Panagiotakopoulos says legalizing hard drugs is the future. Experts say he’s misguided.
The Daily Beast
In the spring of last year, investor and entrepreneur Bill Panagiotakopoulos got in a pickup truck in Cusco, Peru, and rode three hours up bumpy mountain roads to a tiny town near Machu Picchu. The sight of men in business suits was so unfamiliar that villagers in the rural town assumed he was part of the production crew for a movie that had just finished shooting. But Panagiotakopoulos wasn’t there for the scenery. As he looked out over the endless fields of coca plants—the plant most commonly used to make cocaine—he saw another kind of green.
“The fields are incredible,” he said in an interview this week from his hometown of Toronto. “The people are super friendly, and warm, and very progressive in their thinking—they want to make this a real business.”
“They want to evolve this farming that they’ve had for countless generations into the mainstream,” he added. “And we see the opportunity there.”
Panagiotakopoulos, 49, is the founder and CEO of Safe Supply, a Canadian company that invests in the future of the legal drug trade. The company, which has raised about $4 million in venture capital and went public last year, believes that the global surge in legalization policies will create a market worth hundreds of billions of dollars—one they plan to get in on at the ground level. Panagiotakopoulos and his backers are sizing up investments in drug-test strips, rehabilitation centers, laboratories, and any other product that may boom in a legalized drug market.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/safe-supply-founder-bill-panagiotakopoulos-wants-to-sell-cocaine
