The Impact of Global Drug Policy on Women


Book Description

The ebook edition of this title is Open Access and freely available to read online. Examining the impact of drug criminalisation on a previously overlooked demographic, this book argues that women are disproportionately affected by a flawed policy approach.




Women Drug Traffickers


Book Description

In the flow of drugs to the United States from Latin America, women have always played key roles as bosses, business partners, money launderers, confidantes, and couriers—work rarely acknowledged. Elaine Carey’s study of women in the drug trade offers a new understanding of this intriguing subject, from women drug smugglers in the early twentieth century to the cartel queens who make news today. Using international diplomatic documents, trial transcripts, medical and public welfare studies, correspondence between drug czars, and prison and hospital records, the author’s research shows that history can be as gripping as a thriller.




Using Women


Book Description

From the 1950s 'girl junkie' to the 1990s 'crack mom', Using Women investigates how the cultural representations of women drug users have defined America's drug policies in this century. In analyzing the public's continued fear, horror and outrage wrought by the specter of women using drugs, Nancy Campbell demonstrates the importance that public opinion and popular culture have played in regulating women's lives. The book will chronicle the history of women and drug use, provide a critical policy analysis of the government's drug policies and offer recommendations for the direction our current drug policies should take. Using Women includes such chapters as 'Sex, Drugs and Race in the Age of Dope'; 'Regulating Adolescents in the Postwar US'; 'Fifties Femininity'; and 'Regulating Maternal Instinct'.




Girls, Gangs, Women, and Drugs


Book Description

"This important new work by critically the acclaimed sociologist and author of Dangerous Society makes it clear that girls and young women have become a real force in the drug culture and in 1990s urban gang life. Girls, Gangs, Women and Drugs is based on a decade of field work undertaken in the city of Detroit by one of America's foremost gang experts and his team of researchers. In the course of this investigation, Taylor and his staff interviewed hundreds of girls and young women. Based on what they learned, Dr. Taylor has prepared this spell-binding account of drugs, money, sex, and violence. He commands the reader's attention as complex webs of female gang life and drug culture are unraveled." "Girls, Gangs, Women, and Drugs is a book about women, young and old; it is about gangs; it is a book about their survival in a society that has abandoned them; it is a book about women in the criminal justice system; it is about judges, attorneys, administrators of the court, and correctional officers; it is about the women who serve on the police force. It focuses on a large segment of Detroit's female population and how these women see what they are doing as committing acts of self-empowerment - the personal pursuit of their own version of the American Dream." "Girls, Gangs, Women, and Drugs takes a close look at the hard economic realities of life on the street and the women who must encounter them every day. Its message is clear: female involvement with drugs and gangs is yet another facet of America's decaying urban culture, one that commands our immediate attention."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved




Women and Substance Abuse


Book Description

In Women and Substance Abuse: Gender Transparency you’ll see what can be done to aid women in some of the world’s hardest hit substance abuse hubs, including Rio De Janeiro, Brazil; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and New Haven, Connecticut. Filled with timely research and practical solutions, this volume shows you what you can do to aid the tremendous and immediate need for specialized interventions in the lives of women.Women and Substance Abuse considers many of the variables in the lives of women who abuse drugs--race, choice of drug, HIV risk, and drug treatment history--and gives you line-by-line proof of the need for custom-tailored harm reduction strategies for addicted women who are and who aren’t engaged in drug treatment therapy. In addition, you’ll see why frequent cocaine use, current physical and sexual abuse, and concerns relating to children can alter the success of therapies and treatments. Overall, this unique volume will broaden your understanding of the subject by covering: gender differences in risk for gonorrhea infection risk factors for women who trade sex for drugs and money the role of physicians and prenatal care providers of substance abusing women how drug treatment programs can be more multifacted to include planning, prenatal care, and parenting skills prison-based therapeutic communities long-term residential treatment for women with children, pregnant women, and women without childrenFor every unique woman with a drug problem, there is a unique treatment. Women and Substance Abuse turns away from the lost cause of blanket treatments and takes you into the world’s slums and inner-city ghettoes, where the faces of addiction are as diverse as the women who bear its debilitating burdens. You’ll see women’s drug addiction for what it is--a montage of suffering and pain that only individual and specialized care can cure.




Drug Safety


Book Description




Women and Addiction


Book Description

For many years, addiction research focused almost exclusively on men. Yet scientific awareness of sex and gender differences in substance use disorders has grown tremendously in recent decades. This volume brings together leading authorities to review the state of the science and identify key directions for research and clinical practice. Concise, focused chapters illuminate how biological and psychosocial factors influence the etiology and epidemiology of substance use disorders in women; their clinical presentation, course, and psychiatric comorbidities; treatment access; and treatment effectiveness. Prevalent substances of abuse are examined, as are issues facing special populations.




The Risks of Prescription Drugs


Book Description

Few people realize that prescription drugs have become a leading cause of death, disease, and disability. Adverse reactions to widely used drugs, such as psychotropics and birth control pills, as well as biologicals, result in FDA warnings against adverse reactions. The Risks of Prescription Drugs describes how most drugs approved by the FDA are under-tested for adverse drug reactions, yet offer few new benefits. Drugs cause more than 2.2 million hospitalizations and 110,000 hospital-based deaths a year. Serious drug reactions at home or in nursing homes would significantly raise the total. Women, older people, and people with disabilities are least used in clinical trials and most affected. Health policy experts Donald Light, Howard Brody, Peter Conrad, Allan Horwitz, and Cheryl Stults describe how current regulations reward drug companies to expand clinical risks and create new diseases so millions of patients are exposed to unnecessary risks, especially women and the elderly. They reward developing marginally better drugs rather than discovering breakthrough, life-saving drugs. The Risks of Prescription Drugs tackles critical questions about the pharmaceutical industry and the privatization of risk. To what extent does the FDA protect the public from serious side effects and disasters? What is the effect of giving the private sector and markets a greater role and reducing public oversight? This volume considers whether current rules and incentives put patients' health at greater risk, the effect of the expansion of disease categories, the industry's justification of high U.S. prices, and the underlying shifts in the burden of risk borne by individuals in the world of pharmaceuticals. Chapters cover risks of statins for high cholesterol, SSRI drugs for depression and anxiety, and hormone replacement therapy for menopause. A final chapter outlines six changes to make drugs safer and more effective. Suitable for courses on health and aging, gender, disability, and minority studies, this book identifies the Risk Proliferation Syndrome that maximizes the number of people exposed to these risks. Additional Columbia / SSRC books on the privatization of risk and its implications for Americans: Bailouts: Public Money, Private ProfitEdited by Robert E. Wright Disaster and the Politics of InterventionEdited by Andrew Lakoff Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System-and How to Heal ItEdited by Jacob S. Hacker Laid Off, Laid Low: Political and Economic Consequences of Employment InsecurityEdited by Katherine S. Newman Pensions, Social Security, and the Privatization of RiskEdited by Mitchell A. Orenstein




Addicted to Rehab


Book Description

After decades of the American “war on drugs” and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce the prison population: addiction treatment. In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system—two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim’s book shows how addiction rehab reflects the race, class, and gender politics of the punitive turn. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that has reorganized the link between punishment and welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help women, McKim argues that the framework of addiction further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gendered subordination. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.




Woman of Substances


Book Description

A young woman's journey into addiction and treatment. Journalist Jenny Valentish takes a gendered look at drugs and alcohol, using her own story to light the way.