The future of drugs is here, and it’s dangerously unequal.
Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon Valley productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen – and who stands to benefit?
In The Next Fix, award-winning author and academic Kojo Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?
Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over – or merely changing its chemical formula.
Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed. Drugs once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while substances criminalised for generations are being reborn as breakthrough mental health treatments, wellness supplements, Silicon Valley productivity tools and billion-dollar investment opportunities. How did this reversal happen – and who stands to benefit?
In The Next Fix, award-winning author and academic Kojo Koram travels from Scotland to Colombia, Ghana to the United States, to uncover the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to grassroots activist campaigns and the question of reparations, he traces the growing tension between movements fighting for justice after decades of prohibition and the finance-world race to profit from a newly legal frontier. Will drug reform finally undo the racial violence, environmental destruction and public health failures of the War on Drugs? Or will it simply open a new chapter in global capitalism, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?
Urgent, moving and deeply reported, The Next Fix asks whether the War on Drugs is really over – or merely changing its chemical formula.
Reviews
A lucid and compelling guide to the new territory in which yesterday's banned substances are today's wellness aids or pharmaceutical miracles . . . The Next Fix argues persuasively that we stand at a crucial inflection point where we have a chance to replace the monopolies and exploitation of the drug trade with regulatory systems that promote local supply chains, compassionate healthcare and global justice
A beautifully written yet rigorous exploration of one of the thorniest issues of our time
Koram tells the stories of those whose lives have been destroyed by the drug war and the heroic efforts to replace it with a system of care and economic transformation. It is both a prescription for a better future and a cautionary tale of the power of capital to up end that vision
Urgent and compelling, The Next Fix forces us to confront the inconvenient truth that the failed War on Drugs is on course to be replaced not by an approach based on compassion and justice, but by the same corporate monopolies and exploitation that have already caused such devastation and inequality. In this deeply necessary book, Kojo Koram offers a clear-eyed, evidence-based guide to the complex and often contradictory world of drugs and drug reform - this is essential reading if we're to have any hope of designing a world that operates on a different logic