In June 1971, President Richard Nixon officially declared a “War on Drugs,” claiming drug abuse was “public enemy number one.” Subsequently, he created the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), increased federal funding for these agencies, and introduced mandatory prison sentencing for drug-related crimes. Today, the agency maintains 222 field offices and 92 offices in 70 countries outside the U.S., a budget exceeding $3 billion, and 10,169 employees. Less than a decade later, President Ronald Reagan reinforced and expanded many of Nixon’s policies, such as First Lady Nancy Reagan’s 1984 “Just Say No” campaign, which claimed to educate children about the dangerous implications of drug use, and the 1986 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 Jeff Sessions expressed a desire to “bring back” the “war on drugs” in 2017. Through various interdisciplinary frameworks—such as Black Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Borderlands Studies, and Critical Media Studies—this course examines 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.