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So what kind of reception can this champion of human rights and open debate expect for the hundreds of millions he is giving away each year? "He's the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization," who seeks to bamboozle American voters, fumes Joseph Califano, former U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare and currently president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal denounced him as giving new meaning to the term drug money. To Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, on the other hand, his international work makes him a "national treasure." To Richard Holbrooke, the former Assistant Secretary of State who negotiated the Dayton peace agreement for Bosnia, "he is the most interesting and important philanthropist since Andrew Carnegie. He really tries to have his money make a difference."
Soros deliberately courts controversy and publicity, trying to build a platform from which to propagate his views, a strategy that has earned the enmity of governments from Malaysia to Croatia to Belarus. And he's feeling the pressure. "I'm a little bit beleaguered, not too badly but a little bit. I'm overexposed, fighting on too many fronts, and that's a mistake." But that doesn't seem to stop him from engaging on even more fronts as he brings his personal philosophy of "reflexivity" and his megabucks--estimated at up to $5 billion--to bear on the attitudes he believes are damaging the U.S.
Here he is concerned with the antithesis of state control: the abandonment of state responsibility. He thinks our drug laws are ludicrous, filling up prisons with people who really have a medical problem. He calls welfare reform a "clear-cut case of injustice contrary to this country's proud tradition of welcoming immigrants." He also thinks we die wrong.
And he is doing something about all of it.
--Soros is giving $15 million over five years to groups that oppose America's "war on drugs" or want to open the debate about drug policy. He says the "unintended consequences" of the war, including the criminalization of a vast class of drug users, far outweigh the limited and costly success of interdiction. Last year he gave an extra $1 million to persuade voters in California and Arizona to allow doctors to prescribe hitherto illegal drugs, including marijuana, to ease suffering.
"Our drug policy is insane," he says. "And no politician can stand up and say what I'm saying, because it's the third rail--instant electrocution." Soros can get an audience and feels obligated to speak out. "I'm in a unique position. The same applies with Eastern Europe. Therefore I have to do these things."
--Appalled by the fact that more than 1.6 million people are behind bars (the U.S. incarceration rate is more than five times that of most industrialized nations), he has created the Center on Crime, Communities and Culture, which this year will give away about $5 million in grants to service and research organizations.
--Outraged by the way in which President Clinton's 1996 welfare bill penalizes legal immigrants, he set up the Emma Lazarus Fund. Soros emigrated to the U.S. in 1956 from Hungary via Britain. He has committed $50 million to help fellow immigrants gain full citizenship, and to campaign for their rights.