This course will focus upon one of the most highly debated and emotionally charged issues of our time—drug use in the United States, a topic which has its own extensive history and cultural mythology. In the American context, the use and abuse of chemical substances have perpetually appeared at the heart of cultural practice and social response. In short, Americans have always used a lot of drugs and have created a lot of policies to either prohibit, regulate, or encourage this use. This course is designed to explore this relationship and challenge major preconceptions about drug use and its representation. Our goal is to develop the critical skills to recognize and analyze the images and evidence that both social science and popular culture present. Consequently, we will move weekly between the perspectives offered by drug research and cultural images in film. Based upon our assessment of social, political, legal, economic, and cultural factors affecting drug policy, we will look for the ways in which these images intersect, diverge, and collide with historical and social patterns of drug use in the U.S. Depending upon political, historical and personal settings, the meanings and sentiments surrounding particular types of drug use change. We will look at how social contexts affect definitions of use and abuse and their representations. We will consider which perspectives achieve the most widespread dissemination and political leverage. As a class, we will seek to develop a well-informed, critical foundation from which to think about drug use in today's world, questioning where our ideas about drugs come from, asking what expressions of drug use retain the most power and why. In the end, there will be no right or wrong answers to the questions we ask about American society's relationship to drugs, but there will be more informed frames from which to consider these questions. Consequently, we must all work together to provide an open forum from which we may begin to understand drug use and its representation in the United States.