America’s War on Drugs

Monthly multimedia exploration of popular literature and film with d.a.i. teacher Scott Stelle.

Drugs have played a significant role in contemporary social, economic and political history as well as grist for Hollywood. International narcotics trafficking is the biggest illicit industry in the world and has at times run a handful of countries.

This quarter we’d like to explore this underground empire through true-crime and fictional depictions of the drug business: smugglers, lawyers, bankers as well as the police agencies that are ostensibly trying to stop the flow and prosecute the drug lords behind the trade, which informs so much of the thrillers being produced today. The intrigue and romance of undercover work was made for Hollywood. Behind much of the surface melodrama, the dramatized plots explore patriotism and loyalty, subversion and treason, paranoia and persecution.

Fr. 7.4.: Michael Levine, Deep Cover (1990; film: 1992)

Fr. 5.5.: Kim Wozencraft, Rush (1990; film:1991)

Fr. 9.6.: Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream (1978; film: 2000)

Fr. 7.7.: Robert Mazur, The Infiltrator: Undercover in the World of Drug Barons and Dirty Banks (2009; film: 2016)

In English

Location: d.a.i. hall

Admission: free