Opium, heroin, cocaine, crack, and marijuana get the History Channel treatment in this series tracing how each substance moved from medicine cabinet to federal contraband. Pharmacologists and scientists explain what these drugs actually do to the brain and body, while advocates from both sides of the drug war argue over what caused the epidemics that followed. One episode follows the poppy plant from an object of ancient reverence to the source of morphine and heroin, drugs marketed to the upper classes as patent medicines before Congress banned opium and heroin outright in 1914 and restricted morphine to medical use. Cocaine's story runs a similar arc, rising to popularity once chemists learned to extract it from coca leaves. Archival photographs, period advertisements, and interviews carry the history, and the series keeps returning to the same pattern: a drug is legal and respectable until the people using it change, and then the law changes too.