In June 1971, President Richard Nixon officially declared a “War on Drugs,” stating that drug abuse was “public enemy number one.” Subsequently, he increased federal funding for drug-control agencies and introduced mandatory prison sentencing for drug-related crimes. More specifically, he created the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). In its early stages, the DEA boasted 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today, the agency has nearly 5,000 agents and a budget of $2.03 billion. Less than a decade later, President Ronald Reagan reinforced and expanded many of Nixon’s policies. For example, in 1984, First Lady Nancy Reagan launched the “Just Say No” campaign, which claimed to educate children about the dangerous implications of drug use; and in 1986, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, which established mandatory minimum prison sentences for some drug offenses. These efforts have been heavily criticized along the lines of racism, because, as Steven W. Thrasher notes, “Drugs have long been used to scapegoat Black and Latino people, even as study after study finds that white youth use drugs more than their non-white peers and white people are the more likely to have contraband on them when stopped by police.” Despite this, U.S. Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III recently expressed a desire to “bring back” the “war on drugs.” Hence, through various interdisciplinary frameworks—such as Black Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Critical Race Feminism, Borderlands Studies, Critical Media Studies, and Latinx Studies—this course examines these and other debates regarding drug trafficking and abuse in the U.S. and Mexico, especially concerning race, class, gender, and other social, cultural, and political markers and particularly considering the escalation of the drug war in the post 9/11 climate of national securitization.