GEORGE SOROS'S LONG STRANGE TRIP

A Philanthropist Defies Drug War Orthodoxy

One thing about George Soros everyone can agree on: He isn't worried what
people think of him. Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad blamed the
American billionaire for nearly ruining Malaysia's economy with massive
currency speculation. Hard-core Russian nationalists decried as "meddling"
his funding of progressive newspapers and institutions in post-Soviet
Russia. Now, it's a prickly domestic cause--drug policy--that has folks
taking aim at this hard-nosed financier and controversial philanthropist.

Soros is the "Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," says Joseph Califano
Jr. of Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse. Clinton Administration drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey won't speak
directly about Soros, but McCaffrey's spokesman, Bob Weiner, was typically
biting in his assessment of the Lindesmith Center, a Soros-backed
institution that serves as a leading voice for Americans who want to
decriminalize drug use: "I'm sure Lindesmith's desire to take us into
nihilism and chaos and to jam our hospital emergency rooms with more users
has some valid purpose." Out on the lunatic fringe, anti-Semitic cult
leader Lyndon LaRouche has labeled Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew, the
mastermind behind a global drug cartel.

As a creative philanthropist, Soros is perhaps best known for his largesse
to causes in Central and Eastern Europe (last year alone he gave away half
a billion in places like Bosnia and Kazakhstan). When in 1994 he chose, as
one of his first domestic programs, to fund efforts to challenge the
efficacy of America's $37-billion-a-year war on drugs, he seemed intent on
proving that he was either a fool or a visionary. It's still too early for
a final judgment. But one thing is clear: He's touched a lot of raw nerves
in challenging a long-entrenched view that the best way to fight drug abuse
is through the criminal justice system.

That tendency was vividly apparent when in June 1998, at the United
Nations' second conference on drugs, General McCaffrey was handed a
perfectly timed two-page advertisement that had just run in the New York
Times. The banner headline read: the global war on drugs is now causing
more harm than drug abuse itself. Eyewitnesses recall the general fuming.
And no wonder: The ad, brainchild of Lindesmith's director, Ethan
Nadelmann, was an open letter signed by a spectacular array of
opinion-makers, including numerous Nobel Prize laureates, former
presidents, prime ministers and former UN Secretary General Javier Perez de
Cuellar.

Soros's efforts to change the terms of the drug dialogue in America--from
exhortation and punishment to treatment and rehabilitation--have ranged
from such grand PR gestures as the Times open letter to the less glamorous
tasks of research and grassroots advocacy. He has funded
methadone-treatment and needle-exchange programs, supported a spate of
successful medical-marijuana ballot initiatives and provided an
institutional home in Lindesmith for Nadelmann, a man whom opponents tag as
America's most unabashed proselytizer for legalization of drugs. Over the
past six years Soros has given some $30 million to drug reform--just 7
percent of his overall domestic giving, but nonetheless a significant sum
in the circumscribed world of drug policy advocacy.

In an interview with The Nation, Soros argued that his interest in shaking
up the conventional wisdom about the war on drugs--and challenging
political leaders to look beyond the zero-tolerance military model--is
entirely consistent with his vision of an "open society." The parent
organization of his worldwide philanthropic operation, the Open Society
Institute (OSI), is founded upon the philosophical premise that nobody has
a monopoly on the truth and that originally well-intentioned government
efforts often turn repressive. "When I started looking to do something in
the United States, [I saw that] one of the areas where policy has
unintended adverse consequences is drug policy," Soros says. "That was the
insight that got me involved." It's hard to argue with the facts he cites:
Back in 1980 the federal government spent $1 billion on drug control and
approximately 50,000 Americans were incarcerated for drug-law violations.
Today Washington spends $18 billion annually, 400,000 people are in jail
for nonviolent drug-related offenses and drugs are still widely available
to anyone who wants them.

Yet Soros is remarkably frank about the fact that he hasn't got all the
answers. "I don't know what the right thing to do is," he said, "but I do
have a very strong conviction that what we are doing [now] is doing an
awful lot of harm." In the name of reducing that harm and learning more
about the problem, Soros is backing a range of organizations and
initiatives that are testing out new ground, without subjecting them to a
rigid ideological litmus test. Still, organizations using Soros money share
certain core principles. Whether they lobby against harsh determinate
sentencing for first-time drug offenders, run needle-exchange programs for
addicts or promote methadone and other drug treatment programs, they reject
the notion that drug users should be treated as criminals.
"Criminalization," says Aryeh Neier, OSI's president (formerly executive
director of Human Rights Watch and of the ACLU), "is a strategy that buys
into the notion that if you lock up enough young black males--for whatever
reason--you will promote public safety."

By far the most conspicuous part of Soros's empire is the Lindesmith
Center. That's largely because it is directed by Nadelmann, who has a knack
for saying things that others can't--or won't--say. Lindesmith is so
integral a part of the Open Society Institute that its offices are mixed in
right along with other Soros ventures like the Soros Documentary Fund and
the Project on Death in America in the midtown Manhattan building that also
houses Soros's business interests.

The two men met in 1992, when Soros was looking to extend his philanthropic
efforts to the United States. Nadelmann was a Princeton professor and one
of the most visible--and provocative--critics of US drug policy. (In 1993
Nadelmann declared, "It's nice to think that in another five or ten
years...the right to possess and consume drugs may be as powerfully and as
widely understood as the other rights of Americans.") Soros invited
Nadelmann to lunch. After further discussions, in 1994 Soros agreed to
create the Lindesmith Center and put Nadelmann at the helm. The center
(named for the late Professor Alfred Lindesmith of Indiana University, the
first prominent US academic to challenge the war on drugs approach) became
the first of what are now dozens of domestic programs run out of OSI.
Today, it has eighteen employees in New York and San Francisco and a modest
budget of $1.7 million.

Although he's still actively managing billions in investments, Soros gives
major face time to the drug reform effort. "My impression of Soros:
extremely smart guy," says Kevin Zeese, a leading drug reform campaigner.
"He can look at situations and be very helpful in figuring out strategies
that make sense." When Zeese was a staffer at the Washington-based Drug
Policy Foundation (DPF), which was, before Lindesmith, the leading
pro-decriminalization advocacy group in the country, he sent Soros a grant
proposal asking him to support lobbying and other advocacy activities.
Soros invited Zeese to breakfast and confessed he didn't know enough about
the policy issues to feel comfortable funding advocacy per se. But if Zeese
was willing to tackle projects such as needle exchange and AIDS
prevention--hands-on treatment as opposed to efforts to change laws--Soros
was in. Zeese later moved on to form his own group, Common Sense for Drug
Policy, which combines advocacy work with support for service-oriented
programs. Last year Soros gave the organization $125,000, a quarter of its
$500,000 budget.

As an alternative to locking people up, most Soros-backed groups advocate
what they call "harm reduction"--a common-sense approach to drug policy
that would nonetheless represent a radical departure from current practice.
"The basic idea," Nadelmann says, "is that you have a fallback strategy for
dealing with people who are engaged in behavior that can be risky or
dangerous. So if you're smoking cigarettes, smoke less or don't smoke
around kids or don't throw your ashes in dry timber. If you're drinking
alcohol, don't drink and drive. You ride a bicycle--use a helmet. That's
harm reduction."

In other words, harm reduction is about accepting certain realities about
substance abuse and then trying to minimize the related harm to everyone.
It accepts that some people will use drugs regardless of the consequences
or penalties. Therefore, the key is to educate the public with accurate
information--not hysterics--and, where that doesn't work, follow up with
treatment. It involves containing and controlling drug use and therefore
its harmful consequences to both the users and others who may be affected
by the abuse--spouses and children, crime victims and so on.

Lindesmith is perhaps the foremost practitioner of this approach, but
Soros's drug reform philanthropy is by no means limited to Lindesmith, and
Nadelmann has played a key role in helping him decide what else to support.
Since 1993, Soros's OSI has committed roughly $11 million to the DPF, which
makes its own grants for needle exchange, women's treatment, drug education
and methadone programs. Other recipients of Soros money include the Harm
Reduction Coalition, an advocacy group with leadership largely made up of
recovering drug abusers; the Research and Policy Reform Center, an OSI
affiliate that works to affect the political process directly, coordinating
medical-marijuana ballot initiatives and pushing for state-level
legislation (such as revising the drastic Rockefeller laws in New York and
expanding access to methadone in Vermont); Drug Strategies, a
mom-and-apple-pie group that promotes treatment, education and prevention;
and the Tides Foundation, a progressive San Francisco-based grant-making
institution that supports needle exchange. Soros has also taken the issue
abroad, giving $3.8 million over the past four years to support
harm-reduction programs in Central and Eastern Europe.

An immediate goal of many organizations devoted to harm reduction is
expanding access to methadone treatment--a program that is seen by skeptics
as just substituting one addiction for another. In response, writing in
Foreign Affairs last year, Nadelmann noted that the "addiction" to
methadone is "more like a diabetic's 'addiction' to insulin than a heroin
addict's to product bought on the street." While methadone has been shown
in scores of studies to be an effective treatment for heroin addiction--and
findings by the National Institute on Drug Abuse show that an intravenous
drug user enrolled in a methadone treatment program is seven times less
likely to become infected with HIV than a person not enrolled in one--it
remains acutely underfunded, with at most 180,000 of the nation's estimated
800,000 heroin users able to get it. Closing this gap has been a top
priority of OSI-funded drug reform organizations, which have pursued it by
lobbying for legislation on methadone maintenance treatment in the eight
states where it is still illegal, participating in conferences and
spearheading public education drives to counter perceptions that methadone
treatment is just drug abuse by another name.

Harm-reduction groups are also fighting to expand needle-exchange programs,
bolstered by research by the federal Centers for Disease Control, which
estimates that half of all new HIV cases stem from use of infected
syringes. No more than an estimated 10 percent of injection drug users have
access to clean-needle programs. (Contaminated needles have created a new
AIDS generation: A 1995 National Academy of Sciences report, which called
for the Surgeon General to lift the federal ban on funding needle-exchange
programs, stated that "more than half of all pediatric AIDS cases reported
in 1993 can be linked to the HIV epidemic among injection drug users.")
Soros has made major grants for needle exchange through the DPF, the Tides
Foundation and the George Williams Fund, which is the principal source of
private funding for needle exchange in the United States as well as in
Central and Eastern Europe.

Critics charge that while harm reduction sounds reasonable, it will only
lead to increased drug use, with all its attendant social ills. "Anything
that becomes more accessible to adults will become more accessible to young
people," notes Dr. Jerome Jaffe, who served as director of the Special
Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention in the Nixon Administration.
"Coming out with a sensible and workable policy is simply avoided in these
very interesting flights of rhetoric Ethan is capable of. He can be an
effective speaker to people who are not fully cognizant of all the problems
we face."

Perhaps the most controversial element of Soros's drug-reform
portfolio--and the one most frequently associated with a pro-legalization
agenda--is the medical-marijuana movement. All told, Soros-backed ballot
initiatives related to marijuana have gone to the people in seven states,
beginning with California's Proposition 215 (where Soros donated $550,000)
and Arizona's Proposition 200 in 1996, where Soros plopped down $430,000
and later tacked on $366,000 to help fortify the initiative, which also
introduced probation and treatment for nonviolent first- and second-time
offenders instead of prison. The California initiative has yet to take
effect because of foot-dragging by conservative state officials. But in
Arizona, since Prop 200 passed, jail rolls have been lightened of hundreds
of drug users and the state has saved more than $2.5 million in prison
costs, according to a recent report by Arizona's Administrative Office of
the Courts.

Moving from grant-making and policy-wonking to passing laws has proven to
be a productive step, but one requiring delicacy. "We are very cautious not
to mix tax deductibles with non-tax deductibles, where you are trying to
influence legislation," Soros says. "We live in a glass bowl, and people
look at you very carefully, so we look at everything very carefully. If
anything, we err on the side of caution." Soros has used his own money to
back these legislative ventures, but it has nevertheless been Nadelmann
brokering many of the crucial deals, bringing in two other businessmen,
Peter Lewis (an insurance magnate from Cleveland) and John Sperling
(founder of the for-profit University of Phoenix), each of whom ponied up
approximately a third of a million dollars.

Nadelmann, 42, is the son of a rabbi. Lean and pale-freckled, with
close-cropped auburn hair and a gray-tinged beard, he speaks with studied
fervor, his voice ringing with conviction, his hands punctuating his
arguments as he parcels out his words. At a typical gathering, Nadelmann
might begin by acknowledging the widespread and often legitimate panic
sparked by drugs: parents' fear of losing their children, the public's
alarm over rampant drug-related crime, the spread of HIV. Quickly, though,
he's challenging his audience to look more closely at positions they have
probably never heard defended with such winning reasonableness: Throughout
history and in all manner of societies, drugs have been present; like it or
not, drugs will always be present. Drug abuse is self-directed behavior,
and you cannot legislate such behavior. ("You shouldn't be arresting people
and taking away their freedom and engaging them in the criminal justice
system unless they really cause some harm to somebody else.") He argues
that the drug war has devastated civil liberties, given police
unprecedented new powers and penalized unevenly the preferred vices of
various ethnic, racial and social groups. He complains that the massive
rise in drug-related incarceration has decimated communities, destroyed
families and put society's most vulnerable people not in a therapeutic
environment but in one that actually fosters long-term drug use and related
violence.

Nadelmann argues that the right of people to self-administer whatever they
want is consonant with the objective of all libertarians, civil and
otherwise. But he dislikes the word "legalize," which he finds needlessly
divisive and somewhat misleading. The use of this term to disparage
reformers reminds Nadelmann of the days when all trade unionists were
labeled Marxists: "It's a pretty systematic effort by the drug warriors to
really ghettoize us and portray us as one extreme," he says. Craig
Reinarman, an OSI drug policy board member and professor of sociology at
the University of California, Santa Cruz, agrees: "The way you hear it from
the drug warriors, you get the vision of vending machines--you go to the
supermarket and ask, 'Where's the crack aisle? Where's the heroin aisle?'"

As a result of attacks like these, Nadelmann has become somewhat of a
pariah to the drug-policy establishment--signaling his effectiveness as a
critic but also the hurdles he must overcome. "The drug czar has refused to
be at any public event where Nadelmann is," says Reinarman. "[McCaffrey] is
probably smart enough to avoid embarrassment." Calvina Fay, deputy
executive director at the Drug Free America Foundation, who has never been
on a panel with Nadelmann, says, "We don't think debating is a very good
idea."

In his florid presentations, Nadelmann occasionally pushes the analogy
envelope, noting, for example, our unwillingness to ban cars, which kill
more people than drugs do. The hyperbole makes academic drug-policy
analysts--generally the middle-grounders of a continuum on which Lindesmith
is seen as extreme--shake their heads. "Advocacy groups like the Lindesmith
Center benefit in terms of charging up the people who are affiliated with
them by seeing this in a sort of good-versus-evil conflict setting...[but]
I'm frustrated to the extent that the whole debate has been polarized,"
says Jonathan Caulkins, a Carnegie Mellon public policy professor and
researcher at RAND's Drug Policy Research Center. "Lindesmith has, in some
cases, blocked practical, incremental improvement because it allows
politicians to posture and to make outrageous statements...in place of
serious thinking."

Critics point out that Nadelmann openly supported legalization in his
pre-Lindesmith days. But he has since had a change of heart (or tactics)
that Soros himself has no trouble accepting as genuine. Nadelmann's
discomfort with prohibition is still apparent, but his language has
softened, and he acknowledges and even promotes the more moderate positions
of other reformers. "Ethan started out with a more radical position than
the one he stands for today," says Soros. "There has been an evolution in
his thinking. Partly because of his role at the Lindesmith Center, he has
evolved and is now looking for more consensual and less ideological ways of
dealing with things." Despite criticism of Nadelmann's approach, Soros has
no intention of backing away from him. "I believe in substance and not
image," says Soros. "If Ethan has an image problem, I think I can live with
it. At the same time, we have constituted an advisory board that represents
a broader range of views, so I want to make sure that I am striking a
balance." Other OSI drug policy advisory board members include three
sociology professors and a professor of public health--and one other figure
as out-front as Nadelmann, Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, famed for his
early advocacy of decriminalization.

If Nadelmann and Soros are going to build any sort of popular movement
around drug policy reform, one challenge they must face is the tension that
persists between the legalization camp and black activists. Rev. Calvin
Butts of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church, for example, says he is for
moving away from harsh penalties for possession, but against legalization.
"There's a sharp debate in the black community regarding legalization,"
says Butts. "Those of us who deal with drug users and see the effects are
opposed to legalization. Often white liberals just don't get it." Deborah
Small, Lindesmith's director of public policy and community outreach, who
is black and Latino, has a similar view. "To the extent there's tension in
the drug-reform movement, it has a lot to do with the fact that the
movement is dominated by white liberals whose principal issue has to do
with legalization, particularly of marijuana," says Small, who was formerly
legislative director at the New York Civil Liberties Union, where she
worked with Nadelmann on changes in New York's harsh Rockefeller drug laws.
"That doesn't have resonance in the African-American community, [where] the
principal issues have to do with incarceration and punitive policies....
Legalization is not considered a legitimate option in the African-American
community. With the alcohol and tobacco problems we face, legalization is
seen as another form of genocide against communities of color. It is not
enough to say you should be against the war on drugs. Removing that is not
going to make the situation better unless you're talking about taking money
from the war on drugs and using it for services so people don't return to
drugs or drug-selling."

Small notes that Soros is, by definition, removed from some of the
practical effects of the drug problem. "A month ago, we had a meeting at
his estate--it was nice being up there; he has a beautiful home," she
recalls. "That night--I live in Brooklyn near the projects--I heard
gunshots. One of the things I couldn't help thinking about is that [Soros]
doesn't have that experience. He doesn't have to hear gunshots. The drug
war has a different meaning for me.... And yet I think he's a lot more
sensitive than a lot of people who are disconnected from those
consequences." Lindesmith itself, she says, is perhaps the strongest
advocate on issues that matter to communities of color, such as the way
felony convictions (many of which are drug related) have effectively
disfranchised 13 percent of all black men.

Most drug-policy experts agree that Soros and his associates have affected
the national dialogue on drugs but see only one or two areas of concrete
advances. "Ethan Nadelmann is a major figure in the drug-reform area, but I
don't detect any movement on the issues coming from anything other than
medical-marijuana initiatives," says Philip Heymann, who served as Deputy
Attorney General under Clinton, where he was a key Justice Department
figure with regard to drug issues. And those initiatives draw credible
criticism that Soros and his associates are using a medical issue to
advance the broader political agenda of drug decriminalization.

The harm-reduction approach has achieved other, less spectacular victories.
After years of inaction, the House finally passed what had been a
perennially doomed bill to soften the punitive forfeiture of civil assets
by those arrested for drug offenses [see Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen,
"The Drug War's Hidden Economic Agenda," March 9, 1998]. While the credit
for this shift can't be attributed specifically to Soros, his outfits have
been active on the issue recently; OSI made a grant several months ago to
the libertarian Cato Institute for a conference on forfeiture, and the
Lindesmith Center hosted a seminar on the topic. Meanwhile, both the
National Academy of Sciences and the National Institutes of Health have
issued statements expressing their support for needle exchange, methadone
treatment and medical marijuana. Polls nationwide show increased public
skepticism toward the war on drugs and, in most cases, favorable opinion
for efforts like medical marijuana. (Last year Congress refused to count
the vote of a Washington, DC, medical-marijuana initiative; exit polls
suggested that it had passed by 69 percent.) In addition, there's growing
sympathy among judges, legislators and ordinary citizens for doing away
with harsh mandatory-minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders.

Lindesmith has been fighting an uphill battle to expand treatment for
intravenous drug users, but this past summer the prospects finally became
brighter. In July, the Clinton Administration proposed significant changes
in methadone treatment policy, including national accreditation for
methadone centers and a system for accrediting hospitals and doctors so
that they can prescribe the drug. (The final regulations are expected to be
issued early next year.) Yet the gap between available treatment slots and
drug abusers who want them remains huge.

Even less promising is the status of needle exchange. Despite Soros's $1
million matching grant to fund clean needles--and his support of many
foundations working in this area--there has been little change in public
policy toward such programs. In April of last year, Secretary of Health and
Human Services Donna Shalala was set to give a press conference announcing
the government's reversal of its position on needle-exchange funding, but
the Clinton Administration reneged at the last minute.

Surveying these wins and losses, Soros himself says he has no intention of
remaining the sole patron of the movement. "I think we want to move toward
more publicly funded activity rather than being bankrolled by fat cats," he
says. He's also pushing for smaller contributions from a larger base.
Making good on his promise to allow the whole enterprise to sink or swim,
as he has recently done with some of his Central and Eastern European
nonprofits, Soros has cut back his donations to the DPF, eliminating funds
for the group's operations while continuing to fund its community-treatment
grant program. DPF's Tyler Green says that several heavily endowed old-line
foundations have already offered to step into the breach (he asked that
their names not be used). As for the marijuana initiatives, other funders
plan to stay committed. "We're in this for the long haul," says University
of Phoenix's Sperling. "We're on a roll." Among other things, they plan to
retry initiatives in Maine, Nevada and Colorado, where technicalities
prevented them from getting on the ballot last time.

"The first five years have focused on a critique of the current approach,"
says Gara LaMarche, OSI's director of US programs. "The question is, What
now? If the medical-marijuana initiatives showed that the conventional
thinking on the war on drugs can be overcome, what's the long-term agenda?
We need to focus more on the intersection of drugs and the criminal justice
system--to address the disabilities that affect great numbers of people,
including drug testing, prosecution of minor offenses and mandatory
minimums." Lindesmith, LaMarche says, will probably be spun out as a
freestanding organization.

"I think if there is any real challenge the Lindesmith Center and the
drug-policy reform movement are facing, it is how to take a political
viewpoint and ideology and turn it into a movement," says Lindesmith's
Small. "It isn't now. There's a group of people who share a common
perspective, but it hasn't been turned into a plan of action. To be a
movement, you have got to be able to communicate goals and aspirations to
other communities, especially the minority communities. Those communities
are not only not represented in the movement, they're not even aware that a
movement exists."

After five years of verbal brickbats from drug warriors, Soros says he
doesn't mind being a target: "Other people express more respect for me
because I am ready to say something that they would like to say if
they could afford it." Even staunch opponents of his views admire
Soros's unwavering commitment. "He doesn't care how many articles are
written against him," says New York Times columnist and drug warrior
A.M. Rosenthal, a heavy critic of Soros who nevertheless notes,
"Social responsibility is what is important to him."

[contihued in part 2 of 2 at
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n962.a06.html ]