NEWSWEEK - February 3, 1997
THE CASH MACHINE
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WHY BILLIONAIRE GEORGE SOROS IS TRYING TO END THE DRUG WAR AS WE KNOW IT.
By Howard Fineman
George Soros was born in Budapest, so he can't run for president. But if he ever did, he'd have no trouble handling one of the media's inevitable questions. "On the rare occasions when I smoked marijuana," he told NEWSWEEK with a chuckle, "I inhaled." Americans are dangerous absolutists on the topic, he says. "There is a totalitarian mentality here with regard to drugs. I've engaged against that mentality in other countries, and I've decided to engage it here." Warning to all drug-war "czars" and their backers: Soros is Engaged. The billionaire financier and philanthropist is turning his attention from building "open societies" in Eastern Europe. in his adopted home, he's attacking the notion that courts and cops can solve the drug problem. By all means condemn drugs in the home and in the school, says Soros. But he wants to allow for the medicinal use of marijuana and would like the country to consider whether treating drug use as a medical problem, rather than a criminal one, isn't a better course. You ne
ed education, and better relations between parents and children." he told NEWSWEEK in a rare interview. "But you can express all the social opprobrium you need without criminalization." Soros is putting his money where his views are. Considered the most prodigious individual giver in the world, Soros doles out $350 million a year from an estimated annual income of $1 billion, which is derived from currency trading and other activities of the investment "hedge" fund he's headed since 1969. Since 1994 he's committed $15 million to drug-study programs in the U.S., and last year gave nearly $1 million in personal (non-tax-deductible) contributions to support the successful "medical use" ballot initiatives in California and Arizona. He's hired some of the leading theoreticians of the "decriminalization" movement to staff the foundations he supports. But it's not just money that makes Soros formidable. He has an almost feral instinct for knowing when a government - or a governing idea - has become too divorced fro
m reality to survive. Outlasting the Nazis as a boy and fleeing the communists as a youth turned Soros into a connoisseur of governmental self-delusion. Toppling regimes is his speciality. He's made money that way, "investing" in pro-market forces in Eastern Europe such as private banks and business schools long before communism collapsed; selling sterling short (and making billions) when U.K. leaders - playing to Britannic pride - overestimated the pound's value in the currency "basket" of Europe. So it's worth listening when he describes the drug war as a fantasy. He concedes that his firsthand knowledge of the "drug culture" is limited to Taos ski bums and a tennis partner who had to quit a tournament to "dry out." But the country, he says, "is refusing to recognize the fact that the policy id doing more harm than the drugs themselves" by filling prisons with nonviolent users and keeping the drug trade in the criminal underground. If those argument gain currency - and Soros has the cash to make sure they
get a hearing - then there could be a move toward some legalization, beginning with making medical marijuana available for the sick and dying. That would mean that Soros had gotten his money's worth - for better or for worse.
