The Next Fix

The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs

As countries around the world turn away from a century-long War on Drugs, we are seeing the slow decline of a system of drug control which resulted in the futile brutalisation of poor people across the world, especially poor people of colour, all while issues of addiction, impoverishment and dangerous drug deaths continued to sky-rocket. But, as The Next Fix will show, what is being established in the aftermath of the drug war is actually threatening to reinforce many of the same inequalities that were intensified by prohibition. About 1% of the current legal cannabis dispensary store owners in the US are Black. Across many of the states that have legalised cannabis, people with drug convictions are denied a business licence or working in the industry.

This means that the racial minorities who were disproportionately arrested and imprisoned during the drug war are now in danger of being punished twice: once by prohibition and again by exclusion from the emerging multibillion dollar market in legal drugs. Instead of advancing the course of social justice, drug law reform is helping the hedge funds, tech companies, oil companies and tobacco companies investing in drugs to get even richer, encouraging a commercialised legal drug industry that is likely to only accelerate the social problems associated with substance abuse.

Going beyond the legal cannabis market to look at everything from the growing pharmaceutical/therapeutic use of psychedelics to the interconnected worlds of high finance and the cocaine trade, from the association of khat with narco-terrorism to the tobacco companies trying to use legal drugs to rebrand themselves as wellness companies, this book will be taking the readers behind the scenes of this new frontier of global capitalism. Entering the world of drug policy reform, which brings together contrasting characters from yoga instructors to traditional Rastafarian leaders, investment bankers to policing reform activists, over the chapters Kojo Koram will show that although we might be living through the end of the War on Drugs, the brave new world emerging out of it may, in practice, still look a lot like the old one.