The only plausible explanation was that the voters had been duped.  “It’s not the only mistake that was made in November,” said former drug czar William Bennett. “That this initiative passed is a scandal.  It’s also understandable given the promotion and advertising that were used.” That was the key. The voters had been seduced by slick advertising. “A moneyed, out-of-state elite mounted a cynical and deceptive campaign to push its hidden agenda to legalize drugs,” said former Health Secretary Joe Califano Jr., and the Times’ A.M. Rosenthal named names. At the top of the list was financier George Soros, whose “gobs of money” Rosenthal likened to “the fortunes manipulated by drug criminals.” He accused Soros and his ilk of “preaching the benefits of slavery.”^[3]  For Soros, a self-made Hungarian billionaire who escaped both the Nazis and the Communists before coming to the U.S., it must have been a novel experience to be accused of preaching the benefits of slavery since he had personally donated more cash to the struggle for human rights than probably anybody else on the planet. After the fall of the Soviet Union, while the West equivocated, Soros rushed into Eastern Europe and handed out a billion dollars of his own money to aid the new democracies. But when he dropped $6 million on the Drug Policy Foundation, a group that opposes the drug war, he was transformed from a capitalist Galahad to a carpet-bagger with a foreign accent—“the Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.”^[4]

But laying this disaster at the feet of an evil genius would prove to be a tough sell. The voters in both states had been extensively surveyed before either of the laws were written, and they had apparently come to the conclusion that jailing sick people was unenlightened. In California, the legislature had in fact already legalized medical marijuana two years in a row but the governor torpedoed it. In Arizona, the initiative was backed by civic beacons from left, right, and center, and the honorary chairman was Republican icon Barry Goldwater.^[5]  But probably even more decisive, the opponents of the law were unable to explain their own failure. In spite of D.A.R.E., Zero Tolerance,