Del Potter PhD
@drdelpotter.bsky.social
I’m deeply immersed in the intersections of neuroscience, ethnobotany, & pharmacological research, I thrive on leveraging science to enhance human well-being and longevity. After years of scientific writing I’m writing fiction and a cinematic memoir.
US cannabis cultivation licenses are down 24% since late 2023. Retail licenses are down 330. The farms were destroyed and the stores were left standing. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Rent on a Weed: A Marxist Examination of the Cannabis Industry
Fifty years of arrests built a commons. Legalization surveyed it, fenced it, and issued the gates as title.
open.substack.com
Three things were held in common in American cannabis. The genetics. The cultivation knowledge. And legality itself, which fifty years of arrests and ballot initiatives paid for in advance. All three were surveyed and issued as title the moment legality arrived. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Rent on a Weed: A Marxist Examination of the Cannabis Industry
Fifty years of arrests built a commons. Legalization surveyed it, fenced it, and issued the gates as title.
open.substack.com
Before a commons can be enclosed, the people who will have no standing in it have to be identified and marked. In England that was done by commissioners with chains and field books. In America it was done by police. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Rent on a Weed: A Marxist Examination of the Cannabis Industry
Fifty years of arrests built a commons. Legalization surveyed it, fenced it, and issued the gates as title.
open.substack.com
In 1968 a SNCC organizer named Lee Otis Johnson gave one marijuana cigarette to an undercover officer in Houston. He was sentenced to thirty years. A federal court later found that no Black militant could get a fair trial in that city. He served about four. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Rent on a Weed: A Marxist Examination of the Cannabis Industry
Fifty years of arrests built a commons. Legalization surveyed it, fenced it, and issued the gates as title.
open.substack.com
An 81-year-old caregiver with Stage4 cancer,evicted from a $300/month trailer on the coast she served for fifty years.I wrote about the 400-year history inside that sentence, from the English commons to the Airbnb coast, & how we take the commons back. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Hedge: Notes on Enclosure, from the English Commons to the Mendocino Coast
There is a woman in Fort Bragg, 81 years old, with Stage 4 cancer and her life packed in boxes by the door of a trailer she has been told to leave.
open.substack.com
They kept the argument on "does it cause cancer" so you'd never ask who owns the seed. Glyphosate guts the soil microbiome, breeds superweeds, and binds farmers to a patented seed they're forbidden to save. The point was never yield. It was enclosure. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Chemical Enclosure
Glyphosate, the Seed, and the Fencing of the Agricultural Commons. An essay against chemical agriculture and the reasons given for it.
open.substack.com
The trap: to defend a commons with "prior art" you have to document it. The same file that beats the patent is the file that trains the AI trip-sitter. The knowledge safest from extraction is the kind no one wrote down, which also can't defend itself. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Two Faces of the Commons
Reciprocity sells the commons back as a royalty. Refusal denies it was ever enclosable. Only one of them is a politics.
open.substack.com
Two answers to biopiracy in the psychedelics rush.Reciprocity:pay indigenous communities a royalty (Nagoya Protocol,the first legal iboga export from Gabon in 2023).Refusal:deny the knowledge was ever ownable.One improves the terms of enclosure.The other contests it open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Two Faces of the Commons
Reciprocity sells the commons back as a royalty. Refusal denies it was ever enclosable. Only one of them is a politics.
open.substack.com
They gave the fast-track to an MDMA knockoff a Japanese firm bought for $1.23B, over the actual MDMA-for-PTSD program. The molecule that wins is the one engineered to need no therapist. The enclosure has reached the approval pathway itself. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Voucher Is the Enclosure
What could not be patented in the molecule, and could not be contained in the relation, is now being secured in the pathway.
open.substack.com
The FDA's new psychedelic "priority vouchers" can't be sold. A voucher you can sell answers to a market. A voucher you can only be granted answers to a Commissioner, and behind him a White House that vetoed one program, then reversed after a text from a podcaster. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Voucher Is the Enclosure
What could not be patented in the molecule, and could not be contained in the relation, is now being secured in the pathway.
open.substack.com
Taibbi calls the NY left an “elite fixation.” The returns: Mamdani won sub-$45k neighborhoods 52–42 and flipped the Bronx, America’s poorest urban county, from −18 to +11. On bus fares and rent. He didn’t read the data because the data ends his argument. My reply: open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Amalgam: A Reply to Matt Taibbi’s “Nitwit Revolution”
There is an old technique, older than Taibbi, older than the Substack it now pays for.
open.substack.com
And the federal-policy companion piece, the May 2026 National Drug Control Strategy, published and then quietly withdrawn, schedules the November 2026 hemp restriction and explicitly names Marinol and Epidiolex as the authoritative reference standard for cannabis. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Plant Has a Brand New Name
Eight days after I wrote that pharma had conceded the entourage effect, a German firm’s full-spectrum cannabis drug was approved in Europe under a trademark. The forecast is now a product on a shelf.
open.substack.com
My dachshund is seventeen and has started the slow business of leaving. New essay about the long hours on the couch with him, and why the room with a dying animal is one of the last things capitalism hasn't found a way to sell back to you. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Last Unenclosed Hour
My dachshund is seventeen and has started the slow business of leaving. New essay about the long hours on the couch with him, and why the room with a dying animal is one of the last things capitalism ...
open.substack.com
The plant Linnaeus named for everyone in 1753 now answers to a word one company owns. Vertanical's Exilby was approved in Europe on June 9 under a trademark. New essay on how the cannabis movement won the science and lost the plant. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Plant Has a Brand New Name
Eight days after I wrote that pharma had conceded the entourage effect, a German firm’s full-spectrum cannabis drug was approved in Europe under a trademark. The forecast is now a product on a shelf.
open.substack.com
A hundred dollars a month at a dispensary, thirty thousand a year once it carries a trademark. Nothing about the molecules changes. Ownership changes. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
The Plant Has a Brand New Name
Eight days after I wrote that pharma had conceded the entourage effect, a German firm’s full-spectrum cannabis drug was approved in Europe under a trademark. The forecast is now a product on a shelf.
open.substack.com
The manosphere's wound is real (Case & Deaton, deaths of despair). Its cause is a lie (it was capital, not feminism). Its cure is a product (Anduril at $60B on the cage floor). Polanyi's double movement, captured and sold back. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
A Sky Full of Sponsors
How the right sells dispossessed men their own rebellion, and calls the enclosure of their manhood a rebirth
open.substack.com
Theweleit's "soldier male" walks again, this time with a Monster Energy sponsorship. On the manosphere as a counter-movement captured by capital and aimed at the powerless. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
A Sky Full of Sponsors
How the right sells dispossessed men their own rebellion, and calls the enclosure of their manhood a rebirth
open.substack.com
It is cheaper to give a man dominion over his wife than over his workplace, and the people who own the workplace have always understood this. New piece on misogyny as an instrument of accumulation. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
A Sky Full of Sponsors
How the right sells dispossessed men their own rebellion, and calls the enclosure of their manhood a rebirth
open.substack.com
The manosphere's wound is real (Case & Deaton, deaths of despair). Its cause is a lie (it was capital, not feminism). Its cure is a product (Anduril at $60B on the cage floor). Polanyi's double movement, captured and sold back. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
A Sky Full of Sponsors
How the right sells dispossessed men their own rebellion, and calls the enclosure of their manhood a rebirth
open.substack.com
They said it wouldn't generalize. Tuesday it traveled to four districts in one night. Mamdani: 3-for-3 in Congress, the Brooklyn machine beaten on its own ground, the first Palestinian American sent to Albany. The only question on the ballot was who owns what. open.substack.com/pub/againste...
Who Owns the City
Mamdani Went Three for Three. The Question Travels.
open.substack.com
