Sheldon Adelson Was The Final Billionaire To Fight Marijuana Legalization. And He Lost.

Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul and Republican megadonor whose death at 87 was announced Tuesday, left an indelible mark on American politics.

He was one of the first ultrawealthy Americans to funnel oceans of cash through “super PACs” to influence policy and elections.

A lifelong supporter of the drug war—a view he held at least in part because of personal tragedy—Adelson was also the last reliable source of money for marijuana legalization opponents to tap.

But after burning millions in failed efforts to defeat cannabis ballot initiatives in 2016, Adelson—and his wife, Miriam, a doctor who owns an addiction-recovery clinic—gave up.

For anyone trying to find money to beat back the tide of drug-policy reform, that was the end of an era. For ending the drug war, it was the end of the beginning.

Since the Adelsons quit the field, to date, nobody else—not a tycoon with disposable income, nor a political lobby or a corporate interest in pharmaceuticals—has tried to fill this gap. Since then, political campaigns to legalize cannabis have encountered no well-funded opposition.

If you are a policy shop trying to oppose psilocybin legalization or a growing marijuana industry, you have to go to the grassroots, or try to bootstrap your effort yourself. And that is no way to win.

On Election Day—on the same night the presidency was won by Joe Biden, whom the Adelsons spent more than $200 million in 2020 to defeat, according to Open Secrets—voters in five states approved legalization or medical-marijuana measures, including deep-red South Dakota and Mississippi.

Cannabis legalization swept the field, in part because opponents could muster only token opposition. Across the country, anti-drug reform backers raised only a hair above $1 million.

The Adelsons entered the drug-policy reform world late. In 2016, they donated a total of $9 million to campaigns in four states opposing either recreational or medical-marijuana—a pittance for someone whose fortune is measured in the tens of billions, but also far more than anyone else. It was still a bad bet.

California and Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis. Florida legalized medical marijuana. Only in Arizona was an Adelson-backed effort to defeat legalization successful—and that was only a delaying tactic.

Without Adelson or any other deep-pocketed backer, this past year, a who’s-who of Arizona conservatives could raise only a fraction of what a single cannabis company paid to legalize, and lost handily. And that was the best-funded effort. New Jersey, probably the biggest prize of all, the pro-legalization campaign had no opposition at all.

Opposing cannabis legalization is a strange look for someone who made his money dealing in vices. It’s doubly weird for a power player in Las Vegas, where the legal weed industry is thriving and becoming just as much of a part of the Sin City fabric as celebrity chefs, Celine Dion, and slot machines.

Nobody would confuse Adelson, who made billions building the Venetian-branded casinos in Vegas as well as in Macau, as a moralist. Adelson just really hated weed, believing until the very end that cannabis was a gateway drug.

Neither Sheldon nor Miriam Adelson ever explained exactly why they were content to burn millions to defeat legalization. “It is a personal passion of theirs,” Andy Abboud, the vice-president of Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands Corporation, told the Associated Press in 2014.

The power couple were a “sleeping giant” that the “mainstreaming” of marijuana had “awakened,” Abboud added, without providing details then or later. Explanations weren’t forthcoming, even after Adelson bought the Las Vegas Review Journal and canceled the paper’s endorsement of Nevada’s 2016 legalization measure.

The likeliest reason is that the personal was political. Adelson lost a son to a drug overdose in 2005. A second son reportedly suffered from addiction and became estranged.

Ideology stemming from personal tragedy was the theory offered by NORML as to why Sheldon Adelson wrote checks to keep cannabis illegal—and why Miriam Adelson, as recently as last year, called cannabis a “gateway drug” to opiates and asked for a “crackdown” on legal weed.

The Adelson’s investments usually yielded returns. The United States’s Middle Eastern policy under President Donald Trump reflected their own—and they donated to Trump generously. But if they ever asked the president to do something about the American cannabis industry, the value of which has eclipsed the Adelson fortune, Trump didn’t heed. Vague and unsubstantiated threats from

Adelson will be laid to rest in Israel, where he and his wife maintained a residence and held citizenship—and where there’s also a thriving cannabis industry, with research centers as well as publicly traded companies research cannabis genetics, treatment techniques, and consumer-facing products. And Miriam Adelson, whom a 2015 New York magazine profile suggested has wider political ambitions than her husband, remains alive and well.

Adelson money will almost certainly bankroll conservative causes for years to come. Fighting marijuana legalization does not appear to be one of them.

The culture war on weed has been won. Sheldon Adelson was the last loser in a rearguard action.