Cannabis Is Capitalism’s Next Fix
The legal weed boom is just the first stop on capital’s search for a new frontier.
Kojo Koram
American drug policy is currently on the precipice of its biggest transformation in a generation. Over the next couple of weeks, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is hosting its hearing on whether to move marijuana (cannabis in the rest of the world) from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act to Schedule III, the final step in a rescheduling process that has already, since April, moved medical marijuana into that same category. But long before this hearing opens, the shift it represents was already well underway across the world.
In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first jurisdictions in the world to fully legalize the recreational commercial cannabis industry. The following year, Uruguay became the first sovereign nation to do the same. Since then, Canada, Germany, Malta and South Africa, among others, have legalized cannabis in varying forms. Today, nearly half of the United States has fully legalized the recreational cannabis trade, from conservative Alaska to liberal New York. At the federal level, cannabis is now being rescheduled by the Trump administration, no less.
The industry connected to the medical use of cannabis has expanded even further. It was a niche anomaly in 2012 for a jurisdiction to allow patients to take cannabis to alleviate health conditions. Over the subsequent decade, the U.K., Italy, Poland, Norway, Ireland, Peru, Greece, Romania, South Korea, Malawi, Ukraine and Spain, among others, have all legalized cannabis for medical use, and private clinics are now open for business in most major cities across Europe and North America. These changes initially led to fevered talk in the world’s financial press of an oncoming gold rush powered by the cannabis plant, soon nicknamed the green rush. According to Business Insider, Wall Street analysts expect the cannabis industry to become a $100 billion market by the end of the decade.
Beyond cannabis, Australia rescheduled psilocybin and MDMA in 2023, making psychedelic-assisted therapy legal in a nation-state for the first time, with similar developments now happening at the state level in the United States.
We grew up being told, “Just say no,” “Say nope to dope,” “Choose life, not drugs.” Now we read articles about how psychedelics can improve brain health in mainstream media and scroll past Instagram posts advertising cannabis as the latest essential wellness treatment for on-the-go millennials. A change is happening, even if we can’t fully see it. Is the War on Drugs over? If so, who won? Or is it simply changing shape? How did this change come about, and what comes after it? If we have lost the War on Drugs, what does the postwar reconstruction look like?
To understand why this shift is happening, and why now (after all, activists have been calling for drug legalisation since the 1960s), it helps to zoom out. We are living through an era the economic historian Adam Tooze has called a “polycrisis.” The economy is in long-term stagnation. Decades of free-market policy have carved a huge global divide between owners and earners, between asset holders and people who must work for a living. The global superpowers are descending into hostile trade wars, and people fear that artificial intelligence will take away the few remaining professional jobs. Everyone is looking for a fix.
Drugs, as both a concept and a technology, perfectly capture capitalism’s relentless desire for another “fix,” and how that logic gets injected into all of us. At the turn of the millennium, at the high point of globalization, the geographer David Harvey conceptualized our economy’s gluttonous addiction to drawing in more and more resources as a hunt for a “spatial fix” — capitalism’s endless search for ever more malleable locales, pushing into new landscapes and extracting from the natural world, not merely as new sources of profit but as part of its own internal crisis-management strategy.
Today, newspapers everywhere are announcing the death of globalization. Profits in many industries are plateauing, and investors are once again desperate to find the next fix. With the planet now wholly commodified, one of the last territories capitalism has not entirely explored is the vast open space of the human mind. If 20th-century companies got rich solving the problems of the belly, in the 21st century there is a lot of wealth on offer for those who can claim to have solved the problems of the mind and body.
As many of us wrestle with our own minds in a world that pushes us towards overwork, isolation and hypercompetitiveness, we are increasingly susceptible to the quick fix. Life moves too fast to correct problems holistically. We could change our diet, our habits, our economic and social systems … but who has time for that? We need to hack the system, short-circuit the problem, even if the relief it offers is only temporary.
In the lexicon of drugs, “the fix” has a precise meaning: slang for taking a dose of a drug the consumer is dependent on. For all the condemnation heaped on the “drug addict,” this is exactly how society responds to its own crises — economic, technological, political — lurching from short-term relief to shortterm relief, even as it worsens the long-term harm. As the world moves beyond the unsuccessful fix that was the War on Drugs, it’s worth asking how we might use the changing drug laws as an opportunity to design a world that runs on a different logic.
Most of us have grown used to treating “Should we legalize drugs?” as a question with a yes-or-no answer. But the more urgent question is: How will we legalize drugs? In what ways might we structure this emerging market, and what different outcomes might those structures produce? Can we use these new laws to change the predetermined winners and losers in this world, or will we simply reproduce them? And after a century of fear, stigmatization and failure, if we can rewrite our approach to drugs, what else might we change about the way our world works?
Today, hundreds of millions of people worldwide live in places with some form of legal recreational cannabis access — from Canada’s Rocky Mountains to Germany’s Black Forest. Extend that to people who can legally access cannabis for medical purposes (often through “open-minded,” profit-seeking private clinics with a generous definition of what symptoms they will accept as constituting “anxiety” or “sleep deprivation”) and the number runs into the billions. In today’s West, prohibiting cannabis is now the exception, not the rule.
This means the regulations that will govern this marketplace are being written in real time. In another generation, the industry norms for medical and recreational cannabis, medical psychedelics and potentially other drugs may be fully crystallized: the dominant companies established, the rules on health and safety, licensing, taxation, antitrust and consumer welfare deeply entrenched. Once that happens, any hope of shaping the market around different ideals than the ones prevalent in our age of oligopolistic capitalism will likely fall on deaf ears, just as it does with the fossil fuel industry, the recording industry and the shipping industry. Right now, the future of drugs is still being written. We have a chance to get the regulation of an industry right from the outset, rather than reengineering it after the fact. That is why it matters for economic, environmental and racial justice groups to get involved in shaping this space now, while the winners and losers of tomorrow are still being decided.
The industry’s own executives are candid about where this is heading. In early 2024, Boris Jordan, executive chairman of Curaleaf and the first person to become a billionaire through legal cannabis, told Bloomberg he expected a “major consolidation” of the cannabis industry, predicting that once comprehensive regulation passes there will be “no more than 5 to maximum 10 companies, of which probably 5 of them will dominate the sector, with maybe significantly over 50 per cent of the share.” Looking admiringly at the American beer industry, where a handful of giants capture the market while smaller craft producers fight over the scraps, Jordan argued, “We need a lot more consolidation in the sector than we have had. We have way too many players.” Biopharmaceutical company AtaiBeckley’s billionaire founder Christian Angermayer has a similarly grandiose vision for psychedelic treatment of depression, predicting that “once psychedelics are approved, it’s going to be a first-inline treatment, and we are going to have … a lot of market share.” The race is on to become the juggernaut brand that owns the future of drugs, the Starbucks of these sectors.
Even if the DEA’s hearing this month ends with marijuana moved to Schedule III, as Trump has recommended, it is important to remember that rescheduling is not decriminalization. Under Schedule III, marijuana remains a federally controlled substance: consumers and workers in state-legal markets can still, in principle, face federal arrest; noncitizens can still be deported simply for possessing marijuana or working in the industry; and people with existing marijuana convictions remain locked out of federal housing, food assistance and employment, with no automatic expungement of the records that keep them there.
Will the communities who bore the actual weight of the War on Drugs have any say in shaping what comes next? Over the coming years, the key question in this area might move from “should we end the War on Drugs?” to “who gets to write the terms of the drugs peace?”
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KOJO KORAM is author of The War on Drugs and the Global Color Line and Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire.
