Botanical Apartheid - Impacts of Drug Wars on Politics, Culture and the Environment

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 Cañamo, Vice, Global Ganja Report, Humboldt State University, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice
John Veit's work moves fluidly from US 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.

“I think we need your voice, my friend…It’s easy to look around today at dispensaries and legal markets and cannabis brands and changing public attitudes and think we must be making some really serious progress. At the same time, understand that there are more people being arrested today for simple possession than were being arrested five years ago. So, it’s crazy. This is not an industry that’s going to sort itself out. It’s not something that’s just going to, you know, one day, you know, hit a date and all of a sudden everything is just going to be one way or the other. It’s still an issue that people have to fight for. People are going to get arrested, and people are going to go to prison for this still today unless we all rethink and look at perspectives like the one that you put forth…

—Montel Williams on Let’s Be Blunt with Montel interviewing John Veit about Botanical Apartheid: Impacts of Drug Wars on Politics, Culture and the Environment - Sep 10, 2026