Who most benefits from keeping marijuana illegal? The greatest beneficiaries are the major criminal organizations in Mexico and elsewhere that earn billions of dollars annually from this illicit trade - and who would rapidly lose their competitive advantage if marijuana were a legal commodity.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that legalizing marijuana would diminish the profits of criminal organizations benefiting from its illegal trade.
George Soros highlights the paradox in marijuana's illegal status by pointing out that the primary beneficiaries of its prohibition are criminal organizations that profit immensely from its illegal trade. By legalizing marijuana, these groups would lose their financial power and competitive edge, raising questions about the true motivations behind maintaining its illegal status.
In practice
In a discussion about drug policy at a community meeting.
The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. That is the verity that was ignored by regulators and market participants alike.
The collapse of the global marketplace would be a traumatic event with unimaginable consequences. Yet I find it easier to imagine than the continuation of the present regime.
Regulating and taxing marijuana would simultaneously save taxpayers billions of dollars in enforcement and incarceration costs, while providing many billions of dollars in revenue annually.
We are the most powerful nation on earth. No external power, no terrorist organization can defeat us. But we can defeat ourselves by getting caught in a quagmire.
My foundations support people in the country who care about an open society. It's their work that I'm supporting. So it's not me doing it. But I can empower them. I can support them, and I can help them.
The criminalization of marijuana did not prevent marijuana from becoming the most widely used illegal substance in the United States and many other countries. But it did result in extensive costs and negative consequences.
Many people feel small because they're small and the universe is big, but I feel big.
It was too late - everything was too late. For years now he had dreamed the world away, basing his decisions upon emotions unstable as water.
Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsociable man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good.
Whether it was power they sought, or revenge, or love-well, those were all just different forms of hunger. The bigger the hole inside you, the more desperate you became to fill it.
The less I have, the freer I am to do whatever I want to do.
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
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