Success Quote by George Soros

Soros is doing something characteristically financier-like here: he’s running a cost-benefit audit on a moral panic. The first sentence punctures the central promise of prohibition with a blunt market reality. Demand didn’t disappear; it scaled. By framing marijuana as “the most widely used illegal substance,” he turns criminalization into a kind of regulatory failure, less a triumph of order than proof that the state tried to legislate a mass behavior out of existence and lost.

The second sentence is where the persuasion happens. “But it did result” flips the ledger from aspiration to fallout, a pivot that invites the reader to ask: if the stated goal wasn’t achieved, what exactly was accomplished? The phrase “extensive costs and negative consequences” is intentionally broad, a rhetorical umbrella that lets multiple audiences fill in the specifics without triggering partisan defenses: bloated enforcement budgets, overcrowded courts, ruined job prospects from minor convictions, racialized policing patterns, and the quiet empowerment of illicit markets. Soros doesn’t have to litigate each point; the vagueness is strategic, making the indictment feel obvious rather than contested.

Context matters: as a billionaire philanthropist associated with reform politics, Soros is arguing not just for tolerance but for policy triage. He’s repositioning marijuana legalization as a pragmatic correction, not a cultural surrender. The subtext is that “tough on drugs” was never merely about drugs; it was an expensive machine that produced social damage at scale while failing its own headline metric.