This course’s purpose is to examine how historical and modern developments in science and technology refract and shape culture, politics, and society on a global scale. It does so through the history and anthropology of drugs. This course asks how drugs—across many forms and meanings—have been central to major historical developments around the globe. It also explores whether and to what extent human engagements with drugs—as objects of study, consumption, wonder, art, power—are a facet of modernity. This course examines how drugs have been variously understood, defined, studied, and legislated across time and space. This course begins with an exploration of the economic changes spurred by colonial commodities, moves to the medical impact of nineteenth-century pharmaceutical sciences, traces the spiritual technology of modern psychedelics, and ends with the future promise of “magic bullets.”