Presidential Medal of Freedom Winner George Soros (and Me)

George Soros

Well, now I can say I've met, and worked for, a Presidential Medal of Freedom winner. 

Among those bestowed last week with this "highest" civilian honor in the land was George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose Open Society Foundation funds human rights projects internationally, with $32 billion of his personal wealth. Soros also funded the Drug Policy Alliance, for which I worked in San Francisco around the turn of the millennium. 

I met George only once, briefly, and said something stupid like, "Thank you for my job." By then I'd been a volunteer activist for over a decade, and working at what was then called the Lindesmith Center was my first real paying gig in the field. I'd received a few Soros dollars while petitioning for Prop. 215, California's pioneering medical marijuana law, but ended up turning in most of my signatures as a volunteer to bolster those numbers in the funders' eyes.

I was the only activist and only non-Ivy leaguer ever hired by the organization, and my tenure didn't last all that long. But while I was there, I got to spend some of Soros's money on a seminar series addressing issues like racism in the drug war long before the idea had permeated the public consciousness. I also helped plan conferences like the "Just Say Know" drug education conference and another on MDMA. I sat on SF Public Health committees on raves and heroin overdose, and got sent on Soros's dime to Jersey (the island, not the state) to present a poster I'd made about naloxone, the antidote to overdose that was then almost unheard of.  

When I got to Lindesmith/DPA, the Drug War was seldom if ever questioned by politicians, the people, or the media. Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" era had just ended, and police were lining their pockets with drug proceeds, funding their departments with forfeited bank accounts, homes and more from those merely accused of a drug crime under a Reagan-era resurrection of an old admiralty law that erased due process. 

Lead by former Princeton professor Ethan Nadelmann, DPA made it their mission to highlight the unconstitutional and unAmerican excess of the drug war, and its failures, and the strategy worked. I remember the moment I saw it happen: then-drug "czar" Barry McCaffrey was headed to an event in Vallejo, CA to rally locals into an anti-drug frenzy, and a local news channel came to interview me beforehand. I pointed out that while McCaffrey touted drug prevention, his administration's budget continued to overspend on interdiction, and the news report cut to me saying so, and interviewed a man on the street who questioned spending tax money in Columbia instead of poverty-stricken Vallejo. 

DPA later funded Michelle Alexander's research for her breakthrough book "The New Jim Crow"  that blew the lid off the drug war / race connection, and allowed politicians like Kamala Harris to finally embrace marijuana legalization.

Soros has become a bête noire of the radical right, for his funding of progressive DA's around the country. We're now seeing a bit of backlash as the US figures out that a public health solution to drug addiction requires actual investment in public health. But to me Soros is much more of a hero and freedom fighter than today's gazillionaires who are spending their money on shooting off penis-shaped rockets to space or electing one of their own who only claims to be a populist. 

Ironically, as President Biden left the ceremony awarding the medal (to Soros's son Alex), he ignored a question about releasing federal marijuana prisoners before he leaves office, something he promised to do while on the campaign trail in 2020. Trump, who just got zero prison time for 34 felony convictions, awarded the Medal of Freedom to Reagan's anti-drug AG Edwin Meese, and is scheduled to take office in a week.