George Soros and the Dope Lobby
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | March 23, 2007
The dangers associated with marijuana go far beyond mental confusion and acting like a buffoon.
Running for a spot on the Democratic ticket in 2008, New Mexico's Democratic Governor Bill Richardson has decided to exploit the controversy over the firing of the U.S. Attorneys, saying that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales needs to decide if he is the nation's lawyer, the peoples' lawyer, or "the President's political flack." Richardson is in no quandary over whose interests he serves; he is a puppet of left-wing billionaire George Soros.
Richardson took $50,000 from Soros and one of his pro-marijuana front groups and successfully pressured the New Mexico state legislature into passing a fraudulent "medical marijuana" bill that offers false hope to sick people. Meanwhile, a leading British newspaper, The Independent, has now admitted, years after promoting the decriminalization of marijuana in that country, that the drug causes a loss of contact with reality, a condition known as psychosis, and other mental problems.
The Independent, which had successfully campaigned to decriminalize the drug in Britain, published a March 18 editorial apologizing for having misled the public. The words, "Cannabis: An Apology," appeared in large letters on page one. The apology quoted Professor Neil McKeganey of Glasgow University's Centre for Drug Misuse Research as saying, "Society has seriously underestimated how dangerous cannabis really is. We could well see over the next 10 years increasing numbers of young people in serious difficulties." The Independent also quoted Robin Murray, professor of psychiatry at London's Institute of Psychiatry and an editor of Marijuana and Madness, a scientific work linking marijuana to various psychotic disorders.
That marijuana causes mental problems may seem pretty obvious to most people. It helps explain why someone like TV personality Bill Maher, once named the Top Pot Comic by High Times magazine, says such outrageous things. Maher, a board member of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), is featured on a website appropriately named celebstoner.com, where he is quoted as saying that kids should avoid legal drugs and "stick with marijuana." He has also declared, "I'm the guy who thinks religion is bad and drugs are good."
But the dangers associated with marijuana go far beyond mental confusion and acting like a buffoon. It destroys a person's productive capacity and can help make people either wards of the state, unable to take care of themselves, or criminals. We are increasingly hearing of notorious criminal cases in which marijuana has been a factor. One case, from Richardson's home state of New Mexico, involved the boy who shot his family on a ranch owned by Sam Donaldson. He was a marijuana user. The Discovery Times cable channel just re-aired a documentary about the murder of 12-year-old Polly Klass, who was abducted from a slumber party. Career criminal Richard Allen Davis was convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. But many are not aware that he said that he had been high on marijuana when he killed the girl. Davis had previously been convicted of possessing marijuana.
The reversal by The Independent, which has not been covered by any major U.S. media organizations, is quite extraordinary and has direct relevance to the increasingly successful and controversial "medical marijuana" movement in this country. How can marijuana have supposed medical benefits when the evidence shows that it causes mental illness? In California, it is already clear that "medical marijuana," rather than being a vehicle to help sick and dying people, has been used as a cover for drug trafficking and doctors giving "prescriptions" for the drug so students can get high. Federal authorities have begun raiding the hundreds of phony "marijuana clinics" there.
We have not come to this dangerous situation overnight. Here, as in Britain, there has been a movement over the course of many years to decriminalize and legalize marijuana and other drugs. Playboy's Hugh Hefner financed the movement in the beginning before such figures as George Soros, Peter Lewis of Progressive Insurance, and George Zimmer of the Men's Wearhouse took it over. However, Hefner still opens his Playboy Mansion to fundraisers for the Marijuana Policy Project, headed by Rob Kampia, who was himself convicted of growing marijuana.
In Britain, Peter Stoker of the National Drug Prevention Alliance stands vindicated. Stoker was one of only two speakers who spoke against the idea of marijuana decriminalization in a public debate which The Independent sponsored at the time. Stoker says, "It is no coincidence that the increasing use of all drugs - and in particular the stronger strains of cannabis, coincides with the increase of violence, gangs, guns and knives on our streets - and thousands of young people unable to reach their potential through education since they are stoned for much of the time, and at risk of developing (as some are already doing) a chronic apathy and 'amotivational syndrome,' and in some cases are subjected to mental health damage which may or may not be irreversible."
Stoker notes that the timing of the announcement by The Independent comes at a critical time, in the year before the next General Election there. The new leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, who is leading the public polls on who should be Britain's next Prime Minister, has changed his mind over the downgrading of marijuana, which he had approved when he was on a parliamentary Select Committee.
In the U.S., as the Bill Richardson cases shows, the pro-marijuana movement has a lot of money at its disposal and can buy politicians outright. Soros, who subsidizes a large number of liberal/left and media organizations, is very close to the two leading Democratic presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Richardson and Harold Ford, Jr., who has just been signed as a commentator by the Fox New Channel, have to be viewed as possible Democratic vice presidential candidates.
So far, we have not seen the emergence of any presidential candidate from either major political party willing to take on the Soros political machine and its medical marijuana scam.
In taking on Soros, of course, a candidate would have to take on a hostile media wedded to the notion that marijuana is a soft drug that has medical benefits. The media use the term "medical marijuana" regularly, even though the case for smoking a drug-laden plant to get healthy flies in the face of common sense and medical science.
But Steven Steiner of Americans for Drug Free Youth, who established the Soros Monitor website, is not afraid of Soros and his lackeys. When Soros was preparing for a 2004 speech before the National Press Club in Washington, Steiner grabbed the microphone in an effort to explain why Soros-supported drug legalization would only make the drug problem worse. Steiner was roughed up and led away, suffering a dislocated shoulder, a punch to the back, threats of more physical violence, and five hours in the hospital undergoing X-rays and other tests.
Accuracy in Media called the hospitalization of Steiner one of the most underreported or buried stories of 2004, even though it had occurred before a roomful of journalists.
At the National Press Club event, Steiner had held up a photo of his dead son, a victim of drugs. Today's tragedy is that more such victims are being created in the name of helping the sick and dying. Our media are complicit in this dangerous campaign of lies and deceit.
Cliff Kincaid is the Editor of the AIM Report and can be reached at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
7 Comments
Marijuana causes mental illness? This marijuana user begs to differ. You can’t overdose from Marijuana, but you can certainly die from alcohol poisoning, and alcohol happens to be legal.
This is misinformation at it’s best.
“Psychosis?” “Mental Illness” “A kid shooting his family because he smoked pot?”
Give me a break. Until you smoke pot and understand what it’s like to be high, do us all a favor and put a sock in it.
This bullcrap about a billionaire having more lobbying power than the $60+ billion dollars spent on the DEA each year is absurd. George Soros does not have more money than the US government. Legalization advocates are outspent by prohibitionists by a ridiculous margin.
If your friend Steven Steiner was roughed up and hospitalized because of it, I’m sorry. Yet Steiner’s treatment, although unjustifiable (if you’re not making it up), is nothing compared to the suffering endured by everyday Americans who for some reason chose to smoke pot and now find themselves hiding from and struggling against a system that works against them with the use of their tax dollars.
Accuracy in Media? Give me a break.
The marijuana (hemp) plant, has an incredible number of uses. The earliest known woven fabric was apparently of hemp, and over the centuries the plant was used for food, incense, cloth, rope, and much more. This adds to some of the confusion over its introduction in the United States, as the plant was well known from the early 1600’s, but did not reach public awareness as a recreational drug until the early 1900’s.
Cliff,
If you were really that concerned about people’s safety, you would have written about alcohol and it’s role in our society. Do some research. Accuracy in the media? PLEASE, give me a break.
If the usual relapse prevention techniques work, then why do so many people suffering from alcoholism, substance abuse and mental health disorders relapse?
Interestingly, another piece in the “Independent” seems more even-handed:
http://tinyurl.com/ys29vx
At its end:
Should the newer, more potent forms of cannabis be re-classified?
Yes…
* Vulnerable individuals with a predisposition to mental illness may be tipped into psychosis by the drug
* The younger age at which people start smoking means their brains are more vulnerable
* Skunk cannabis is three to four times stronger than herbal cannabis and has more potent effects
No…
* At worst, the experts say, the use of cannabis increases the lifetime risk of schizophrenia by only 1 per cent
* The chances that users of skunk will progress to harder drugs such as heroin are very small
* Skunk is safer than alcohol and tobacco, which are legal and cause more than 100,000 deaths a year
[Personal opinion: Super-strong dope strains are a bad idea, a rejection of millenia of co-evolution to create good strains with interesting cannabinoid profiles in favour of THC-fetichism, and fundamentally an epiphenomenon of prohibition—-see bad, strong gin’s displacing beer during alcohol prohibition. It’s a bad idea i.m.arrogant.o., but like many such (roller-coasters, religion, A.i.M.) by no means should be illegal.]
Richardson a “lackey” of Soros’? Pretty strong talk coming from one of R.M. Scaife’s intellectual catamites….
May 21 at 2:46 pm | #1 | Link
Great blog