... are harmful to you and... and everything else. I think people know what drugs are all about and what they do and all the problems that drugs bring.

The desire for drugs is somewhat suicidal. And if someone is willing to take drugs, the government telling you no, you might get arrested in case you do it, isn't going to do any good. The people who use drugs are not intimidated by the fact that it is illegal. The fact that they use drugs means that their life has gotten... gone beyond the point where they care what the local police officer happens to think or what he might do to them.

So I don’t think any of these is going to get at the root cause of drugs and the problem is already... was long ago too big, I think for law enforcement to really control. So a lot like... we have already pointed out. Essentially what they are doing is they are controlling everybody under this supposition that they are going to do something about the drugs and they are not touching, really, the root of the problem at all. They are not even doing much at the top of the heap. They are barely touching the flow of drugs. Drugs are easily available and commonly available. So I guess it is compared, at least the availability of drugs, to the availability of alcohol during prohibition.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I the mid 30s when I was a student there were a group of us who were always together and this other young man who was very close to me and very thoroughly a Christian, his cousin and her parents came to the city and she joined our circle, naturally. Well, it was interesting to me. This was a girl with unlimited money. Mid 30s were a time of very great depression and by the mid 30s the unemployment had increased five fold from what it was when Roosevelt took office. And yet there was basically a positive and a hopeful note among the people.

Well, this girl who had a magnificent foreign roadster. I don’t recall the name of it, a variety, an imported thing, just to go someplace with her heads would turn as she drove by. She was inclined to be imperious, unrestrained in what she did. Her father and mother indulged her. But what startled me was she became interested in this one young man who was a drummer in a prominent band which was at that time in the city. And then she found out he was using marijuana and she dismissed him with contempt. She told him to crawl back under his rock that anyone who had to have drugs to enjoy life was the worst kind of creep imaginable.

Now today that girl would be a part of the drug culture, but at that time to her it was contemptible. It represented very clearly something suicidal and she liked life. The point I am trying to make is that there was even in that girl a element of Christian faith, some relic of it. She basically affirmed the values of a Christian culture so that to her what this young man represented was the world of death. She was totally contemptuous of him.

Today she would be a part of that drug culture, because there has been a difference. There is a growing social suicide. And we are not going to turn back this tide with a war against drugs such as Washington is conducting, but only by a restoration of a strong Christian faith and a family culture.

[ Scott ] Well, we are taking the prohibition route, only it is worse than prohibition.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Because during prohibition they didn’t use the search for alcohol as an excuse to seize people’s homes.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] They would drag people out who had a still or were bootlegging. They sent them to the penitentiary, but they didn’t take their homes and they didn’t beggar their families. They didn’t throw their wives and children out into the street. So we have gone a long way down in terms of what can be done to us and by the caliber of the people who do it. But let’s look at it. Suppose they legalized drugs. At this point if they kept the same power in every other area it wouldn’t make any difference to the rest of us. My feeling is that this is a big and numerous country and that we can afford a lost generation. Let them go to hell. God let’s them go to hell. And we can’t stop them. You can’t people who want to go hell.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now I was told by the seamen—and I had not been to Persia, Iran. I have never been there. But there is a port and I knew fellows who sailed in and out. And in World War II Persia or Iran still had legal opium. And I was told that the use of opium there was of a comparable to alcohol here. They didn't have alcohol, but they had opium and that about one out of 10 would be addicted, which is about the same percentage that get hooked on booze, one out of 10. The other nine can drink or not drink and generally stop drinking to excess when they are in their middle twenties.

And I talked to a high school counselor in San Diego on the subject of drugs. And he said that most of them quit in their middle twenties. He said there are some who get hooked, about one out of 10, but he said most of them turn away and get involved in other things.

[ Murray ] Well, they claim that the use of alcohol among high... high school students shot way up.

[ Scott ] Well, it could have. But, again, I have known very heavy drinkers in youth who stopped. And get married, get kids, get responsible, lead different lives. So I don’t think it necessarily follows that everybody would succumb and stay, become a wreck. But what are we going to do about the runaway government?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] That is really...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ... the problem.

[ Murray ] That is the unfortunate residue from the problem.

[ Scott ] Yes. The problem has escalated into a different problem and that is the general idea that it is the duty of the government to govern your private behavior. We have got... I... I... I saw C Span a few weeks back Representative Waxman and his colleagues talking to the tobacco company executives. They spoke to them as ... in tones that I never used on a dog, because if you use that tone of voice to a dog, the poor dog will grovel and suffer.

[ Murray ] Or bite you.

[ Scott ] Or bite you, yes, but if it is your own dog, the dog will suffer when you talk to him that way. He is being punished. They spoke to these men at though they were dirt. And they accused them of peddling a product which killed, said Waxman, 400,000 people a year. Now if you believe in that, I have got some other things I want to tell you. That is nonsense. Tobacco has never been good for you. But it has been a solace for millions of people for centuries.

[ Murray ] {?} then you don't agree with Singapore’s approach to the drug problem.

[ Scott ] Well, we have got a lot of people. We would have to execute a great many. We don’t execute them for murder. I don’t see why we should execute them for drugs.

[ Murray ] How many would it take?

[ Scott ] I don’t know. We could try it. I... I said it on occasion, but I don’t really mean it. But I am more worried about the government than I am about the drugs.

[ Rushdoony ] I would agree. In one area after another Washington is trying to regulate our life. Tobacco is one. Now I have never even tried smoking, but I don't see why if people want to they shouldn’t have the freedom to do so. And it isn’t as though there has been a deception on a part of anyone in promoting tobacco. Before I was born cigarettes were known as coffin nails. And they have had one such term after another for them for generations.

But we are going to try to regulate that. Drugs, of course, we have been talking about that. Asbestos, the vast campaign against asbestos and yet what is behind the walls can’t harm anyone and the whole thing has been demonstrated to be fallacious. But, of course, nobody is making New York City which transmits water to the millions of water users with asbestos pipes where there is a real leakage of asbestos into the water, they are not being asked to do anything by way of altering that.

You can go on down the line where the state is own trying to regulate our private life. And without any warrant, trying to regulate our health. So the drug war is one aspect of a growing temper in Washington that you and I don’t have a common sense to come in out of the rain.

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] I have no objection to anybody smoking all they want. I don’t particular enjoy it if they are around me, but I have the freedom to say so.

[ Scott ] Since I smoked for many years I gave it up. I don’t recall when I gave it up, because I don’t keep track of dates of that sort. I don’t think they are important. I ate some hard candy for about a month or so. And I was very surprised at how much ... what... what to do with my hands. I had more to do with less after I quit smoking because all the motions that go through. But it wasn’t any terrible thing. It wasn’t difficult to give up and I have never regretted ... I... I don’t care about it today. But it doesn't bother me if somebody smokes. That is... you know, I grew up with my grandfather’s corn cob pipe and my father’s cigars. It would be kind of late in the day for me to get holy about this.

[ Murray ] But pretty soon the government will rule ice cream is a drug.

[ Scott ] Well, there is very few things that they don’t lecture us about on the air.

[ Murray ] Oh, constant day and night.

[ M Rushdoony ] Now they are going after... they are also going after noise pollution. The city in the Bay area has... has bound... has banned these leaf blowers...

[ Scott ] Really.

[ M Rushdoony ] ... because of the objectionable amount of noise.

[ Scott ] I see.

[ M Rushdoony ] They are now have been talking about going after lawn mowers because the air pollution produced by lawn mowers.

[ Scott ] Well, wood fires in fireplaces are banned in some places in New England.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I got a letter, an angry letter from a professor in Colorado on the James I book. If you recall I used one Saxon word in the very last paragraph. And he accused me of visual pollution. .

[ Murray ] Picky, picky, picky.

[ Scott ] One word.

[ Murray ] There is a big herd of busy bodies out there.

[ Scott ] I hadn't asked him to read the book.

[ Murray ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] Did you tell him that?

[ Scott ] No. As a matter of ... I forget. I don’t know whether I answered him or not. I ... I thought he just as well let him suffer.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the drug war today is an ugly thing because it is striking at our liberties and the decision of the court with regard to the innocent victims of these seizures is being disregarded .

[ Scott ] It is amazing.

[ Rushdoony ] So...

[ Scott ] That... that whole... whole families are impoverished.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Law no longer means anything. A purely bureaucratic group can seize properties and defy the legitimate government of the United States when it chooses.

[ Scott ] Well, the statutory law regarding criminal offenses up until now has been confined to imprisonment and or fines, supposedly kept within reasonable bounds. Now untrue, not untrue, but strange, unlimited penalties are supposed to be unconstitutional. In the case of the confiscations the individual is not arrested, is not charged, is not tried, is not convicted. It is just that the property is taken.

Now I don’t know how the courts have allowed this.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I have never heard the question propounded in a single interview anywhere either in print or on film or in sound. It is as though suddenly the media has had its throat cut and is afraid to talk.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] You know, in some states they have ruled that prisoners in prison that it is cruel and unusual punishment to withdraw television from them, to withdraw their favorite foods from their diet and so forth and why is it not cruel and unusual punishment to impoverish people and take away whatever they accumulate? In effect, you are taking away the product, you know the productive portion of their life.

[ Scott ] Well, you are ruining them.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And... and it seems as though there has been some sort of a sideways slip and we have become irrational... an irrational nation.

[ Rushdoony ] Douglas, why don’t you call attention to the two extremes in dealing with the situation.

[ Murray ] Well, everybody has an opinion about what to do about the drug war. Everybody is confused why there seems to be no resolution to it. The opinions that are held by some people, Libertarians, in particular, is that drugs should be legalized. It could be eliminated by taking the profit out of it on the one hand. On the other hand, you have the draconian approach where under MacArthur’s administration right after World War II it was a capital crime to deal in drugs and you would be shot in front of a military firing squad. This only took place over a period of about a year immediately after the end of World War II when MacArthur was running Japan. And then we have a more recent example in Singapore whereas if you have it in your possession you are put to death. But I don’t think either approach is going to solve the problem. People themselves, just like any alcoholic or any other person who becomes dependent, substance dependent, they have to make the decision themselves that there is good reason not to do it anymore. And it is, you know, some... the ... some people say let’s... it can only be eliminated through education. Well, we have tried the education as, Mark, as you pointed out before. There isn’t ... I don't think there is anybody alive in this country that doesn't realize that drugs are ... aren’t bad for you. But people need to find another ... those people that are on drugs need to find another compelling reason not to do drugs anymore. And that is what we have to explore.

[ Scott ] Some of the affects are very interesting. Anyone who informs on somebody who is dealing in drugs can get 25 percent of the value of the confiscation and the percentage of the other percentages go to the judge and go to the police. Now if you ship a package though the UPS it is likely to be opened and if there is any contraband in it, you can be reported and they get a reward. And I had a package, a very large package delivered to me a few months ago and it had been opened and the packing slip had been taken out and examined and put back in a very clumsy fashion. And I called the UPS to asked them what was this all about. The fellow laughed, “Oh, ho, ho,” he said, “Why,” he said, “there is a hundred different reasons why we open packages: contraband. There is this, there is that. There is all kinds of things.” And he felt he was perfectly entitled to do so.

The same thing applied or a similar thing applies if you buy an airplane ticket with cash. They are likely to call the drug inspector because you are suspicious. Cash is suspicious. Or if the police stop you and you have a large amount of cash they will confiscate it.

[ Murray ] Yeah, but the bottom line is that none of these thing are working. They have been tried and they have been in force now for quite a number of years and they are not working.

[ Scott ] They are working for the police.

[ Murray ] True.

[ Scott ] And they are working for the informers.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And we are getting more informers all the time. What we are talking about here is the spread of corruption in the name of the law.

[ Murray ] Yeah. This is true. You know, you are creating a self perpetuating bureaucracy and it is... it is boot strapping itself. It is... it is feeding on itself, but the ultimate goal here is you can ... you can eliminate the ... the drug problem by eliminating the demand, by giving people some

[ Scott ] Well, you can...

[ Murray ] Incentive to get off it.

[ multiple voices ]

[ Scott ] You could utilize it, couldn’t you?

[ Murray ] You can... you can diminish, if not remove the reason for the existence of this bureaucracy.

[ Scott ] You could legalize drugs, but you would still have the complications going on for other reasons.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the price of radical controls is that you create a powerful state. And you destroy freedom.

[ Scott ] That is the point.

[ Rushdoony ] But the price of radical freedom is also serious. Most people have no idea because they have no real contact with those Islamic cultures that are given to the free use of one or another form of narcotic, hashish is the most common.

And the results are deplorable. And the children start out as capable and intelligent at school as anyone else, but they wind up the same dull witted people as their parents because of hashish. And the countries that are given to the free use of hashish simply don't have the mentality to compete with the rest of the world, because they are in never, never land. So it has been very destructive when you have had radical controls and radical freedom. And the only thing that I feel will bring the drug problem under control is when people have a faith for living.

[ Murray ] {?}

[ Rushdoony ] If you enjoy life, why in the world cloud your mind with narcotics?

[ Scott ] It is very difficult to enjoy life in a slave state.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I just got through writing on the basis of a book about Rome. I think you have got it recently. And my conclusion was that when the Romans lost their liberty they ceased to want to live, because life was no longer of any value. If we continue to live under a government that is going to govern us every waking minute of our life, life is not going to be worth living.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Man is a fallen creature. He does have a bent to evil. But he is also God’s creature. And anything that deforms him in terms of that does have its effect.

One of the most interesting things I ever encountered as a student years ago was to realize that as Calvinism waned in this country the church became feminized. The percentage of women increased steadily. And even a feminist writer, Mary Douglas...

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] ...in The Feminization of American Culture makes that point.

[ Scott ] Anne Douglas.

[ Rushdoony ] So it has been... Anne Douglas.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] A couple of generations now. So that you cannot tamper with God’s purpose without serious harm to me and women.

[ Scott ] Well, that is a very interesting point, because men are under attack.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] At this point. And the feminization of American culture has continued since the period that Anne Douglas wrote about.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...into the Feminists who most of the ones I have seen don’t have to worry about men.

[ Murray ] Well, it is another dead end street. You know, the feminists attack men because men have not solved all of the ills of the worlds. And, therefore, they want to turn at the wheel. But I think it was the movie actor Jack Nicholson made the remark that give women what they want and they will destroy themselves. And, you know, it is another dead end.

[ Scott ] Well, it falls into the same category as the drug issue and the cigarette issue and the rest of the behavioral sciences, if you want to call it that. There is a genuine effort under way to control every human being in the country. And we are just beginning to realize this.

[ Rushdoony ] We are going to be asked, if the president has his way, to carry an ID card everywhere.

[ Scott ] We might as well. We have got a social security card everywhere. Our bank ... our bank’s microfilm our accounts. All our financial records are available to any official who wants to call them up.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] And we understand that you can’t put out a fax without your source on it. It has to have your telephone number and so forth.

[ Murray ] I would view with some alarm the information super highway.

[ Scott ] Yes, because...

[ Murray ] ...because it is going to reach into every home, every bank account and that information is going to be disseminated to every government agency.

[ Scott ] Well, power is a drug, too, isn’t it?

[ Murray ] The ultimate aphrodisiac as Kissinger says.

[ Scott ] Well, he wouldn’t need one.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the culture that revolts against God commits suicide. I was very interested in some of the thing that are coming out of late and E. Michael Jones in Degenerate Moderns calls attention to it. That they are now admitting what was not stated earlier that Nietzsche went out systematically to a brothel, asked of a diseased girl so that he might infect himself.

[ Scott ] Really?

[ Rushdoony ] Because he was at war against God and therefore he was at war with hell and with everything good.

[ Scott ] That is astonishing.

[ Rushdoony ] So that is a startling fact and it hasn’t come out from Christian sources. It has been the scholars who are Nietzschians who have called attention to that fact. It was a part of his war against God.

[ Scott ] Well, it is a also {?}, isn’t it? The French thinker, so-called.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Who got... did he get AIDS or ... or not? I don’t... I don’t know. But certainly made an assiduous effort. And getting AIDS now is almost considered heroic.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I called attention to that earlier this evening and it is startling. They are treated as heroes. They wear it, as one said, as a badge of honor.

[ Scott ] Some honor.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Well...

[ Rushdoony ] All they that hate me love death, the Bible says.

[ Scott ] It really, really does. And we are seeing it. Of course, to me the drugs are relatively minor compared with the growth of tyranny, because tyranny oppresses everybody. The druggies kill themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] I think it would be very easy to document that as you have tyranny people will resort to liquor or to drugs or to whatever they can to drown themselves in it.

[ Scott ] No question.

[ Rushdoony ] ... to obliterate their minds.

[ Murray ] Yeah, look at Russia, you know...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Murray ] ...before the ... the Gorbachev I met a couple. They were both school teachers that took a year’s sabbatical and they traveled through Russia and they said at every home and they visited a lot of private residences because they used ham radios as their entrée, amateur radio. And they had contacted all of these people before they went over there. So they had a long itinerary that stretched all the way across Russia where they could get into private homes and talk to the people. Ad in every case the first thing to come out was the vodka. And every, you know, and... and they were just anesthetizing themselves.

[ Scott ] Yeah, well, without vodka and cigarettes, I don’t think they would have lasted 70 years.

[ Murray ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] The...

[ Scott ] I am Serious.

[ Rushdoony ] The state controlled sale of vodka to the people in Russia is a major source of income and it would be hauled into a public square by trucks. And people would line up knowing there would be a sale there waiting for the truck. And as soon as they received their bottle they drank it on the spot, because they did not what to share it with anyone. They would walk to too many steps and collapse, passed out.

Oblivion was what they wanted. This was under Brezhnev.

[ Murray ] There was one of the Russian leaders that made a... a try at getting rid of public drunkenness, because it didn’t look good for tourists.

[ Scott ] Gorbachev.

[ Murray ] Yeah.

[ Scott ] Gorbachev.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Gorbachev put prohibition in. It was one of the reasons he lost.

You know, working against human nature is not a very easy task.

[ Murray ] Communism always has.

[ Scott ] I know and our government has undertaken this task. It is going to change the nature of people. And it is not going to succeed, but in the process it is going to damage a lot of people.

[ Murray ] Well, has there ever been in the entire recorded history of man in this earth any government that has ever outlasted the people?

[ Scott ] No. No. No and I... I had that exchange once with a liberal, a very well known liberal. I said, “Between the two propositions, one that the government will change the people and the other that the people will change the government, I will take the latter.” And he said, “Oh, I hope not.”

[ Murray ] They all live in that dream.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, the government is their god. They do believe in salvation by the state and therefore good or bad the state must continue. Its power is too important to them.

[ Scott ] Well, look at the cigarette war. First they are going to stop people from smoking and, secondly, they are going to tax them enough to pay for the health plan.

[ Murray ] Well, thought out.

[ Rushdoony ] Meanwhile they are subsidizing the growth of tobacco.

[ Scott ] Yes. You know...

[ M Rushdoony ] They did the same thing with gasoline. They had to convince us that gasoline and automobiles were an evil as they progressively convinced people that gasoline was the problem and automobile were the problem, they progressively yet added a tax on to it. The justification came when the tax came. Why, we have to tax this thing. It is now something like 32 cents a gallon in taxes. Gas just can’t go under a dollar a gallon. It couldn’t... it would be under a dollar a gallon if we just had a normal sales tax.

[ Scott ] Well, as far as the oil companies are concerned it is pretty cheap. It is cheaper than most other large industrial countries. But nobody ever considers that.

[ Murray ] A third of the cost of diesel is taxes.

[ Scott ] Now they have passed a new regulation to the effect that all ... we are going to have to use ethanol. Now ethanol is very bad for the engine, but the {?} brothers who have ADM, Archer Daniel Midland, great friends of the Soviet Union and very, very close to the administration, to all administrations because they are one of the great money raising groups in the country. And they control 60 percent of all the ethanol sold in the United States. And they have just gotten thought that new regulation mandating ethanol in the gasoline.

So the... the... the confiscations, the fines, the additional officials necessary to administrate all of this, the taxes it is like the cat and rat farm.

[ Murray ] How are they going to... keep all of the drunks from siphoning the fuel out of people’s tanks when they are parked?

[ Scott ] I have no idea.

[ Rushdoony ] I think the suicidal aspect of the use of drugs is apparent in the fact that there is always a tremendous demand for whatever new manufactured drug appears which is very powerful and often fatal. So the suicidal aspect comes out in the demand for such drugs.

[ Scott ] All addiction is a sort of a self...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] ...injury.

[ Murray ] It is gluttony.

[ Scott ] It is gluttony.

[ Murray ] The sin of gluttony.

[ Scott ] That is true.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, let’s say...

[ Scott ] It is one of the... one of the deadly sins.

[ Rushdoony ] Let’s say substance addiction.

[ Scott ] Substance addiction.

[ Rushdoony ] Because some of us are addicted to loving our wives, to good food...

[ Scott ] Books.

[ Rushdoony ] Books, yes.

[ Scott ] Never mind books. Ok?

[ Murray ] Well, there is an awful lot of questions in people’s minds. I think, you know the... the public will to solve the drug problem, I think, is virtually melted away. The... the public has become sort of a disinterested bystander.

[ Scott ] Well, the machinery is worse than the problem. It has... it has created a nightmare worse than the problem. And all you have to do is give mediocre men a noble sounding reason to kick your brains out and they will really enjoy themselves. I will never get over if Representative Waxman looking past that enormous nose down at the drug... at the tobacco men. I will never understand why none of these men ever get up and walk over and smack one of those representatives or senators in the nose.

[ Murray ] There is probably a law. They would send them to prison.

[ Scott ] Well, so what? It would be worth it. Just for the lesson it would give. They weren’t elected to abuse the citizens of this country.

[ Murray ] Well, it is open season. The administration declared open season on the tobacco companies. So, you know, little... little guys like Waxman that suddenly get... you know, they get bigger than life, you know?

[ Scott ] Oh, you have the legal... you have the legal activity. I mean, what is the crime?

[ Murray ] It is not politically correct. The government says so. That is the crime. It doesn’t have to be codified. You don’t have to write it down in a book anywhere. It is against the law. If it is against the will of the administration it is automatically against the law.

[ Rushdoony ] Can you imagine a Walter Chrysler sitting and taking the abuse that those men did?

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] It is a different generation.

[ Scott ] It is. That is the reason when I bring it up. I reflect my time. If a fellow got too far out of line we used to belt him.

[ Rushdoony ] Walter Chrysler...

[ Scott ] It was very {?}.

[ Rushdoony ] ... did not put up with any nonsense from any bureaucrat.

[ Scott ] Not from General Johnson, anyway.

[ Rushdoony ] No. His kind is gone forever, at least for this generation.

[ Scott ] He will come back.

[ Rushdoony ] I hope so and soon.

[ Scott ] You know they will come back. There has never been a government that went too far that didn't find out where it got.

[ Rushdoony ] They will have to stop taking their executives from the Harvard school of business and Stanford and other like places.

[ Scott ] Well, Oxford, you know, with all of it is antiquity, Gibbons said it was not only a waste of time, but it was destructive to the mind.

[ Rushdoony ] Who said that?

[ Scott ] Gibbon.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh.

[ Scott ] The historian.

[ Rushdoony ] Well...

[ Scott ] The had fell for the Marxists and our president went there. I got a copy recently which is sent out by {?}. Do you still get his newsletter?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. I haven't seen the...

[ Scott ] Well, he...

[ Rushdoony ] Anything lately.

[ Scott ] He... he sent out a copy of Clinton’s letter to colonel about how he got out of the draft.

[ Rushdoony ] Oh, yes, that I did see.

[ Scott ] Yes, what a letter.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] It was for the noblest of reasons.

[ Murray ] I never got that letter.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, our time is coming to a close. Any last comments?

[ Murray ] Well, I think in summation, your ... your point about the final resolution of the drug war is within the people themselves. It is not within the government. We... the bad taste in the mouth of the administration and bureaucracy that has been put together and all of their depredations on the liberties of this country will last long after the drug war ceases to be ... or drug use ceases to become a problem. And it will take far longer to rid ourselves of that problem than it will of the drugs themselves.

[ Rushdoony ] Otto.

[ Scott ] Just imagine creating a whole class of informers, what this does to the character of the people.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

Well, the only solution is one that calls for a change in the lives of the people, a will to live rather than a will to death as Proverbs 8:36 says, “All they that hate me love death.” And our age is marked by the will to death. But by the grace of God we are marked by the will to life and therefore we shall come out ahead and it will be Christ’s kingdom that shall prevail. The drug culture is the culture of death.

Well, thank you all for listening and God bless you.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.