FYS: Earth On Drugs - Medicine, Bodies, Environment

3 Credits.

Sixty-eight percent of Americans report taking at least one prescription medication daily, and twenty-six percent say they’re taking at least four prescriptions per day. What are the ecological effects of the production and consumption of pharmaceuticals? Where do drugs go when they leave the body–and how are organisms and ecosystems affected? How are nonhumans implicated in drug testing and other exposures? What knowledge regimes undergird understandings of the human body as (1) treatable by medications and (2) dissociated from the natural world? What ecological knowledge has contributed to the biomedical pharmacopeia? In this seminar, we will learn about dolphins on LSD, the botanical links between the mafia and scurvy, cocaine-addicted animals, yams and the contraceptive pill, plants and the war on drugs, and more. Students will engage with historical, anthropological, cultural studies, and environmental health texts and media to examine these questions. Students will visit a clinical herbalist’s medicinal plant cultivation site, an open source insulin production lab, and a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioner. We will also conduct water quality testing in the Chesapeake Bay watershed to determine the presence of pharmaceuticals. Using planetary health and cross-cultural lenses, we will ask after the relationship between drugs, bodies, and the environment, and consider nonbiomedical healing regimes that posit different relationships between them.