Charles Koch’s New Green Deal
The libertarian billionaire wants federal cannabis legalization.
Don whom you ask, Charles Koch is a titan of industry, a dark-money political bogeyman or the Marcus Aurelius of the libertarian movement. But soon Koch might be best known as the billionaire who persuaded Republican and Democratic congressional holdouts to vote to legalize cannabis at the federal level.
And it’s not because he’s a pothead.
The only time the 85-year-old chief executive of Koch Industries has consumed marijuana, he says, was by accident in the 1980s. He was helicopter-skiing in British Columbia, and après-ski, he and his friends enjoyed a few gin and tonics at dinner. For dessert, the chef brought out a plate of brownies. Koch ate one and after a while felt a little “loopy.” He doesn’t know who infused the sweets with pot, but he says he has known many successful friends— doctors, lawyers and other professionals—who have smoked marijuana.
Although Koch isn’t big on consuming it himself, he’s going public now with a long-held belief: Cannabis should be legal nationwide. So he’s putting his name, and nearly $25 million of his $45 billion fortune, to influence criminal-justice reform and legalization. Brian Hooks, Koch’s right-hand man, says that a good barometer to gauge what Koch and his network are eventually willing to spend is what they’ve already put toward these issues—some $70 million over the last two years.
“It should be the individual’s choice,” Koch says from his office in Koch Industries’ sprawling granite compound in Wichita, Kansas. “[Prohibition] is counterproductive. It ruins people’s lives, creates conflict in society and is anti-progress. The whole thing never made sense to me.”
Nationally, marijuana has been outlawed in America since 1937—but the times, they’ve been a-changin’. To date, 37 states have legalized medical use, 18 now permit adult use, and some 70% of Americans now believe cannabis should be fully legal. Regardless of state laws, though, federal prohibition creates many problems: Cannabis companies are taxed at a punitive rate, have difficulty accessing the banking system and can’t easily tap the public markets. Those are big handicaps for an industry that generated more than $17.5 billion in legal sales last year, a figure expected to balloon to $100 billion by 2030.
In July, Senators Chuck Schumer, Cory Booker and Ron Wyden, all Democrats from states that have legalized recreational use, introduced their long-awaited federal legalization bill. It remains a long shot, though. At least 10 Republican senators—and all 50 Senate Democrats—would need to vote yes, and Schumer admits he doesn’t yet have the numbers. There’s also the possibility of a veto: President Biden does not support legalization.
Sitting at his desk in front of an oil painting of his late father, Fred, who founded Koch Industries as an oil-and-gas company in 1940, Koch explains that as a staunch libertarian, he sees cannabis prohibition as a basic infringement on personal freedom, as well as destructive public policy that adds to America’s mass-incarceration problem. The U.S. should have learned from the “nightmare” of alcohol prohibition a century ago, he says.
“By criminalizing [cannabis], it has huge negative manifestations, not only for the individuals who get trapped in that system, but for society,” he says. “We want a society that empowers people to realize their potential and contribute, but with these laws you block out millions of people.”
More than anything, Koch sees marijuana legalization as the beginning of the end of the federal war on drugs. Here, the modern philosopher king looks to a 19th-century French economist for wisdom. “For a law to be respected,” Koch says, paraphrasing Frédéric Bastiat, “it must be respectable.”