On drugs and empire with Kojo Koram

All Book Fringe events are FREE in person + online | no tickets required (but you can reserve them here to get a book/reminder of the event & help us have enough seats for everyone)

We invite you to a special Book Fringe hour with one of our favourite historians and political writers, Kojo Koram, who we’re thrilled to welcome back to the Lighthouse.

In his new book, The Next Fix, Koram unpacks the monumental changes taking place in the world of drugs, and the future these point to. Moving between glossy corporate cannabis expos to 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, creating a smooth transition from cartel barons to Wall Street oligopolies?

This event will be 30 mins followed by audience questions and signing. Please feel free to attend any or all of these depending on your capacity!

Our speaker:

Kojo Koram is a Professor of Law, author and investigative journalist. This year he co-founded the Transnational Research Centre on Emerging Drug Markets at Loughborough University which will examine how drug markets are changing. He previously taught Law at Birkbeck.

Born in Ghana and raised on Merseyside, he’s now based in London. He regularly contributes to Novara and the Guardian and has also written for the New Statesman and NYT. He is the author of Uncommon Wealth (2022). It won the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing and was a Guardian BOTY.