Pubdate: Sun, 17 Sep 2000
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2000 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  P.O.Box 15779, Sacramento CA 95852
Feedback: http://www.sacbee.com/about_us/sacbeemail.html
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Forum: http://www.sacbee.com/voices/voices_forum.html
Author: Andy Furillo
Cited: TLC-DPF: http://www.drugpolicy.org/
Related: The Washington Post OPED: 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v97/n000/a03.html
Bookmarks: For George Soros items: http://www.mapinc.org/soros.htm
Proposition 36 items: http://www.mapinc.org/prop36.htm
Also: Proposition 36 website: http://www.drugreform.org/

PHILANTHROPIST CRUSADES AGAINST NATION'S DRUG WAR

The 29th-richest man in the world is putting up hundreds of thousands of 
dollars to make California a prime battleground in the war on drugs, taking 
on an enemy he considers far worse than the ravages of addiction: 
totalitarianism.

A Jew who survived the Nazi occupation of Hungary and an anti-communist who 
fled the subsequent Soviet domination of his native country, George Soros 
believes he's well-qualified to spot a totalitarian mind-set. And he thinks 
he sees one at work in the way the U.S. government is waging the drug war.

In Soros' view, critics of the government's drug policies get branded as 
subversives, people who vote for softening drug use penalties get labeled 
as dupes and tens of thousands of addicts suffering from an illness -- 
addiction -- are treated as criminals.

An international financier and philanthropist worth $4 billion, according 
to Forbes Magazine, Soros has spent $343,333 and committed himself to 
spending hundreds of thousands more on behalf of Proposition 36. The 
November ballot initiative would mandate treatment instead of jail or 
prison for anybody arrested for possession of illegal drugs for personal use.

Soros, who lives and works in New York, has been inundated with interview 
requests this year and is declining them all, according to a spokesperson.

But Ethan Nadelman, the money magnate's point man in the drug debate, said 
Soros' relatively recent political involvement is a natural outgrowth of 
his desire to move substance abuse from the arena of criminal justice to 
that of public health.

"He regards the incarceration (nationwide) of 2 million people overall, and 
a quarter of them on drug charges, as essentially an affront to human 
rights and as foolish, counterproductive public policy," said Nadelman, 
director of the Lindesmith Center, a Soros-funded drug reform institute in 
New York.

This year's California campaign is just the latest counterattack on the 
drug war featuring Soros as a major backer.

In the last four years, he has spent $1.4 million on seven successful drug 
decriminalization campaigns around the country. More than a third of that 
amount went to Proposition 215, the medicinal marijuana initiative approved 
by California voters in 1996.

Soros has given nearly $900,000 more to finance four other drug 
decriminalization efforts on ballots around the country this November -- in 
Massachusetts, Oregon, Utah and Nevada -- on top of California's 
Proposition 36.

The California initiative would require treatment programs for virtually 
anyone convicted of possession of even the hardest drugs, including heroin, 
cocaine, PCP and methamphetamine. It would require the state to spend $120 
million to fund those programs.

The Legislative Analyst's Office estimates that 36,000 California drug 
offenders would be diverted from jails and prisons to treatment after their 
convictions.

The Massachusetts initiative is a virtual carbon copy of the California 
measure. The Oregon and Utah proposals would prevent authorities from 
seizing the assets of drug dealers unless the culprits are convicted. Even 
when forfeitures are allowed, the assets would go to drug treatment in 
Oregon and education in Utah, instead of to law enforcement.

Nevada will vote in November on a clean-up measure to its already-passed 
medical marijuana initiative. In addition to Nevada's earlier measure, past 
successful drug decriminalization measures in the District of Columbia and 
four other states -- Alaska, Arizona, Washington and Oregon -- were 
financed in large part by Soros.

Soros' background hardly suggests he would become a leader in the drug 
decriminalization movement in the United States.

The son of a Budapest lawyer, Soros survived the Nazi occupation thanks to 
his father's ability to pay for hiding places, according to Soros' 
autobiography.

He migrated to England in 1947, graduated from the London School of 
Economics and moved to the United States in the mid-1950s, where he got 
into international finance and became wealthy as a Wall Street arbitrageur. 
In 1970, he set up a $4 million investment fund that has since grown to $12 
billion.

Soros sent shock waves through the financial world on Sept. 16, 1992, when 
he sold short against the British pound and made $1 billion over the course 
of an afternoon.

That huge profit financed Soros' philanthropic work, which exploded across 
the globe during the next several years. And it bankrolled his domestic 
agenda: reform of the nation's welfare, immigration and drug policies.

Over the years, Soros also contributed money to the assisted suicide 
movement; just another reflection, his supporters say, of his concern for 
society's most down and out.

"The great paradox of George Soros is that he understands how society 
operates to produce underdogs," said Craig Reinerman, a UC Santa Cruz 
sociology professor and adviser to Soros on drug policy. "So he uses his 
resources in a way to make the playing field a little more level.

"He doesn't have an orthodox bone in his body," Reinerman added.

Soros' campaign contributions have made him a giant in the national drug 
decriminalization movement, but the issue only occupies a microscopic 
portion of his time and attention, his spokesman said.

Most of Soros' focus is devoted to managing his $12 billion Quantum Fund, 
which requires participants to invest at least $10 million. His remaining 
energy is largely devoted to his philanthropy; his New York-based Open 
Society Institute reports spending $560 million on charitable giving in 
1999 alone.

Some of his fortune paid for textbooks in Kosovo, and for mass exhumations 
in Guatemala to help people identify and properly bury relatives believed 
to have been slain by the country's military regime.

He sponsored international roundtables supporting democracy in Burma. He 
helped fund an anti-carjacking project in South Africa and a mobile library 
in Mongolia.

But it's his stateside attack on government drug policy that has earned him 
the ire of officials such as Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of President 
Clinton's Office of Drug Control Policy; and Joseph Califano, director of 
the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse in New York. It was 
Califano who, in 1996, said California and Arizona voters were "bamboozled" 
when they approved their decriminalization measures.

Such officials favor keeping substance abuse policies strongly linked to 
the criminal justice system. They have labeled Soros a "legalizer" whose 
campaigns could undermine their achievements.

"This is certainly not an evil man," McCaffrey spokesman Bob Weiner said of 
Soros. "But he may not recognize that actually America's drug prevention 
efforts are working, and he may not recognize that legalization will drive 
youth drug use -- and all the harm involved with it -- way up."

Soros stated his position clearly in a February 1997 op-ed article in the 
Washington Post: "The war on drugs is doing more harm to our society than 
drug abuse itself," he wrote.

He described the "drug war" as inimical to the concept of "the open 
society," which is his ideological starting point. The open society theory 
holds that perfection is unattainable and that any government that thinks 
it can attain it is tilting toward totalitarianism.

Such a concept of perfection, he wrote, is inherent in the idea of a 
"drug-free America," which he called "a utopian dream."

"Insisting on the total eradiction of drug use can only lead to failure and 
disappointment," Soros wrote.

Instead, Soros says the government should concentrate its efforts on 
reducing harm caused by drugs, through methodone maintenance, needle 
exchanges and other means.

Soros' people say he has spent $25 million over the past decade on his 
counterattack to the U.S. drug war, not counting his political spending. 
About $5 million went to needle exchange programs, they say, including $1 
million to the Tides Foundation in San Francisco. Millions more went for 
research and scholarship focusing on what he views as the "criminalization" 
of drug dependency.

His first foray into drug politics did not occur until 1996, with medical 
marijuana initiatives in California, Washington and Arizona.

In the Golden State, it was Soros point man Nadelman who made the first 
contacts on behalf of the billionaire.

In late 1995, Nadelman asked California political consultant Bill Zimmerman 
to get a handle on the sputtering medical marijuana campaign. When 
Zimmerman told him the signature gathering effort was in trouble, Nadelman 
breathed some financial life into the effort with Soros' money. This year, 
as in past campaigns, Soros is joined in financial backing for the efforts 
in California and elsewhere by University of Phoenix founder John Sperling 
and Progressive Insurance President Peter Lewis.

Lewis could not be reached for comment, but Sperling said, "Everyone 
realizes the drug war is a fraud."

Soros' past victories and the early polls in California, where the Field 
Poll last month showed Proposition 36 ahead by a 55 percent to 27 percent 
margin, indicate his call for drug policy reform is getting a favorable 
reception from the public.

"I look forward to the day," Soros wrote in the Washington Post article, 
"when the nation's drug control policies better reflect the ideals of an 
open society." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake