What is happening as previously banned substances have become billion-dollar industries?

Live Discussion with Kojo Koram

"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 - Mike Jay, author of Free Radicals and Psychonauts

The future of drugs is here, and it's dangerously unequal. Over the last decade, the status quo around drugs has collapsed: substances once sold as safe cures have been revealed as ineffective or dangerous, while others 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, uncovering the forces reshaping the global drug landscape. Moving between corporate cannabis expos, 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?

Join us on Kojo’s journey.

The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs is available now from Waterstones, Blackwell's, and Hachette.

Ask Your Questions

Every ticket holder will be invited to submit questions in advance, which will be woven throughout the discussion. Whether scientific, philosophical, practical or speculative, your questions will help shape the conversation.

Kojo Koram

Kojo Koram is a writer and academic, currently a Professor at the School of Law at Loughborough University (previously a lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London). Born in Accra, Ghana, and raised on Merseyside, he is now based in London. Prior to academia, he worked in social welfare law, youth work and teaching. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire (John Murray, 2022), winner of the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and a Guardian Book of the Year, and editor of The War on Drugs and the Global Color Line. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Washington Post, the New York Times and elsewhere.

Your Organiser

Kate is an event coordinator at the Psychedelic Society. Her research background spans clinical sleep studies, altered states of consciousness, and personalised gene therapies. She currently works applying neuroscience to the arts at the neuroaesthetics lab, Kinda Studios. Working with Onaya Science, she explores how rituals, music, and plant medicines support trauma recovery. Kate brings curiosity and care to the ways we feel, connect, and transform (and will usually be found outside).

@katedalbyy

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