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How George Soros's Marijuana Advocacy Makes the COVID-19
Panic Worse
April 1, 2020
George Soros's first major effort to reshape America was
undertaking the legitimization of illegal drug use, especially
marijuana. Soros initially said his overarching goal was to promote
informed discussion of drug policy. But debate and discussion are
not his style and were not his objects. Instead, he used his
resources to fund think-tanks, foundations, and public policy action groups
that successfully muddled public opinion enough to change public laws, making
illegal drug use legal.
In the early 1990s, the notion of legalizing marijuana in
the U.S. was unthinkable and unacceptable. The voices to legalize
drugs were marginal and not in sync. This changed in 1993, when
Soros, who claimed that prohibitionist drug policies are wrong because they
contradict his vision of the "Open Society," launched a $15-million
pro–drug legalization propaganda campaign that has made him the new darling of
the media left. Soros and his acolytes have garnered enormous press
attention through a barrage of magazine articles, op-ed pieces, and television
appearances. By 1996, the slogans of "medicalization" and
"compassion" joined "legalization" and
"decriminalization," as well as "nonviolent drug
offender." All of these were shaping the vocabulary of the
public dialogue. Soros's sponsorship provided the credibility
theretofore lacking in the movement to legalize drugs.
David Callahan, the liberal founder and editor of the
website Inside Philanthropy, noted in his 2018
book The Givers: Wealth,
Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, that "no philanthropist has
done more than Soros to soften America's drug laws. Soros got behind
that cause in the mid-1990s, funding a new drug policy think tank and
bankrolling the push for medicinal marijuana, widely seen as a bridge to
legalization. Today, two decades after Soros began his push — and
many tens of millions of dollars later — several states have legalized pot, and
more are likely to follow."
Many millions of dollars in funding pro-drug non-profits;
organizing ballots; and creating the Drug Policy Alliance,
which sponsored massive media campaigns asserting that allowing the sick the
use of marijuana and other drugs for "medical purposes" is not only
right, but also "compassionate." Less
than three years later, in 1996, Arizona and California passed laws allowing
"medical marijuana" use. Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, and
Washington followed suit in 1998. By now, most states in the U.S.
allow marijuana use for loosely defined medical purposes, and many also allow
marijuana for "recreational" purposes.
The strategy of lobbying states to change the law instead of
the federal government — which still considers marijuana a dangerous drug – was
"the best way to get the attention of Congress ... to legalize
marijuana," explained a pro-legalization activist. "If a
majority of states approve marijuana measures, and public opinion continues to
swell in favor of cannabis, Congress may have no choice but to consider
decriminalization — or legalize the substance," he reasoned. By February 2020,
marijuana use has been legal for medical use in 33 states, and 11 states allow
recreational marijuana use for adults over the age of 21.
Soros's successful legalization efforts assuaged the social
stigma of drug abuse and drove more Americans to regularly use and get addicted
to marijuana. Soros claims that marijuana use and addiction will
decline once this substance becomes legal, as will the illegal trade in this
drug. But this prediction has not panned out.
On the contrary, the number of users and addicts, especially
among the young, has grown rapidly in the U.S., Canada, and other countries
that have legalized the use of "natural marijuana" as a
drug. In the U.S., for example, in 2018, the number of young adults
who reported regular use of marijuana rose to 11.8 million,
and the number of teens in 8th and 10th grades who say they use it daily has
increased as their perception that regular use of marijuana is risky is
decreasing. It is decreasing because Soros's successful legalization
campaign has deliberately misled the public on hazards caused by "natural
marijuana."
According to Dr. Carlton E. Turner, President
Ronald Reagan's Drug Czar, natural marijuana "is a dirty drug with so many
different side effects that it will never pass the required safety and efficacy
testing for medicine. Marijuana can contain over 700 individual
chemicals, and when smoked the number of chemicals expands to the
thousands. The smoke contains 50 percent to 70 percent more
cancer-causing compounds than tobacco."
In the meantime, the legalization of marijuana opened the
door to the new multi-billion-dollar cannabis industry and increased revenues
to the states that legalized the drug. According to the online
publication American Marijuana, in a January 6,
2020 update, "[i]t is predicted that in 2025, legal marijuana sales will
earn as much as 23 Billion USD in the US alone." Moreover, the
legalization of marijuana in the U.S. set the trend and encouraged other
countries to do the same.
Despite Soros's efforts, marijuana (cannabis) is still
identified by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the U.S. National
Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), as
a Schedule I drug, "with no currently accepted medical use and a high
potential for abuse."
Soros's success in legalizing marijuana use is now putting
millions of Americans who have taken up smoking marijuana (because it's legal)
at higher risk of infection by COVID-19. "Cannabis smoking is
growing rapidly and has been linked with poor respiratory health,
immunosuppression and multiple contaminants," says renowned cannabis researcher Albert
Stuart Reece, professor of medicine, University of Western
Australia. A recent publication by NIDA says the
virus poses "an especially serious threat to those who smoke tobacco or
marijuana or who vape," because — as was evident all along — their lungs
have "enhanced tissue damage and inflammation."
But the efforts to legalize marijuana in states that have
not done so in the coming elections is ongoing, as evidenced by the Soros- (and
friends) funded Marijuana Policy Project's statement
dated March 19, 2020. "In times of this pandemic, it is all the
more apparent that finite government resources shouldn't be wasted on cannabis
prohibition. And states could use the economic growth and tax
revenue that come with marijuana legalization in these challenging times,"
the MPP advises.
Had Soros, the speculator who prides himself as a highbrow
go-getter, genuinely considered marijuana as the important drug he has spent
loads of money to legalize, he would have invested his money lobbying Congress
to support scientific research to identify the medicinal properties of the
cannabinoids found in the cannabis (marijuana) and would have sponsored the
clinical trials necessary to develop effective treatments for a variety of
diseases.
Discernibly, it was not compassion for the sick that motivated
Soros's drug legalization campaigns. Instead, he successfully used
marijuana legalization campaigns to test his ability to reshape American
society. It was his first successful venture of making the once
unthinkable unacceptable and illegal, a thing of the past, turning Aldous
Huxley's Brave New World's
"soma" distribution into reality.
_____________________________
Copyright © 2013 | The American Center for Democracy is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your
contribution is tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the
law.
Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is
Founder and President of the New York-based American Center for Democracy, and
the Economic Warfare Institute.
Dr. Ehrenfeld’s work
encompasses economic warfare, including cyber-warfare, Weapons of Mass Effect
(WME), corruption, lawfare, terrorist financing, the links between global
networks of criminal and terrorist groups, disinformation, corruption and
jihadist movements. Dr. Ehrenfeld focuses on recognizing patterns of seemingly
unrelated foreign and domestic events as they link to threaten the U.S. political,
social. economic and financial systems and other issues related to its national
security. She lectured in and organized international
conferences/workshops and specialized briefings and war gaming in the U.S. and
elsewhere. She testified on terrorist financing before Congressional
Committees, the Canadian and European Parliaments, and provided evidence to the
British Parliament, and consulted the governments of Bulgaria and Indonesia on
good governance. She also consulted U.S. government agencies, including
the Department of Defense, Justice, State, Treasury and Homeland Security,
and provided expert testimony in U.S. courts.
Dr. Ehrenfeld has initiated
the anti-libel tourism legislations in the United States. “Rachel’s Law”
passed in 2008 unanimously in New York State (New York Libel Terrorism Protection Act 2008). At least 10 other U.S. states had passed similar
legislation.
The “Speech Act“, Public Law 111-223: Securing and Protecting our Enduring and
Established Constitutional Heritage Act, passed unanimously
by the U.S. Congress ans signed into law by
President Obama in 2010.
The laws protect all American
journalists, publishers, and writers in print and on the Internet in the U.S.
from the enforcement of foreign libel judgments.
Dr. Ehrenfeld was a visiting
scholar at Columbia University Institute of War and Peace Studies, a research
scholar at the New York University School of Law, a fellow at Johns Hopkins
School of Advanced International Studies and Jesus College at Cambridge
University. She has a Ph.D. in Criminology from the Hebrew University School of
Law. Dr. Ehrenfeld is the recipient of the American Jewish Historical
Society’s “Public Service Award” (2008), and the “Sappho Award” from the
Free Press Society (2011).
Dr. Ehrenfeld has authored
academic and policy papers and more than one thousand articles. Her books
include FUNDING EVIL: How Terrorism is Financed – and How to Stop Ii (2011) • EVIL MONEY (HarperCollins, 1992,1994). Her latest book project
is on The Economic Warfare against the U.S. from Within and Without. • NARCOTERRORISM (Basic Books, 1990,
1992).
