Introductory description

This final year Advanced Option module, which looks at the production, trade, and prohibition of narcotics throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeks to contextualize the current situation, teasing out the social, economic, and political effects of the drug trade and its US-led opposition.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Term 1

1. Introduction
2. The Global Drug Trade
3. The Early US Drug trade
4. Mid-century US Drug Control, Harry Anslinger, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics
5. Drugs and the the U.S. Counterculture
6. Reading Week
7. U.S. Drug Policy Today: Race, Policing, and the Prison State
8. Peruvian Cocaine
9. The rise of the Colombian "cartels"
10. Radical Politics, US Foreign Policy and the Drug Trade in Colombia

Term 2

1. Democratization and Violence in Brazil
2. Youth gangs in Central America
3. The Early Mexican trade, (1890-1960)
4. Beatniks and hippies in Mexico (1960-1970)
5. The First War on Drugs (1970-1980)
6. Reading Week
7. The Rise of the Cartels and the Role of the State (1980-2000)
8. The Drug War (2006-2019)
9. Narcoculture
10. Civil society, democracy, and violence in Mexico

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a systematic knowledge and understanding of the history of the production, trade, and prohibition of narcotics in the United States and Latin America throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Critically analyse and evaluate a broad range of primary sources relating to the US and Latin American drug trade, US and Latin American culture, and the history of marijuana, opium, and cocaine as commodities
• Effectively communicate ideas, and make informed, coherent and persuasive arguments, relating to the history of the Latin American drug trade and the effects of US drug policy
• Critically review and consolidate theoretical, methodological, and historiographical ideas relating to the history of the US and Latin American drug trade.

Indicative reading list

• Elijah Wald’s Narcocorrido
• Mark Edberg’s El Narcotraficante
• Ioan Grillo, El Narco
• Oliver Villar and Drew Cottle, Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror
• George Grayson, Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State?
• F. Thoumi’s Political Economy & Illegal Drugs in Colombia
• Paul Gootenburg (ed.), Cocaine: Global Histories (London: Routledge, 2001)
• Paul Gootenburg, Andean Cocaine: The making of a global drug (London: Routledge, (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2008)
• Isaac Campos, Homegrown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)
• Victoria Malkin, Narcotrafficking, migration, and modernity in rural Mexico, Latin American Perspectives, 28, pp 101-128
• Dominic Streatfeild, Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (London: Picador, 2001)
• Elaine Carey, "Selling is More of a Habit than Using": Narcotraficante Lola la Chata and Her Threat to Civilization, 1930-1960 in Journal of Women’s History, 21.2 (Summer 2009)
• Robin Kirk, More terrible than death: War, drugs, and America’s war in Colombia (New York: Perseus, 2003)
• Coletta Youngers, Eileen Rosin (eds.) Drugs and democracy in Latin America: the impact of U.S. policy (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 2005)
• David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
• Howard Campbell, Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009)

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.