Global History of the Psychoactive
This course will examine the impacts of drugs and intoxicants in World History, their use as spiritual and medicinal tools, their role as key devices in economic capitalist expansion, and eventually their part as a divisive political and economic issue in the contemporary world. Students will analyze the importance of stimulants, such as tea, sugar, coffee, and opium, in the expansion of free trade and global capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Students will study shifts to prohibition — particularly the suppression of the global drug trade as justification for the expansion of the American empire — along with the U.S.-led “War on Drugs” and its relationship with the expansion of the global drug trade. This course will also address contemporary issues regarding the war on drugs in Mexico and narco-terrorism in Afghanistan. A variety of books, articles, documents, and films will be investigated to understand this rich, complex, and often misunderstood history.