Carrie Hamilton

As a legal intern in 2012, Kojo Koram was sent to visit clients in Angola – not the country, but the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, located in Louisiana and named after the plantation previously on the site. One hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery, Koram found Black men – many there for drug-related offenses – working in fields, surveilled by guards on horseback.

Garth Mullins is an activist, musician, podcaster and writer. His first book, Crackdown: Surviving and Resisting the War on Drugs, is about growing up with albinism in Western Canada, coming to adulthood through punk, activism and heroin, and organising as a person who uses drugs during an overdose crisis. This is no tale of addiction and decay in the tradition of William Burroughs’s Junkie. And it’s not a recovery story.

In 2023, Australia became the first country in the world to legalise MDMA for therapeutic purposes. Rebecca Huntley’s Sassafras: A Memoir of Love, Loss and MDMA Therapy is a timely account of one woman’s life-changing experience of MDMA therapy on the eve of legalisation. Moving between memories of a difficult childhood and accounts of the transformative therapy sessions, the book highlights both the value and the limitations of memoir for understanding the current “psychedelic renaissance”.