Downstream: Who Really Won the War on Drugs? w/ Kojo Koram

**Ash Sarkar** (0:07)
The question used to be, should we legalise drugs? Now with forms of drug liberalisation in Germany, Barcelona, Thailand and increasing parts of the United States, the question is more, how should we legalise drugs? The 20th century war on drugs had a decisive victor, and it wasn't prohibition.
But the war on drugs wasn't really about drug use at all. It was about enshrining American hegemony, having a tool of social control for working class communities and people of colour at home, and embedding a global system of capitalist extraction and resource hoarding. But drug legalisation might not actually be a silver bullet to all those things. In fact, our next guest Kojo Koram argues that drug legalisation can just be a reinvention of those same systems of oppression, that is, if we let it. His new book, The Next Fix, looks at drug liberalisation efforts to the world over, and examines why everyone from Silicon Valley tech pros to the MAGA movement is looking to get in on the action. We talk about everything from addiction to harm reduction, from indigenous use of plant medicine, to why English culture wouldn't be the same without prodigious use of opium. I hope you enjoy the interview.
Kojo Koram, welcome to Downstream again.

**Kojo Koram** (1:36)
Thank you for having me back.

**Ash Sarkar** (1:38)
I mean, we didn't actually invite you. You just refused to leave.

**Kojo Koram** (1:41)
I never want to leave.

**Ash Sarkar** (1:42)
From the first interview. He's been here for years. Your new book, The Next Fix, it was provocative in that it suggested something that I've not seen argued elsewhere, because your previous work regarding the war on drugs said, look, this has been a way to use drugs as a pretext for shaping a global order, capitalist extraction, resource hoarding, racism, indigenous displacement, all of these things. Then with this book, you're saying, well, you can legalize drugs and also do all those same things.
What got you to that place?

**Kojo Koram** (2:23)
I think the journey that brought me to this book really is founded in two moments. So the initial impetus for my interest in the way the drug policy has been used to facilitate structures of power was where-

**Ash Sarkar** (2:36)
How much cocaine costs these days?

**Kojo Koram** (2:39)
I'm infuriating, but no. It was working as a young lawyer in the United States of America, and I ended up working at Angola Prison, which is in Louisiana, which for viewers, is the largest maximum security prison in the United States. It's a prison that is the size, I think slightly larger in fact than the island of Manhattan, if you just want to imagine the scale of it.
People might think, why is a prison in the American deep south called Angola seems like a strange name? Well, the reason is because the prison was formerly a slave plantation, and the slaves who populated it came from Angola in Africa, and it maintains this name up until today. And so that gives you just an example of the type of history and politics that informs this institution. And so I went there in 2012, and the scene that greeted me could have easily have been 1812

**Ash Sarkar** (3:40)
I mean, tell me about convict pinball.

**Kojo Koram** (3:42)
It was. I mean, this is, so Angola is famous for having not only the largest maximum security prison in the United States, but also for its rodeo.
And its rodeo is an opportunity where inmates perform different types of daredevil stunts for the entertainment of the local population. And one of those is convict pinball, where the inmates will line up in a 10 pin bowling formation and a giant Brahmin bull will be released. And the last inmate to stay standing on their spot wins the equivalent of $250, which doesn't sound like much to be gored and thrown in the air by a giant bull, but considering you might be paid 2 cents an hour for your prison and labor work whilst you're there, that's quite a substantial amount.

**Ash Sarkar** (4:32)
And who's in there? Like, who's in Angola?

**Kojo Koram** (4:35)
And so when you walk in Angola, you can see, you know, the very visible racial demographics of the place. You know, I mentioned, you know, I went in 2012, and the scene you're confronted with could easily have been 1812 It's, you know, disproportionately black and Latino inmates. You will see, you know, 12, 15 black guys working the fields, one guard on horseback looking over them. You know, you'll see inmates being led around in kind of shackles and manacles. And, you know, like, I remember going there and thinking, I stumbled onto the set of like 12 years of slave.