Marijuana Referendum: Andrew Little’s Disinformation

‘Swallowing half an hour before closing time, that second dose of soma had raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds’. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932).

It is a very odd allegation, but Mr Little is also the primary instigator of a proposed ‘hate speech law’, and one should not be surprised at his grandstanding. While one might look in askance at a politician whose party is an affiliate of an international organisation, the Progressive Alliance (breakaway from the Socialist International), pontificating about (imaginary) political influence from beyond our borders, he seems to be more than a little muddled, if he is not being outright deceptive.

Mr Little focuses on Smart Approaches to Marijuana – NZ (SAM-NZ), a coalition of around three dozen organisations, as being the recipient of largesse and direction from US organisations.[1] This amounts to no more than receiving research scholarship (from what one can deduce from Mr Little’s embarrassingly blundering explanation in an interview with Heather du Plessis-Allan on Newstalk ZB). But what is one to make of the state-funded NZ Drug Foundation that leads the vote ‘Yes’ campaign?

The Soros Connection

Journalist Patrick Gower, not a friend of conservative causes, stated in 2009 that the NZ Drug Foundation, Health Department, and currency speculator George Soros, the leading money bags for legalising and decriminalising narcotics, funded a symposium in NZ, a revelation that seems to have upset the Foundation greatly, Gower writing:

Prime Minister John Key says he has no problem with a major drugs conference being sponsored by a leading advocate of cannabis decriminalisation, because his government will never legalise the drug. The Government has found itself in the embarrassing position of jointly financing this week’s $165,000 symposium on drug policy with billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Mr Key said he only knew of Mr Soros for his deeds as a currency speculator, rather than for his views on ‘weed’. ‘I’ve got to be honest and say I thought he was better known for blasting the pound out of the ERM [European Exchange Rate Mechanism] but I’ve now learnt of his desire apparently to have everyone smoking weed.

Mr Soros is known for financing drug reform campaigns. Mr Key said he did not mind that Mr Soros’ money was being used, because the Government ‘just simply does not support the decriminalisation of marijuana’. ‘I don’t really care whether its George Soros or Mickey Mouse that supports the conference, I’m not going to be changing my position on that,’ Mr Key said.

The Ministry of Health has put up $30,000 and the symposium organiser, the largely Government-funded NZ Drug Foundation, is paying $50,000. The Society on Alcohol and Drug Dependence, a charitable trust, is putting up $50,000. The Drug Foundation withdrew an invitation for a Herald reporter to attend a dinner with delegates after yesterday’s story detailing the funding of Mr Soros’ Open Society Institute. [2]

Soros, apart from gaining his wealth as a currency speculator, pours his fortune into sundry causes: ‘regime change’ via ‘colour revolutions’, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ++++ (ad infinitum), open borders…. via an interconnecting web of organisations throughout the world. One such organisation is the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA). Soros is a member of the Board, and a primary donor.

According to DPA sources, the organisation was founded in the year 2000. One of its founding organisations, the Lindesmith Center, was the first domestic (that is, US) organisation funded by Soros’s Open Society Institute. On the DPA Board were such luminaries of the Establishment and the oligarchy as the omnipresent George Soros (whose mention in any context other than favourably prompts allegations of ‘anti-Semitism’); George P. Shultz, eminent in the administrations of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, chairman of J P Morgan Chase Board of Advisors, and a director of sundry war-mongering neocon fronts; Paul Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, also having served as chairman of the Rockefeller founded Trilateral Commission; Vaclav Havel, first president of the Czech Republic, brought to power by one of Soros’ ‘velvet revolutions’. [3]

The 2012 DPA ‘honorary board’ called a ‘powerful group’ by The Weed Blog, includes: Richard Branson; Frank Carlucci, defence secretary under Reagan, member of the Project for a New American Century, the overt aim of which was US global hegemony, director of Wackenhut international security firm, etc.; Nicholas Katzenbach, US Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, counsel for IBM, during which he fought a government anti-trust action against, chairman of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International; chairman MCI Communications; et al. [4 ]

NZ Drug Foundation ‘Foreign Influences’

It is an odd thing that Little particularly castigates SAM-NZ for using research materials from the USA. Apparently Little’s idea of ‘scholarship’ is that it must remain strictly parochial, otherwise it is a reflection of ‘foreign influences’. Yet the NZDF is a member of several international bodies. In 2016 NZDF co-signed a letter addressed to the United Nations conference on ‘the World Drug Problem’. Among the signatories were numerous ex-premiers, Hollywood uber-scum, feminist eminence Gloria Steinem (who got her start as a CIA mole at the world youth festivals during the Cold War) and such Establishment and oligarchic figures as Schultz, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Eli Broad, Mo Ibrahim, Soros, and a large number of other capitalist notables. [5]

Perhaps most bizarre of all is that Little was a featured speaker at a 2019 drug liberalisation symposium at which other featured speakers included Asha Bandele, director of the DPA, advocate for prison abolition, manager of a grants programme funded by the Open Society Institute , founder of Just Media Inc., an international marketing corporation. [6]

Another featured speaker from the USA was Deborah Small, director of Break the Chains (USA), and previously a director of DPA. [7]

Has Little forgotten that he was a featured speaker just last year along with these well-connected US campaigners?

The NZDF has been intimately associated with US interests, and in particular with the DPA. In 2015 NZDF staff met with 1500 others from 70 countries at a conference in Washington DC organised by the DPA. [8]

Brave New World

Marijuana and other narcotics assist in breaking down traditional outlooks, in transforming personalities, to become easily manipulated, in the name of ‘freedom’. As is now comparatively well-know the CIA’s MK-ULTRA was a decades-long programme to experiment with narcotics, especially LSD, as a means of population control and mind manipulation. The CIA set up shop at Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, the centre of Hippiedom, and dispensed LSD to the useful idiots who flocked there seeking ‘freedom’ and nirvana.

In 1932 Aldous Huxley wrote the prescient dystopian novel Brave New World, which described a global state run by ‘World Controllers’, a synthesis of capitalism and communism, where the population was controlled by non-reproductive sex (because births were managed through artificial means), and a narcotic which Huxley called soma, which was consumed as a sacrament to keep the masses blissfully happy with their servitude. Ironically, while Aldous warned of such a world-techno-state, his brother Julian regarded such ideas, which he called transhumanism, as wonderful and had the influence to implement them as first doctor-general of UNESCO. The transhumanist agenda continues with the financial patronage of Soros, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, et al.

The main point about drug legalisation and decriminalisation in this globalist agenda is that it is part of a package deal. The reforms demanded by the ‘activists’ and their Establishment sponsors is one of a range of matters intended to destroy the foundations of traditional cultures whether under the name of ‘feminism’, abortion liberalisation, open borders, LGBTQ+++, and so on.

George Soros’s commitment is literally, as the name of his foundation states, an ‘open society’. His ideological mentor was Professor Karl Popper, under whom he studied at the London School of Economics. The Open Society Institute was established by Soros for the purpose of creating a global order that will obliterate what Soros attacks as ‘organic’ bonds such as those of family, race and gender. The ideal is to re-create the individual as a rootless entity that can change identity (including gender) at a whim, without being bound to any traditional bond. This destruction of organic identities is undertaken in the name of affirming ‘identities’, but ‘identities that are transient and rootless, thereby creating a global ‘open society’ where the individual, unattached to anything of permanence, can be utilised as global production and marketing require.

What the cultural Marxists such as Eric Fromm call ‘the primary ties’ Soros calls ‘organic bonds’. Both claim that such bonds inhibit the free expression of the individual. It is here that the Left and capitalist globalisation meet in their two-pronged attack on what vestiges remain of traditional societies, religions, morals and cultures… in the name of ‘freedom’ and in the service of a ‘Brave New World’ of servitude.

‘Intersectionality’

Hence when Small and Bandele came to New Zealand last year, part of their message to New Zealanders was that ‘drug reform’ can ‘cure’ us of colonialist attitudes. They claim that ‘white supremacy’ and ‘colonialism’ are at the heart of drug laws. While we have Little feigning outrage that SAM-NZ is somehow being ‘directed and ‘influenced by ‘US interests’, his comrades at the NZDF heralded Ms Small’s visit as head of the Soros-funded DPA, reproducing a news item stating, ‘Small, a leader in the US drug law reform movement, visited New Zealand ahead of next year’s cannabis referendum to share her knowledge of the fight against failed drug policies. Alongside her is asha bandele [sic] – another leading criminal justice reform advocate from the US. Each of the women, both New York natives, brings her own perspective and advice on cannabis reform…’ [9]

Little alluded to American ‘Vote No’ campaigners as ‘foreigners’ without a legitimate interest in New Zealand, ‘influencing our politics,’ and condemned them as ‘advising’ SAM-NZ and allegedly offering lobbying advice, yet it is fine for Small and Bandele to come over here with their ‘own advice on cannabis reform’…

Small stated that, ‘New Zealand must consider what it is trying to address in a reform, and in that sense, who as a nation it wants to be and stand for’. [10] She affirms what we deduce: that legalisation and decriminalisation of narcotics is part of a wide agenda for the destruction of traditional vestiges and is intended to promote mass attitudinal changes.

Small states that, ‘One of the many reasons we’ve held onto a failed policy for so long is because it serves the interest that we don’t want to acknowledge. It serves the interest of the colonisers to continue to oppress the people they expropriated from… Slavery, the exploitation of people, and the contribution that had in creating inequality and problems with addiction in countries under imperial and colonial rule must be acknowledged, she says…. It is one of the many perversities of racism or capitalism. [11]

Such anti-colonialist, anti-racist rhetoric detracts from understanding the actual economic processes at work, and the real global exploiters, while also serving to deconstruct whatever remains of Western civilisation as the supposed creation of ‘white supremacy’ and colonialism. How seriously should one take such ‘activists’ who decry ‘capitalist exploitation’ while being funded by the biggest oligarchs in the world in a process that has been unfolding for a century?

The DPA brings ‘Black Lives Matter’, George Floyd, and LGTBQ++++ issues into the equation. A disproportionate number of staff at DPA come from the LGTBQ+++ milieu. When Small and Bandele state that drug legalisation is part of an anti-colonialist agenda they are referring to what is called intersectionality in the Left. This is a confluence of sundry issues, commonly referred to as ‘political correctness’ and ‘cultural Marxism’. When the Left failed to mobilise the proletariat, it changed tactics by appealing to disaffected and alienated elements, which could be agitated to break down the organic bonds of traditional family, gender, culture, custom, and homeland; bonds that also happen to be hindrances to globalisation. Drug decriminalisation and legalisation is one element within this well-funded concept of intersectionality.

Green Profits

The next step is the legitimisation of banking transactions for the marijuana industry, so that marijuana manufacturing and distribution can be a lucrative part of international finance, as another form of ‘green banking’. We have seen how this was accomplished with the ‘global warming’ agenda (which is not to imply that ‘global warming’ is not taking place). Here under the guise of saving the world carbon credits are brokered as another speculative scam for the international finance. Now we have another ‘green’ element on the stock market.

Since marijuana had been legalised in most US Sates, while remaining illegal on a Federal scale, a Congressional Bill was passed in 2019 to clarify the situation for banks in legalising money transactions for the marijuana industry. The bankers threw their weight behind lobbying for the passage of the Bill, a news report stating:

Banks have thrown their weight behind the legislation, telling lawmakers they need clarity on whether they can do business with cannabis companies where it is legal at the state level despite the fact that marijuana remains illegal in the eyes of the federal government.

‘Our members are committed to serving the financial needs of their communities – including those that have voted to legalize cannabis,’ said the American Bankers Association in a letter sent to lawmakers Tuesday seeking their support. [12]

As with many causes that the Left has been used to help promote as rebelliously fashionable, international capitalism is gearing up to invest in cannabis as one of the most lucrative world commodities . The Guardian states:

The European cannabis market will be worth €123bn (£106bn) by 2028, according to the London-based analysis firm Prohibition Partners. That is more than twice the revenues that Apple reported in the region last year …

Some of the more fanciful forecasts suggest that the world is witnessing the birth of an industry which could be worth from $500 billion to $1 trillion.

A flood of established stockbrokers have begun pumping out research on the industry and, as of the beginning of 2018, there were already a dozen cannabis companies with a stock market value of more than $1bn.

Altria, the company behind Marlboro cigarettes, paid $1.8bn for 45% of Canopy’s competitor and compatriot Cronos in December. The beer giant ABInBev, owner of America’s pervasive Budweiser brand, has put $50m into a joint venture with the cannabis company Tilray to research weed-infused beverages, a plan Coca-Cola has also toyed with. These are not half-baked Californian start-ups but international heavyweights betting that the future is green.

Cronos, Canopy and one of the sector’s other big beasts, Aurora, are all based in Canada, where recreational use achieved legal status in 2018, 17 years after medicinal use. [13]

As mentioned by the Guardian article, it is unfortunate but predictable that this push by international capitalism for the legalisation of ‘recreational cannabis’ has proceeded on the coat-tails of the campaign to legalise the use of medicinal cannabis, while the cost for patients, as with many pharmaceuticals, will remain high. These international investment firms are involved with both pharmaceutical and recreational cannabis, and cynically use the first to drive the legalisation of the second.

While the Left-wing proponents of marijuana legalisation proclaim that taxes will be garnered for the public good from legitimate marijuana cultivation and sales, like the tobacco industry and other trash commodities, this will be pittance in comparison to the profits reaped by the transnational corporations and international investment firms. An analysis of investments shows the profitability of cannabis on the stock market:

Beyond the figures, marijuana-related companies have really reached the mainstream, with several big ETFs [EFT = Exchange Traded Fund] trading on major stock exchanges. Among them, the following trade on the New York Stock Exchange: the ETFMG Alternative Harvest ETF (NYSE: MJ), the AdvisorShares Pure Cannabis ETF (NYSE: YOLO), the Cannabis ETF (NYSE: THCX), and the Amplify Seymour Cannabis ETF (NYSE: CNBS).

Further evidencing the mainstreaming of cannabis are companies like weed grower Cronos Group Inc. (NASDAQ: CRON) and cannabinoid-based biotech GW Pharmaceuticals PLC- ADR (NASDAQ: GWPH) listing on the Nasdaq, Canopy Growth (NYSE: CGC) trading on the NYSE, and Acreage Holdings (OTC: ACRZF) going after Super Bowl ads and getting political big guns like John Boehner and Bill Weld on board as advisors…[14 ]

An example of the confluence between international capitalism, the pot industry, and medicinal cannabis was the investment of PayPal in a Canadian corporation that grows medicinal marijuana in addition to promoting recreational marijuana, Leafly.com. A CNBC report stated back in 2015 that, ‘In January, the PayPal co-founder’s Founders Fund took a minority stake in Seattle’s Privateer Holdings. The company runs a medical marijuana growing operation in Canada and a pot review site called Leafly.com, among other marijuana-related businesses’. [15]

The PayPal Founders Fund invests not only to make a profit but to transform the world according to the transhumanist ideology. Like many other such oligarchs they see themselves as visionaries using money to change the world for the betterment of ‘humanity’. Hence the Founders Fund speaks in ‘messianic’ terms of creating what amounts to Aldous Huxley’s dystopia. Peruse the ‘manifesto’ of the Founders Fund to see just how the oligarchy is devoted to this self-proclaimed messianic world mission of transhumanism. The ‘manifesto’ concludes in this regard:

The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place. It doesn’t matter whether everyone agrees with the entrepreneur about the world-historical nature of the project – if the entrepreneur seeks an impact beyond his own payday and can convince employees of the same, the project is much more likely to get done. [16]

Note that the messiah complex of these oligarchs disregards whether their ‘visionary’ improvements for mankind via their wealth, which the Founders Fund manifesto calls ‘contrarian investments’, is actually wanted by others.

In fact, just how freedom-loving such oligarchs are can be deduced by PayPal denying its services to ‘right-wing’ projects, along in similar vein with the ‘deplatforming of the ‘Right’ by Facebook, Twitter and Amazon.

These aspiring ‘World Controllers’ have the superior ‘vision’ that has no room for genuine dissent. They are the ‘world-messiah’, collectively, who know what is best by virtue of their entrepreneurial success.

When the PayPal Founders Fund were the first venture capitalists to invest in the marijuana industry in 2015 pot smoking was legal in only a few states, but that was no deterrence, because they create public opinion, and are not beholden to it. The Guardian reported:

Investing in the cannabis business – now legal for recreational use in only four states and the District of Columbia, and with at least some form of medical marijuana usage approved by 24 states – ‘is just a slightly more extreme version of something we’ve shown in our other investments that we’re comfortable with’, says [Fund partner Goeff] Lewis. ‘We’re fine with investing in businesses with regulatory ambiguity, because we believe that regulation follows public sentiment’. [17]

Lewis knew that investments in the marijuana industry would become profitable because he knows that ‘public sentiment’ is moulded by those with the wealth. Marijuana, like carbon credits, stands to become a very lucrative investment for global capitalism, and another sham promoted among the naïve as some type of ‘progressive’ ‘human right’.

1. NZs ‘Vote No’ Campaign is NZ-Funded Effort, 30 June 2020, https://saynopetodope.org.nz/2020/06/30/nzs-vote-no-campaign-is-a-nz-funded-effort/
2. Patrick Gower, ‘Weed’ Advocate can sponsor drugs event: PM, NZ Herald, 16 February 2009, https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10557109
3. Bolton, Revolution from Above, 127-128. Also: DPA, About Us, https://www.drugpolicy.org/about-us#staff-board
4. Virgin Group Founder Richard Branson Joins Drug Policy Alliance Honorary Board, The Weed Blog, 9 February 2012, https://theweedblog.com/global-drug-war/international-entrepreneur-richard-branson-joins-drug-policy-alliance-honorary-board
5. Over 1000 leaders worldwide slam failed prohibitionist drug policies, call for systemic reform, Drug Policy Alliance, 13 April 2016, https://www.drugpolicy.org/news/2016/04/over-1000-leaders-worldwide-slam-failed-prohibitionist-drug-policies-call-systemic-refo
6. Just Media, https://justmedia.com/about/
7. Through the Maze, Speaker Biographies, NZDF, https://www.drugfoundation.org.nz/news-media-and-events/through-the-maze-just-and-equitable-drug-law-reform/speaker-biographies/
8. Kiwis join drug policy hui in Washington, November 2015; NZDF, 14 December 2015, https://www.drugfoundation.org.nz/news-media-and-events/reformconf15-nz-report/
9. How drug reform can cure of colonialist inclination, NZDF, November 2019.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Pete Schroeder, House passes bill that would allow banks to work with cannabis companies, Reuters, 26 September 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-house-cannabis/house-passes-bill-that-would-allow-banks-to-work-with-cannabis-companies-idUSKBN1WA308
13. Sweet smell of success? Big business bets on a marijuana boom, Guardian, 2 March 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/mar/02/legal-medicinal-recreational-cannabis-industry-investors
14. Javier Hasse, How to invest in marijuana stocks, Benzinga, 15 March 2020, https://www.benzinga.com/money/marijuana-stocks/
15. Nichelle Castillo, how to legally invest in pot companies, CNBC, 22 June 2015, https://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/22/how-to-legally-invest-in-pot-companies.html
16. PayPal Founders Fund, ‘Our Manifesto’ (G) Conclusion, https://foundersfund.com/the-future/
17. Suzanne McGee, PayPal founder Peter Thiel becomes marijuana’s first big investor, Guardian, 8 January 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jan/08/cannabis-investor-peter-theil-paypal-founder