← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:01]
Host (Atoza)
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:03]
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Producer (Mia Sorrenti)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. As drugs move from the underground economy into the mainstream, who stands to benefit from this new era of legalization and commercialization? And what happens when substances once associated with criminality become tools of wellness, productivity and profit? On today's episode, Kojo Karam, professor of law and political economy at Loughborough University, joins atusa Arakcia Abrahamian, journalist and author, to discuss new frontiers in the global drugs trade. Let's join our host ATUSA now with more.
- [01:33]
Host (Atoza)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. Kojo, it's so nice to speak to you. Thank you for writing yet another wonderful book.
- [01:39]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
Thank you for having me.
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Host (Atoza)
Let's dive right in. So you start the book in Angola, which is many things. What and where is Angola and what does it have to do with drugs?
- [01:51]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
Oh, thank you so much for being in conversation with me again, Atoza, to talk a little bit about where this book started. So this book started about a decade ago, back when I was a newly graduated baby lawyer from the UK and one of my first, in fact, my very first job outside of law school was to decide to engage in an internship with a capital defense firm in Louisiana in America. Young graduate decided I wanted to get a little bit of adventure, didn't just want to stay in an office doing corporate law. And so that meant that I was going to visit our clients at Louisiana State Prison. But a prison which is much more commonly known as Angola Prison. And listeners might think, why would a prison in the deep south of the USA have a name like Angola? Well, it's because the prison itself is based on a former slave plantation and the slaves that came there in antiquity, you know, came from Angola and Sub Saharan Africa. And the. The prison maintains this name to this very day. And Angola prison is the largest maximum security prison in the United States of America. I believe it's slightly bigger than the island of Manhattan, if you want to have a. An idea of the scale of it. And the scene that greeted me when I entered there in 2012, this was. Could have been exactly the same as in 1812 or 1712. You would see prisoners being led around in shackles and manacles. You'd see them work in the field. You'd see guards on horseback. And the racial discrepancy between the inmates and the guards was obviously very visible. And so how does that lead me to writing a book about the history of drug laws and the changing condition of drug laws today? Well, what I found out when I was in Angola, you're confronted with a prison of that size, and you think, how can such an institution reproduce itself? Louisiana doesn't have that big a population to fill a prison of that size with people doing armed robberies and murders. And you realize the amount of people who were coming through the doors were there because of drug offenses. And especially in states like Louisiana, multiple drug offenses lead to life in prison without parole. And so that was just a very visceral encounter with the way that the decisions that we've taken to try and control the drugs trade over the course of the 20th century haven't led to a reduction in the drug trade, haven't led to less drug use or less drug deaths or any of the other associated harms that might come with drugs. But what they have led to is a global architecture of mass incarceration. The United nations estimates that 20% of people in prisons across the world are there solely because of drug offenses. And when I thought about Angola, I wanted to, first of all, understand how our drug laws came into being. But what was also interesting is the same year that I was in Angola, 2012 was the very same year that the first US states legalized a fully recreational commercial cannabis market, Colorado and Washington State. And so at the same time, we're seeing this system of mass incarceration. I've also been seeing over the past decade, the emergence of this new lucrative commodities market in the very same substances that some of the people I met in Angola were sitting in a slave plantation for. And so that's really what this book is trying to unpack. How do we have both of those worlds happening simultaneously? And what does it mean for the future?
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Host (Atoza)
Yeah, you really entered this sort of field at an inflection point. Where it seemed like things were changing, but maybe not as much as one would want. We'll get to that. But before we get to that, I was hoping you could give a sense of where prohibition comes from in the world of drugs. The alcohol narrative is pretty well known. You know, we don't definitely don't have prohibition anymore with booze, but with the various kinds of drugs that are mostly illicit, the mentality remains. Where is it coming from?
- [06:20]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
That's a really good question. And I think it's a really important thing, if ever you're writing about this area, to first historicize and almost denaturalize the idea of prohibition relating to drugs, because the substances that are prohibited, whether we're thinking about opiates, cannabis related, coca related, their what drug policy scores are called the big three, or we might think about psychedelics and maybe some synthetic derivatives. But many of the forms, many of the plants in their natural form, have been used by human beings since time immemorial. You know, you go back 5,000 years, you will find, you know, people using, you know, cannabis in China. You will see cannabis inscribed in the pyramids. You will understand the histories of indigenous populations using all various forms of psychedelics, whether that's peyote in Mexico, whether that's, you know, ayahuasca in South America, whether that's the ibago root plants in West Africa. And so a lot of these substances have been used by humans for religious, sacred, medicinal, and recreational points for many centuries. But at the turn of the 20th century, we really get the emergence of this project of global drug prohibition. And it really is one of the very first foreign policy initiatives that the United States of America steps into the international arena with. Because in the era of European imperialism, what we often forget is that the European empires saw a lot of the drugs that we've prohibited in the 20th century as just another commercial commodity to be profited from. Of course, the most extreme example of this is the British Opium Wars. And so often, I think people associate the opium wars with maybe Britain fighting against the opium trade. But that was not what the opium wars are for. It was, in fact, a war that was fought in order to force China to accept the trade of opium from British merchants, the East India Company and some of their privateer derivatives, including many companies that are now Fortune 500 legitimate economies like Jardi Matheson, for example, the product of two of the potentially most successful drug smugglers of all time.
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Host (Atoza)
Can I pause for one second? On the Chinese side, did they want to buy and sell their own opium or did they not want it at all? Was there prohibition coming from the Chinese side too, or was this more of a mercantilism issue for them?
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Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
So this is really interesting. So it was really tied to the attempts of the Qing dynasty to maintain a closed economy in China. Outside of the region of Canton, where certain amounts of European trade were facilitated, there was a trade imbalance between, between the Europeans and the Qing dynasty in China, where Europe was buying silk, porcelain, particularly the British as well, with our love of tea, the British national dish. And so that led to a trade imbalance. And what the East India Company that had the monopoly on the trade in the Indies wanted was to balance out that trade. And with the industrial production of opiates in India, they started to flood China with those opiates. Now, there was an interesting internal debate actually in China when this started to happen, where a lot of the people, including the figure who's perhaps most associated with prohibition in China, Ling Ze too, was actually championing for legalization as a response to say, okay, if they're going to do this, we need to, as you mentioned, have our own economy, legalize the economy, and try and undercut the British traders that way. But the other side of the argument, the prohibitionist side of the argument, was able to work on the insecurities of the emperor at the time that this would be seen as weak. And he engaged in this attempt to try and prohibit the trade coming from the British that led to the British waging a war on China in order to force the trade of opium and of course, leading to such world changing events like Hong Kong becoming British territory.
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Host (Atoza)
So whenever we're talking about drugs, we're also talking about money, right? And capital, sort of capital.
- [10:50]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
We're talking about geopolitics and the distinction between the legitimate economy and the illicit economy, between, you know, narcotics, as we call them, and, you know, pharmaceuticals. That is very much a 20th century distinction. In the 19th century, the British, the French in the East Indies, the Dutch in Indonesia, they were industrializing and commercializing the trade of many of substances that we now consider to be illegal drugs. And so how does that change, how does that change in the 20th century to such a point that I think most people would assume that drugs like opiates and cocaine had always been prohibited, they'd always been illegal because of, so how harmful they are? Well, this is really where I want to return back to the point you made earlier about the prohibition of alcohol. Because I think from the modern perspective, we see the prohibition of alcohol as this kind of strange moral panic that erupted and then disappeared. And then we see the prohibition of drugs as something rational and health based and based on logic. But they were actually the same movement, the very same moral groups and prohibitionists and temperance organizations that pushed the prohibition of alcohol were the same ones who championed the early laws that led to the US encouraging the European empires to start to agree to a prohibitionist framework around drugs. And so you get the first international laws against drugs. First you get the 1909 Shanghai Opium Commission, which the US set up. It's headed up not by a doctor, not by a diplomat, but by a religious leader, Charles Henry Brent, one of the major prohibitionist temperance voices of that time. He heads this international meeting. This then leads to the 1912 Hague Opium Convention, which is the first international law trying to control control drugs. And that law itself, I think this is quite crucial, becomes a condition of becoming a member of the League of Nations. And so signing up to that convention is required for you to enter into this new architecture of international law. And then all of that, I think, gets really crystallized when we get the establishment of the United nations and the passing of the first of the major three drug control treaties, the single conventional narcotic drugs, which continue to prohibit drugs even up until this very day.
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Host (Atoza)
And so if you're taking these arguments against drugs at face value, right, like forget the sort of machinations of capitalism in the background, what did they think that they were achieving on a social and a global level? Like, what was the point of prohibition of drugs at this point?
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Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
So I think there's multiple things operating simultaneously. There is a kind of shift in the understanding of the human being and what it means to be a healthy human. And so we are moving from this idea of the role of law being to kind of, especially at the international level, being to mitigate and minimize confrontation, to almost producing in a very biopolitical way this idea of a healthy human being. And so you can see these campaigns against vice as tied in on a positive level with ideas around health and sanitation and all these ideas of what it means to be a kind of healthy, well adjusted, rational and civilized human being. But I think the underside of that is who gets demarcated as deviant, who gets demarcated as being a potential almost infection within this idealized human body politic. And in the early 20th century, particularly in the USA, which had a domestic racial minority in the way that the European empires didn't, that gets read onto the racial bodies of individuals who, you know, then become really the. The argument for the prohibition of drugs. And we can see this now, you know, because so much of this stuff is digitized and archived. You know, anybody can go and look at the New York Times or San Francisco Chronicle articles, you know, around the Harrison act, the passing of the first federal prohibitionist law in the USA in 1914. And that very same year, the New Times has a famous article which is entitled Negro Cocaine the New Southern Menace. And this article is, and I'm not being hyperbolic here, it can be read by all of our listeners. It talks about how black people in the American south are taking cocaine which has given them supernatural powers and making them impervious to bullets. And so when police officers try and arrest them, they're shooting bullets at them. And these high on cocaine deviant black people who no longer recognize their place in society are almost running through the bullets and causing untold devastation. And so this was the rhetoric that was taken seriously. We can look at some of the speeches of people like Hamilton Wright in Congress who talks about the importance of controlling cocaine, because otherwise this is going to facilitate communities, black communities, Asian communities, being able to sexually exploit white women. So these will be the arguments that were made very explicitly. I think that that was operating at the same time as this idea of producing a kind of rarefied, purified idea of the human being. And for me, it's no surprise that when we actually look at the consequences of prohibition, when we look at what actually happened, not what it promised, which continued to promise this ide of if we prohibit and criminalize drugs, we will eventually lead to what the UN called in 1998, a drug free world. That is not what's manifested, but what we have seen is devastating impacts, particularly on people in the global south and particularly on racial minority communities in the global North. And I think that goes back to that root.
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Host (Atoza)
Yeah, I mean, you were talking about newspaper headlines from a long time ago, but even recently in New York there was a bad batch of K2, which is a synthetic drug. And you know, the descriptions were not so unlike the ones you're reading. Zombies, Walking Dead. I mean, these things come up over and over again. That being said, I think we can acknowledge that there has been some progress, right on the criminal justice side on the sort of acceptance of certain kind, not all, but certain kinds of drugs as potentially therapeutic. I mean, when did this start happening? When did this sort of opening up or maybe softening of these norms begin to arise?
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Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
I think what's really remarkable talking about this topic in 2026 is just how transformative the last decade or so has been in relationship to the conversation around drugs. And so if you go back to the 1980s, to the Reagan era of the war on drugs, where historians say that Reagan used to begin every cabinet meeting with asking every member of, of the different departments, what have you done today to fight the war on drugs? And so that's education, that's housing, that's health. You know, what are you doing to fight the war on drugs? He would sit in the Oval Office and give, you know, statements to the American public about how drugs are public enemy number one. You know, we had, you know, Nancy Reagan, you know, collaborating on pop hit singles with, you know, people like David Hasselhoff, Whitney Houston's on one of them, talking about the importance of just say no. This was just 30, 40 years ago. And then over the past year, we've had Donald Trump in the Oval Office twice talking about drugs. One, to sign an executive order rescheduling cannabis so that it's now moved from being Schedule 1 associated with drugs like heroin to Schedule 3 drugs like codeine. And recently with Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy, sat in the Oval Office signing another executive order fast tracking mainstream access to psychedelic medicine. I think if you'd have told Reagan and Republicans 40 years ago that there will be a Republican president sat in the Oval Office asking, and this is what Trump does, he goes, can I have some of these psychedelics? I think that they would have thought maybe you've been, you'd have spiked on yourself.
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Host (Atoza)
I mean, he'd already been on something, right? He'd been smoking in that golf.
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Producer (Mia Sorrenti)
Yeah.
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Host (Atoza)
I mean, it's remarkable. If you just look at cannabis in the US at least it's gone from seeming like this really dodgy illicit substance to almost being uncool because it's everywhere.
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Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
Yeah, absolutely.
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Host (Atoza)
You know, people roll their eyes at these weed stores. Oh, another, another weed store. I mean, it's, it's pretty, it's pretty incredible. But, you know, you outline how this has come at a great cost and also at a great profit for certain segments of society. We've talked a little bit about who lost out on, in this, in this trajectory, but who's winning here.
- [20:09]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
Absolutely. So I think that is something that we have often been, I think, stuck in on the debate around drugs. We've often talked about the legalization and regulation of drugs as though it's a yes or no question. You know, yes, legalize or no legalize, instead of, I think what we're seeing as a result of what's happened with cannabis and now with psychedelics over the past decade is potentially the most important question is how, how do you legalize what laws, what controls what types of organizations to facilitate the cultivation, the distribution and consumption of these substances? You know, do you have a public health based approach, do you have a more cooperative approach, or do you have a highly commercialized approach that can all lead to very different consequences. And so what we've seen largely with cannabis in the USA has been a heavily commercialized model. And so transferring this drug from being contraband into being a commodity. And that means that a lot of the primary beneficiaries of that change have been. And this isn't in all states. Well, the interesting thing is different states legalizing at different times means you can emphasize different points. But in some states, some of the states there has been the creation of a highly commercial, highly lucrative new commodities market in legal cannabis. Forbes recently announced the very first billionaire from legal cannabis in the usa, Boris Jordan, who's the CEO of Curaleaf. And at the same time, in some of those states, you still have people serving out criminal sentences for cannabis convictions because they didn't include as part of the legalization the commution of sentences or social equity bills which would allow people who were criminalized in the previous regime to be able to enter into the new legal market. And so when we look at how say the legalization of cannabis has been rolled out in places like Alaska, you are not going to see some of those more reparative initiatives. Now that isn't the case in somewhere like New York where I know they delayed the legalization of cannabis for a couple of years. Years, not because of opposition from conservative groups or religious groups who didn't want the legalization to happen, but from actual racial justice and economic justice groups who said, well, at the moment this is a big transfer from the criminal black market into the highly lucrative, highly well resourced capital markets. And what about the people who are over policed, who are still carrying the consequences of criminalization maybe decades afterwards, even if you leave prison, still might be difficult to get a visa, might be able to secure public housing, might be able, difficult to secure work because of that criminal conviction? What happens to them in this new era? And so what we're seeing with these social equity laws is attempts to try and use some of the profits that are going to be made from this new commodities market to try and repair some of those harms in those communities that were most disadvantaged by the war on drugs. And I think what we're also seeing a final point that I will make is that there is also experiments in trying to move away from criminalization and into legal regulation, but not through a commercial vehicle. And so perhaps the most interesting example of this is what happened when Germany legalized cannabis in 2024. And so when Germany, the largest economy in Europe, announced with the Tropical Coalition that it was going to legalize cannabis, all of the big pharmaceutical, tobacco and cannabis companies from North America were flying in imagining this is going to be the new largest commercial market in Europe. And instead what happened was whilst they legalized it, they didn't allow kind of storefront commercial dispensary sales in the way you have in the U.S. instead, the form they legalized it through was through the creation of kind of cooperative cannabis clubs, similar to what people might find in Barcelona, which encourages people to kind of cultivate, grow their own in a collection and to have a very different relationship potentially to this substance than the simple consume until you can't take any more, which is encouraged through the standard forms of capitalism. And for me, that's some of the most interesting things about monitoring the changes that's happening with drugs right now. If we are moving away from criminalization, then we have an opportunity to sit down and think, how would we design a market from scratch? For so often in this age of runaway wealth inequality, we try and re engineer markets or re engineer sectors when they're already crystallized, monopoly and oligopolistic powers is already centralized and there's already the laws, the rules, the norms that entrench inequality baked in. And then we're trying to kind of challenge that, whether that's, you know, fossil fuels or whether that's energy with what we're doing, if we're going to move away from the criminalization of particular substances, I think we should stop, take a second and have a collective conversation about, okay, well, what would be ways of sustainable cultivation? What would be forms of cooperative cultivation? What would be the ways in which we might facilitate an industry that doesn't just lead to runaway consumption and runaway wealth inequality?
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Host (Atoza)
Right. Because runaway consumption also kind of defeats the purpose. Right. The goal is ultimately some form of harm reduction on a social level. Not everyone eating 10 bags of gummies and like, you know, going to sleep. Although maybe that has its benefits too.
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Host (Atoza)
So while we're on this topic, there has been a lot of buzz about psychedelics now in recent years in the White House, everywhere, all over this country. And you know, there's there are studies that seem convincing that say they can help with trauma related issues and it can be very therapeutic. On the other hand, we still have this speculative corporate investment apparatus that creates situations where, you know, the pharmaceutical companies are rubbing their hands together and people like Peter Thiel and Gina Rinehart are getting involved. And so it's hard to know really how to think about this because obviously if there are drugs that help people, whether whatever they are, that's probably a good thing. On the other hand, we still have billionaires enriching themselves more and more, and it's hard not to be a little bit cynical about the reasons behind that. How are you thinking about psychedelics in particular at this moment?
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Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
I think psychedelics is, you know, that's the new really interesting kind of new kid on the block in relationship to drug policy reform. And so like you mentioned, the kind of cannabis hype of the green rush of the early 2020s is starting to die down now and that's seen as a little bit passe, at least in North America. And now, you know, it's all about psychedelics. Those are the, you know, the acronyms that are being listed on early stage investment opportunity portfolios being passed around private wealth offices and hedge funds. Talking about dmt, Ibogaine, lsd. This is where a lot of money is being put into. And I think that this psychedelic renaissance as has been described is anytime we're not mass arresting people, I think for substances that will harm them if they consume them. I think that that is a positive step moving away from the system of criminalization which to the warehousing of human beings and the example I encountered in Angola. I am always going to think that that's a positive first step. But I think that there's the great kind of quote that's at least attributed to George Clemenceau. People don't often talk about George Clemenceau when talking about drugs. But I think this quote is relevant where he's apparently known to have said that the bad general prepares for the last war whilst the good general thinks about the next war, anticipates that the rules of engagement, the technologies, the systems that were apparent in the last war aren't gonna be the ones that are apparent in this next one in the future. And I almost feel like that is what's happening with psychedelics at the moment. Whilst we're still arguing about criminalization at that very same time. We do have many Silicon Valley backed biotech companies, not just championing psychedelics, but actually securing the ownership over psychedelics and so registering patterns and intellectual property over not only the different molecule struct strains, but the ways of administering those molecules. And that, as anyone who's familiar with the emergence of neoliberalism, the kind of protection of intellectual property and the globalization of that was one of the real central tenets of the transitions we've seen over the last 40 years. And this is something that's stated quite explicitly. If you look at the company reports or interviews with some of the founders of some of these major biotech companies, they see the value that they offer in this area being tied to the ability to own the very molecules that any form of legalization will allow to be distributed amongst a potentially very large consumer market. When we think about what the future of psychedelics might look like, we very much might see a world in which it is legal and expensive. The very first country to have fully Legal psychedelic informed therapy is Australia, which rescheduled psychedelics in 2023. And now you can go to private psychedelic clinics and get psychedelic therapy for ptsd, depression, a whole range of potential, you know, really acute life destroying illnesses. And so I think that's fantastic. But it will cost you in some cases over 20,000 Australian dollars to go for, you know, a nine month treatment. It could be expensive, it could be available, legal, expensive, wholly owned by some of those richest people who we mentioned. And at the same time it could be criminalized for you to, you know, pick a mushroom off the ground and consume that, even if it has at its core the very same kind of psychedelic properties that have been captured and commodified and owned by these biotech companies. And so I think if we want to avoid that type of future, that's why we need to have the conversation now about what type of legal reform do we want with drugs, not just allow for legalization and for that to slip automatically into commercialization, but to take the time that we have now as we're going through that transition to think about different ways of organizing an economy and also society.
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Commercial Announcer
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Host (Atoza)
And on the society, on the social level, I guess there are also concerns about how these drugs are going to affect us on a sort of not an individual basis, but like as subjects, as workers, as citizens, because yes, by all means, like heal the traumas, all of them, that's a very good thing. But the way that a lot of these drugs are being sort of positioned now is better, happier, more productive, you know, workers under capitalism. And then you have to think, well, who's this really for? Like, yeah, I might sleep a bit better. But is the goal to just, you know, send more emails for my company? Like who? There, there are other kinds of beneficiaries to this legalization that merit a second look, right?
- [36:27]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
Absolutely, yeah. This idea of a lot of the same substances that we were told would make you kind of a parasitism member of society. That was what if you started, if you were a stoner, if you were a hippie in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, you were seen as someone who would be useless within the traditional mechanisms of capitalist accumulation. And now we're being told that those very same substances are in fact going to be part of your wellness program. This is going to be something that does make you more productive. The idea of microdosing, which has become very popular, which has taken small amounts of psychedelics, so it's non psychoactive, but it can keep you up, it can sharpen your mindset. This has become very popular amongst billions. The most aggressively hyperproductive industries, particularly banking, finance, tech, students at Ivy League universities. I don't know if that's the type of drug law reform that the hippies were dreaming of in the 1960s, listening to Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix or whatever. But yeah, one day you might be able to be in Silicon Valley office coding for 18 hours because, because of the miracle of psychedelics. And so I think that we need to take that moment now and think about what type of society do we want to have and to recognize as well that the fears people have about the harms and there are obviously very real harms that can be associated with drug use. I've worked in drug policy reform for over a decade. I've worked in treatment centers. I've seen the impact it can have on people's lives. And if we hand this whole leap wholesale over to the market, the market is primed to try and increase profits at all costs. And so that means aggressive digital advertising strategies, marketing, creation of new products to slightly increase the use. Everything that we're seeing with almost the sports betting market in the USA now we could see that with some of the legalization of, of these substances if we hand it entirely over to the market and also don't take the time to use the wealth that is held within these substances to try and repair some of those harms that happened under the war on drugs and Prohibition. Because I think that those people can't be forgotten in this transition. Not just in the usa, but also people in countries who've been devastated by Prohibition, your Mexicos, your Colombias, all these areas of how they had human beings whose lives have been ravaged by this failed project to create a drug free world. And if we're going to create a new commodities market that's going to have winners or losers, I think it should be them and not the pedophiles of the world.
- [39:22]
Host (Atoza)
Right. Well, we're running short on time, but I did want to ask, and this might touch on what you just brought up, I wanted to ask you how your current work on your sort of early work and your current work on drugs ties in with your wonderful scholarship on Empire and tax havens. Because these things seem connected. But I was hoping you could sort of tease it out for us as a last thought.
- [39:45]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
There's a lot of different points of connection and so, so often people, you know, have said to me, oh, there's quite a shift moving from empire to talking about drugs. But I always say, like how do we think that these substances that were, you know, kind of tied to particular communities and particular traditions around the world, you know, coca used in the Andes mountains, your cat used in the Horn of Africa. How do we think these became globalized? Well, they became globalized through the project of empire. They became globalized through your colonial shipping companies, turning them into commodities in the same way they did to psychoactive substances that are now wholly integrated within the European diet. Your sugar, your coffee, your tobacco, at least until recently, and of course, your alcohol, they were all globalized in the same process alongside your opiates, your cannabis and other substances. And so when you look at the history of empire, you see the history of drugs at the same time. And the story I mentioned earlier about the British Opium wars is a perfect example of that. And secondly, when we look at the way in which global inequality was maintained during the era of, of formal decolonization, everything that I mentioned in my previous book, which looked at the kind of corporate capture of potentially democratically elected sovereign governments, was also tied with the erosion of their ability to actually determine their own jurisdiction. That was enforced by having to sign up to those international drug laws. The UN Syn Convention on Narcotic Drugs is one of the most comprehensive lists agreed signed up to international laws of the United Nations. And that's not because Suddenly in the 1950s and 60s, countries from Brazil, Colombia, Ghana, Nigeria, and everywhere, just Jamaica, Morocco, all suddenly decided that they wanted to prohibit exactly the same drugs because of their own interests. This was something that was mandated in order to be part of this new international system. And the USA maintained, maintained the strict policing of drug prohibition within disparate jurisdictions by funding counternarcotics programs like Plan Colombia in Colombia or the Mridi Initiative in Mexico, by penalizing countries not just in terms of lack of access to aid and funding, but also actually putting sanctions upon them if they were seen to facilitate the drugs trade. To. Even as we talk about the Trump administration sitting in the Oval Office talking about how much they love psychedelics with Joe Rogan, they're also still using the laws on controlling drugs to bomb shipping vessels in the Caribbean that are supposed to be drug traffickers, to seize any individual who might have qualified citizenship statuses and deport them on the basis that they are suddenly a drug trafficker. And of course, to capture the democratically elected leader of another nation state with Nicolas Maduro and bring him to the US on this idea of being a, you know, a narco trafficante. And so the use of drug prohibition, I think, was very much tied to maintaining those imperial hierarchies over the course of the 20th century. What I want to ensure with this book book and what I want to ask people to kind of think through is how do we ensure that this transition from criminalization to potentially some form of legal regulation doesn't maintain those same power structures deep into the 21st century. And I think if it moves straight to commodification and commercialization, it will do. But I think we still have a window to maybe try and design something different and something better.
- [43:40]
Host (Atoza)
Well, I think your book is a wonderful intervention and hope it works, but thank you so much for your time, Kojo. This has been a wonderful chat and thanks again for writing such a great book.
- [43:51]
Guest Expert (Kojo Karam)
Thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk.
- [43:55]
Producer (Mia Sorrenti)
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member at Intelligence Squared. And if you'd like to join us at future live events, you can head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
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