September 23, 1999 | Read Time: 2 minutes
George Soros, the peripatetic American philanthropist best known for his giving in Eastern Europe, has been pouring millions of dollars into a controversial cause here at home: changing the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with illegal drug users, says The Nation (September 20).
In the past six years, Mr. Soros has given about $30-million — about 7 per cent of his overall domestic giving — to efforts aimed at reshaping the nation’s drug policies, the magazine reports.
The Nation says that Mr. Soros is backing a variety of groups and programs “that are testing out new ground” on the drug issue. The groups receiving Soros money “share certain core principles,” the magazine adds. “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.”
In 1994, when Mr. Soros “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,” The Nation writes. “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.”
Mr. Soros told The Nation that his interest in questioning the conventional wisdom about the war on drugs is consistent with his vision of an “open society,” a concept that is at the core of his Open Society Institute, the parent organization of Mr. Soros’s international philanthropic activities.
“When I started looking to do something in the United States,” Mr. Soros told The Nation, “[I saw that] one of the areas where policy has unintended adverse consequences is drug policy. That was the insight that got me involved.”
Mr. Soros told the magazine that he couldn’t say what is “the right thing to do” about drug use in America. But, he added, “I do have a very strong conviction that what we are doing [now] is doing an awful lot of harm.”
The article is available on the magazine’s Web site at http://www.thenation.com.
