Interview by Fonie Mitsopoulou
Portrait by Tom Trevatt

FM Seeing so many prisoners held for drugs offences at the Louisiana
State Penitentiary, nicknamed“Angola”, was a formative experience for you. Was that when you decided to devote years to research and advocacy?

KK I grew up in the 1990s, when rhetoric around the war on drugs was at its most crystallised. I’m also from a church-going Christian West African immigrant family, so that story was reinforced at home. By the time I arrived at Angola, I’d looked out of my window enough to see that the war on drugs was not working. The Lammy Review estimates that Black people in the UK are 240 times more likely to be convicted of drug offences than white people, despite similar rates of use. The war on drugs has driven mass criminalisation, particularly of minority communities. Being confronted with that so starkly, on the Angola prison pantomime plantation, made me commit much of my career to understanding and challenging the norms of the war on drugs.

FM Has there been a change in attitudes as drugs become the preserve of wealthier and more “respectable” people?

KK The rhetoric surrounding drugs has always been interwoven with racial and class-based communities, justifying different forms of racialised criminalisation. Our association with psychoactive substances dates back to time immemorial. Whether it’s Amerindian communities using peyote in the Andes, or inscriptions about the medicinal power of cannabis found in the pyramids, human societies have always had religious, medicinal, ritualistic or hedonistic relationships with these substances. We often think of the experiments with decriminalisation over the past decade as radical breaks with the norm, but the real experiment was the war on drugs itself. In 1914, the year that the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed, the New York Times ran articles about “Negro cocaine fiends” running amok through Mississippi, and “marijuana-crazed Mexican families” killing everybody in their town. This paranoia reinforced a commitment to protect a reified and exalted vision of what white America should be. The most dystopian world we might be moving into is one where the same substance carries different legal significance depending on which community uses it. President Trump this year signed an executive order, with Joe Rogan standing in the background, proclaiming the miraculous powers of psychedelic-informed therapy. If you access those substances through these commercialised pathways, you’re not just legally protected but afforded a certain cultural cachet. If you’d used the words “self-optimising” or “biohacking” to Ronald Reagan, I think he’d have had a heart attack. But taking the very same substance in indigenous communities or at an illegal rave remains subject to criminalisation, prohibition and ultimately punishment.

FM You’re optimistic about a Barcelona-style model, which is more grassroots than a US-style dispensary. What does your vision for the UK look like?

KK There is huge leverage to steer one of the largest emerging markets of the 21st century. Some of the most exciting initiatives are experimenting with forms of ownership outside the traditional retail storefront model, like the cannabis social clubs in Barcelona. There are also initiatives to establish worker-owned cooperatives in the US. Rhode Island requires 25% of all business licenses for cannabis stores to go to worker-owned cooperatives. We’re thinking about different forms of cooperative ownership in the traditional economy, and here’s an emerging market where we can set the rules.

FM The UK Labour Party’s recent campaign to paint the Greens as rogue drug peddlers struck me as strange. What do you make of all this?

KK The response to the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election, where Labour ran a public demonisation campaign against the Greens over their drug policy – which is to legalise and regulate all drugs – showed just how facile the conversation has become in the UK. The UK has one of the highest drug death rates in Europe, which should be a point of national shame. The desire for regulation was caricatured as “the Green Party wants to give crack cocaine to children”. The UK is still clinging to norms imposed by the US during the height of the war on drugs. Part of why policy reform is so difficult in the UK is that the mechanisms through which the public can exercise its voice are more stifled. In the US, reforms like cannabis legalisation emerge through ballot initiatives: if an issue has enough public support, it can go on the ballot and be decided by public referendum. In the UK, we have to rely on representative politicians having the courage to make the case for trying different policies. There are a huge number of politicians in Westminster who, before entering office, are on record saying “legalising drugs is the way to go”. The second they’re in proximity to power, at best they say nothing about it, and at worst they reverse their entire position.

FM Where is this resistance coming from? It seems obvious, even to the naysayers, that the war on drugs didn’t work. Why not experiment?

KK Many fears about the potential health impacts are legitimate. You have to start the conversation by recognising those harms, but also by showing how many of the things people worry about are amplified under prohibition. The book doesn’t argue that legalising drugs on its own is a silver bullet. The inspiration behind drug legalisation, particularly in North American states, has been economic. It’s no coincidence that these changes have emerged just as the global economy has reached a stagnation point, with capital in desperate search of new markets to commodify. But new legalisation doesn’t simply have to hand over the market to corporations floating on the New York Stock Exchange. If they dominate the emerging market, the profit incentive could produce all the standard drivers of increased use we’ve seen in other vice industries like gambling, tobacco or alcohol. There is still time to shape this industry along different lines, and to build the cooperative initiatives that emphasise public health, economic justice, environmental sustainability and reparative justice. In those kinds of models, we’d see fewer of the social impacts that make many people understandably nervous when drug legalisation is raised..