Angola, Louisiana: a plantation that became a prison, and the first stop on a reporting trip that ends with Silicon Valley selling psilocybin as a wellness category. Koram crossed five continents to ask one question, and it is a property question rather than a moral one. When a criminalized substance is rebranded as a commodity, who is standing there to collect? He is a legal scholar, born in Accra and raised on Merseyside, and his first book, Uncommon Wealth, took the English PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and an Orwell shortlist for arguing that Britain's post-imperial economy was built by lawyers more than by statesmen. Same method here. Dispensaries now sell the thing that carried life sentences, and the sentences have not been unwound. He refuses the easy version and says so on the jacket: not a polemic for or against legalization. Note what it isn't: a reform story with an ending. Akala calls the case irrefutable. Koram has worked the podcast circuit all month, This Is Hell! on July 28, which is most of the reason a Verso title is moving at all. Published July 28 by Verso in the US — 304 pages, $29.95; the British edition landed June 4 from John Murray.
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