Who we are

This centre emerges from a broader collective process that has unfolded since 2022, bringing together researchers, activists, and policy actors across different countries at a moment of global transformation on drug markets raising both critical questions and numerous possibilities. The Open Society Foundation (OSF)’s Global Drug Policy Programs has been essential to our development - from funding for initial convening meetings to seeding our project itself.

In Salem, MA in the US in 2022, our conversations began with the OSF exchange forum "Global Justice in Emerging Cannabis Markets.” At this meeting it became clear that there was a need for bringing together research and knowledge on questions like corporatisation rising up from different sites across the globe to help understand our commonalities and better support advocacy. 

To help further explore the possibilities in deeper transnational research and advocacy relationships, OSF then supported us to convene the “Global Network for Emerging Drug Markets”, at Birkbeck University in London in October 2023. Bringing together more than 20 participants from across research institutions globally (as well as policy and civil society), the workshop helped shape a common vision. We consolidated shared priorities, understood common challenges faced in community-facing research, and encouraged the formalisation of collaborations to make a deeper impact on quickly-advancing questions such as economic, labor and environmental justice.

The idea of the centre was born to build central networks and collaborations to monitor, analyse and impact emerging drug markets, starting with cannabis. Amidst the important conversations in London we recognised that limiting impactful research and collaboration was the inequalities in Global South/North institutions, and the need to more rapidly share deep, collaborative research to the people who needed it - including regulators and advocates - in the face of growing corporate capture. Again, OSF was there to help us take us from concept to creation and seeded this project.The core team responsible for the centre — Chevon Holmes, Kojo Koram, Paulo Pereira and Robert Chlala — brings together complementary expertise across research, policy, and community engagement in their respective contexts. 

  • Chevon works at the intersection of land systems, agriculture, and sustainability, examining how cultivation practices and environmental governance are being reshaped by emerging legal markets and the pressures of industrialisation. 
  • Kojo is a legal scholar whose research traces the historical entanglements between empire, racial capitalism, and global drug prohibition, highlighting how contemporary regulatory frameworks reproduce structural inequalities. 
  • Paulo is a scholar of international relations and global drug policy, whose work examines the political economy of drug regulation and the consolidation of a transnational cannabis industry, with particular attention to processes of corporate capture in Latin America. 
  • Robert is an urban and economic geographer whose community-collaborative work focuses on cannabis workers, unregulated market participants, and transformative organising particularly in contexts shaped by punitive governance and market consolidation.


A horizontal and collective dynamic is central to this initiative. Rather than operating as a top-down structure, the centre is conceived as a collaborative platform that connects diverse actors and experiences, fostering knowledge production that is both analytically rigorous and socially engaged, while remaining attentive to the risks of exclusion, dispossession, and the concentration of power in emerging drug economies.

This orientation depends on, and is sustained by, a wider network of collaborators across different regions, enabling comparative perspectives and grounded, context-sensitive approaches that reflect the diversity of contexts in which these transformations unfold and giving priority to the Global South and to marginalised voices in the Global North.