BOTANICAL APARTHEID

Impacts of Drug Wars on Politics, Culture, and the Environment

Botanical Apartheid brings together decades of reporting to examine the global consequences of drug wars. This anthology features long-form features, interviews, op-eds, documentary excerpts, book reviews, academic writing, and photographs from High Times, Cannabis Now, Revista Cáñamo, Vice, Global Ganja Report, Humboldt State University, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

John Veit’s work moves fluidly from U.S. stories examining the Ku Klux Klan, the prison-industrial complex, cannabis criminalization, and law-enforcement corruption to international reporting from Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean. Across these geographies, the book reveals how drug wars operate as systems of segregation, severing people from land, culture, and traditional plant knowledge.

Foregrounding voices routinely excluded from policy debates—Indigenous farmers, political dissidents, journalists, activists, and those living under prohibition—Botanical Apartheid resists simple reform narratives. Instead, it interrogates drug prohibition as a mechanism of social control, ecological harm, and geopolitical power.

The result is both a historical record and a contemporary warning, demonstrating how drug policy is inseparable from questions of human rights, climate change, labor, and state power.