A call to action: women and the drug war

In 1961, The Fantastic Lodge: The Autobiography of a Drug Addict, was published in the United States. The book, edited by Helen MacGill Hughes, includes a number of extensive interviews over a period of years with a white working class woman who is identified as Janet. The interviews are conducted by Howard Becker, renowned U.S. sociologist and critical drug researcher. Janet was born in 1928 and used illegal heroin and other drugs throughout the decades of her adult life. The book highlights events in Janet’s life, including her experiences with heroin, her family, law enforcement, imprisonment, drug treatment, declining health, and her death by suicide (MacGill Hughes, 1961). Although sections of The Fantastic Lodge reflect the era in which it was written, especially in relation to language and gender norms, rereading it recently, I was taken aback by how little women’s experience of drug policy differs today in and outside of the US. Discourses about women, drugs, addiction, race/ethnicity, class, immorality, sexuality, criminality, and maternal fitness continue to be actualized daily in legal, economic, and social policy and practice.

Women who use illegal drugs or who participate in the drug trade continue to experience gender discrimination, stigma, risk of arrest and imprisonment, overdose death, child apprehension, inadequate and eroding reproductive and human rights, and a lack of public health care and diversity of drug services. Today women also experience discrimination when living with HIV/AIDs and hepatitis C and more entrenched policing of pregnancy and mothering. Women’s bodies have long been the terrain to further punitive drug prohibitionist policies through drug laws and an intersecting web of regulation through social welfare, child protection, health, drug treatment, housing policies, and threats to women’s reproductive and human rights.

Scholars and activists point to how punitive drug prohibitionist laws and policies at the local, national, and international level are linked to personal and structural violence against women and their families. Yet, the impacts of drug prohibition and subsequent punishments for using, producing, selling, or importing criminalized drugs are not equal. Rather, as women’s groups have long made clear, drug policies are class-based, gendered, sexualized, and racialized. The impact of drug policies falls disproportionately on those women (and nations) that are racialized and less powerful, making some women more vulnerable to violence and imprisonment. Surprisingly, women’s struggles and resistance are often absent in critical drug discourse even though globally, feminist scholars and women’s groups have long rallied and campaigned against the war on drugs and associated drug trade violence, rising rates of femicide, neoliberalism, colonialism, the prison industrial complex, and the militarization of civil society.

Dion Million, an Indigenous scholar, clearly paints the lived effects of neoliberalism, gender, race, class oppression, and colonialism that Indigenous women experience in North America. Million points to gender inequality and gender violence ‘perpetuated against Indigenous women as more than an attack on individuals, and as a mobile but durable feature of colonial power relations’ (Million, 2013, p. 7). Although Million is speaking about Indigenous women, her analysis sheds light on drug prohibition around the world and how it intersects with colonialism and neoliberalism. Globally it is Indigenous women, racialized women, and poor women, in contrast to privileged women, who bear the brunt of punitive international, national, and local drug policies. Million cautions that as Indigenous women in North America work to heal, they are ‘continuously assailed by the ongoing damages that are wreaked by racism, gender violence, political powerlessness, and the continuing breakdown of affective networks,’ communities, and families (Million, 2013, p. 20).

Clearly corporate interests and neoliberal (imperialism and capitalism) policies shape the war on drugs globally. For example, funding for social, economic, and public health supports may decrease or cease if foreign aid and state taxes are funnelled into policing, criminal courts, and the military. Critics point to how drug policies also intersect with global struggles for natural resources and Indigenous rights, especially in the Americas. Human rights scholars point to how punitive drug polices stemming from United Nations international treaties (1961 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs; 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Drugs; and 1988 Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances) (Bewley-Taylor, 2013), and war on drugs policies promoted by the UN agency, the International Narcotic Control Board (INCB), increase human rights violations, dislocation, violence against women, and imprisonment. Yet, globally, drug treaties, criminal justice initiatives, punitive policies, and discourses generated by international and national sources have failed to lower ‘illicit drug production or use’ (Room & Reuter, 2012, p. 90). The war on drugs has never been about drugs themselves; rather it is a war against marginalized women and men and their families, resources, land, and alternative political and social systems.

International and national drug control regimes continue to negatively impact women and their families, seemingly in contravention of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human rights, UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, UN Commission on the Status of Women, UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the goals of the Joint UN Programme on HIV and AIDS. Yet, internationally there is a growing resistance to the war on drugs. States and nations have legalized cannabis, decriminalized personal possession of drugs, and expanded harm reduction services. Of course there is powerful opposition too. For example, since 2016, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has launched a brutal war on drugs targeting and murdering poor urban residents. In February 2017, the US Senate approved Jeff Sessions as attorney general even though his record on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, race, drug policy, criminal justice reform, and civil and human rights is horrendous, signaling that the war on drugs will be ramped up, and women and their families in and outside of the US will suffer unnecessarily.

As we work to end the war on drugs we need to examine how the war on drugs intersects with other punishment industries and how our thinking is affected by culturally bound ideas about women, race, class, sexuality, punishment, addiction, drugs and the people who use, produce, and sell them. The impacts of structural violence (i.e. neoliberalism, gendered violence, colonial practices) and the legal discrimination and violence that stems from it must be part of this examination. The end of drug prohibition in and of itself will not end structural and gendered violence – and we know historically how one punitive regime often replaces another. Thus, as we rally to stop the war on drugs and to envision and work towards alternative polities, women and their families, and those most effected by punitive drug polices, must remain central.

Susan Boyd,
University of Victoria, Canada
[email protected]