How Will a New Era of Drugs Shape Our World? With Kojo Koram

**Mia Sarenti** (0:00)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, Where Great Minds Meet. I'm producer Mia Sarenti. 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 Koram, Professor of Law and Political Economy at Loughborough University, joins Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, journalist and author, to discuss new frontiers in the global drugs trade.
Let's join our host Atossa now with more.

**Atossa Araxia Abrahamian** (0:35)
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. Kojo, it's so nice to speak to you. Thank you for writing yet another wonderful book.

**Kojo Koram** (0:41)
Thank you for having me.

**Atossa Araxia Abrahamian** (0:42)
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?

**Kojo Koram** (0:53)
Thank you so much for being in conversation with me again, Atossa, 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, you know, young graduate decided to want 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 more commonly known as Angola Prison. And, you know, listeners might think, you know, 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 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 an idea of the scale of it. And the scene that greeted me when I entered there in 2012, this was, you know, could have been exactly the same as in 1812 or 1712 You know, you would see prisoners being led around in shackles and manacles, you'd see them work in the field, you'd see a horseback, you know, 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 write 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 know, 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, you know, doing armed robberies and murders. And you realize the amount of people who are coming through the doors were there because of drug offenses. And especially in states like Louisiana, multiple drug offenses can 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 of 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?