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."