Drugs: Culture and Context

This course addresses the consumption, production, and distribution of drugs, as well as the representation and treatment of drug users, both in the United States and abroad. Course readings and discussions examine how substances move across history and social space, taking on different meanings and uses as they go. The course also explores the related questions of how and why different societies sanction, encourage, and prohibit particular kinds of drug use. Such comparisons reveal that our responses to drug use and users have as much to do with social norms and ideologies-such as notions of gender, race and class-as they do with the more-or-less deleterious effects of the substances themselves. The course also explores how the authorization of certain drugs in certain settings (e.g. binge drinking on college campuses) is connected not only to the social positions of users, but also to the marketplaces in which these drugs are exchanged. Thus, in the latter half of the course, students will attend to the production, distribution, and consumption of drugs in relation to processes of global capitalism.
This course fulfills the Human Diversity Requirement and Advanced HBSE.
This course is one of SSA's global and international course offerings.