Soros Joins Unorthodox AntiDrug Fight in Baltimore

By Paul W. Valentine
Washington Post Service

BALTIMOREGeorge Soros, the billionaire financier, and Kurt Schmoke, this
city's cautious, threeterm mayor, would seem at first to make an unlikely
couple.

But it is here that the philanthropist, who like Mr. Schmoke supports the
liberalization of U.S. drug policy has decided to focus some of his largely
international philanthropy on a social policy experiment in his adopted
country.

Known best as a foreigncurrency speculator and for donating hundreds of
millions of dollars to educational and other institutions in former
countries of the Soviet bloc, Mr. Soros will pump $25 million over the next
five years into Baltimore's battered urban landscape for a range of drug
treatment, job training and other programs, some of them controversial and
not proven.

But that is, in large part, what brought the two men together: a common
interest in looking at unorthodox solutions to old problems.

Mr. Soros, who was already considering Baltimore as another focus of his
philanthropy, had invited the mayor and key members of his staff to discuss
a wide range of drug policy issues and related topics. The meeting sealed
Mr. Soros's decision to select Baltimore for the first satellite office of
his Open Society Institute.

Details of the project have not been developed, but a local board will
propose programs for financing, said Diana Morris, director of the satellite
of fice, which opened in September. The project will probably include an
array of educational and social programs designed to head off drug addiction
and criminal activity, and it will supplement money already in the pipeline
to bolster a system of "managed care" that would provide treatment on demand
for addicts.

''I expect the board to be open to alternative concepts," Ms. Morris said,
with an emphasis on treatment rather than law enforcement.

Those kinds of programs underpin Mr. Soros's and Mr. Schmoke's view of drug
abuse as more a public health sssue than a law enforcement problem. Mr.
Schmoke is careful to note that he expects his police department to continue
cracking down on "the real predators, on the distributors and on the violent
enforcers."

But critics say the program's approaches to the problem may be precursors to
a harder push for the decriminalization of drugs, a goal that Mr. Soros and
Mr. Schmoke, among others, have said society should consider. This has drawn
fire from law enforcement hardliners, who contend those philosophies will
weaken the fabric of U.S. society, and from some addiction experts, who say
that the more a drug is available, the more people will use it and get into
trouble.

Mr. Schmoke made history in 1989 as one of the first big city mayors to
declare that the drug war had been lost. Since then, he has established a
needleexchange program, increased financing for drug treatment, encouraged
such experimental treatments such acupuncture and pushed for a "drug court"
that could divert users from jail to treatment. Both men have urged a
national debate on "medicalizing" drug abuse by allowing closely controlled
prescnption of some hard drugs to addicts as part of a treatment and
crimereduction strategy, similar to programs in Switzerland and the
Netherlands.

Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros, said the philanthropist was
making a challenge of U.S. drug policy one of his first domestic interests
"because it is one of the most clearcut cases of irrational policy ."

"The war on drugs was supposed to cure the ills," the spokesman said, "but
it has had the unintended consequence of creating even greater harms.''