“Between a battle lost and a battle won, the distance is immense and there stand empires” – Napoleon
Research by Deirdre Boyd, 23 April 2016
From 19-21 April 2016, for the first time in almost 20 years, the United Nations held a General Assembly Special Session on the world drug problem and policy. This session, in New York, was the grand finale of heavily financed global pro-cannabis, pro-legalisation media manoeuvres. Taking up the rear, personal attacks including internet trolling were used to silence individuals wishing to prevent and reduce drug use worldwide – as my own experience can attest.
According to the Washington Times, over $48million was poured into this campaign by George Soros alone, a man feted for his philanthropic funding of international-policy and journalism schools and scholarships in strategic areas.
Another $70million of his firepower was directed to pro-legalisation organisations, enabling groups such as the International Drugs Policy Consortium (IDPC, funded also by unwitting taxpayers via the EU Commission) and Stop The Harm, to exert influence via a further 213 organisations into UNGASS debates.
“The pro-legalisation movement hasn’t come from a groundswell of the people. A great deal of its funding and fraud has been perpetrated by George Soros and then promoted by celebrities,” confirmed John Walters, former director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
For example, Soros donated $5million in 2008 and more in 2012 for Barack Obama’s US presidential campaigns and has funded current presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Soros’ accounts also show that he also donated at least $250,000 to former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s foundation with Annan most strongly adding his voice to the ranks of the pro-cannabis campaign.
The largest single recipient of Soros’s $200million largesse in this area since 1994, according to Forbes magazine is the Drug Policy Alliance headed by Ethan Nadelmann.
The outcome of all this investment has been, as no doubt planned, a constant salvo of headlines. “The war on drugs is dead,” wrote IDPC. “The best reasons why we must reform our drug laws,” added Richard Branson via the Virgin website, referring to and praising a pro-legalisation letter “brilliantly collated by the Drug Policy Alliance”.
The DPA also called a press conference proclaiming that: “World leaders call for decriminalisation and regulation of drugs,” referring to many of those it had itself been involved in funding. Obediently, the Washington Post wrote that “More than 1,000 world leaders say the drug war has been a disaster” while the Huffington Post wrote of “Censorship and exclusion on Day One of UNGASS” (see HuffPo and WP links to Soros).
Abroad, Kerry Cullinan, director of South Africa Health News Service funded by – well, you probably guessed – fired a broadside with “How to get rid of a ‘delusional, dangerous’ policy on drugs”.
In the UK, Nick Clegg speaking on behalf of the Global Commission on Drugs Policy (GCDP) funded by – yes, you’ve guessed again – accused Home Secretary [now Prime Minister] Theresa May of tampering with a Coalition pro-legalisation report he’d engineered when deputy PM. Ironically, his attack merely succeeded in showing the ‘Portuguese Model’ of decriminalisation hadn’t emerged so bright and shiny under scrutiny.
The Lancet was also on hand to publish its sympathetic ‘scientific’ evidence for the legalisation cause. Its chief editor, Sir Richard Horton, is a key adviser to the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy which in turn is funded by… do I need to repeat it again? Hence its promotion by Soros-funded Transform Drugs Policy Foundation. The British Medical Journal and the BMA have long given platforms to Transform to spin pro-drugs propaganda dressed up as science, as The Conservative Woman revealed.
All these roads, so to speak, trace back back to one source – to one man.
Given his massive investment and global campaign, many feared that this month’s United Nations’ session would mark the beginning of the end of drugs control. But to the surprise of many, the UNGASS battle didn’t play out as the legalising lobby hoped.
“UN drugs summit opens with worldwide divisions laid bare,” came the BBCheadline.
Yes, Jamaica defended its decriminalisation of possession of small amounts of marijuana; Canada stated its intention to liberalise drugs; and Switzerland argued for a four-pronged approach: prevention, therapy, damage limitation and repression. But Iran stated it had seized 620 tons of drugs last year and was helping protect the world from “the evils of addiction”. Singapore, too, slammed calls for a soft approach. Indonesia called for a zero-tolerance approach. Russia and Putin provided the most powerful resistance to the pro-legalisation campaign.
Cuba also opposed the legalisation of drugs and condemned any declaration suggesting them to be harmless: “It will be really difficult to solve the problems of mass production of and trafficking in drugs from the South, if the majority demand from the North [ie, US] is not eliminated”. US drug czar Michael Botticelli wobbled on the political tightrope.
So, despite the barrage, on 19 April the United Nations, led by UNODC head Yury Fedotov of Russia, opted for a ‘new’ framework that reaffirmed the cornerstone principles of the global drug control system, emphasising “the health and welfare of humankind that is the founding purpose of the international drug conventions”.
Who won the UNGASS battle then? Not George Soros and his liberal political allies, but the Russians filling the leadership void that the US under Obama abandoned – with the backing of the majority of the world’s leaders (press: please note).
There was a Parthian shot. On the last day of the week, The Guardian proclaimed: “Legalise all drugs,’ business and world leaders tell UN”. Actually, the world leaders had agreed and signed the UN document. The Guardian referred merely to former leaders, members of the Soros-funded GCDP.
