Using Women

Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice

Nancy Campbell

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781135961046
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Sciences sociales
• Thema: Sociologie

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'.

NOTES

Introduction

1. In 1964 Congress addressed the “menace of pep pills” but declined to examine the decreasing availability of meaningful labor, Cold War anxieties, increased mobility, and amplified stress that contributed to their use. See U.S. Senate. Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. Subcommittee on Health. Control of Psychotoxic Drugs. 88th Cong., 2d sess., 3 August 1964.

2. Christopher S.Wren, “The Illegal Home Business: ‘Speed’ Manufacture,” New York Times, July 8, 1997, A8. Former user Bruce Fowler was quoted as saying: “Meth just makes you want to go. You go out to mow the lawn and end up manicuring it.”

3. Carey Goldberg, “Way Out West and Under the Influence,” New York Times, March 16, 1997, E16. Quotation attributed to Michael Gorman, University of Washington.

4. Milton C.Regan, Jr., Family Law and the Pursuit of Intimacy (New York: New York University Press, 1993) contrasts the modernist “acontextual self” to the postmodern “relational self.”

5. See Nancy Folbre, Who Pays for the Kids? Gender and the Structures of Constraint (New York: Routledge, 1994). Women’s disproportionate share of the work of social reproduction is an effect of structural forms of power that represent the collective interests of men. Folbre identifies them as “structures of constraint.” I employ the shorthand “structure” throughout the book.

6. U.S. Congress. House Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families. Law and Policy Affecting Addicted Women and Their Children. 101st Cong., 2d sess., 17 May 1990, 22. These are direct quotes of Senator Pete Wilson (R-CA).

7. House Select Committee. Law and Policy Affecting Addicted Women, 21–22.

8. “Women in Prison: Some Facts and Figures” (Washington, DC: National Women’s Law Center, 1996).

9. Nearly half of women were incarcerated for violent offenses in 1979. That proportion has fallen to less than one third. See Bureau of Justice Statistics 1988 and 1994 quoted in Meda Chesney-Lind, “Sentencing Women to Prison: Equality without Justice,” in Race, Gender, and Class in Criminology, eds. Martin D.Schwartz and Dragan Milovanovic (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 130.

10. Ilene H.Nagel and Barry L.Johnson, “The Role of Gender in a Structured Sentencing System,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 85, no. 1 (1994):216.

11. Chesney-Lind, “Sentencing Women,” Race, Gender, and Class in Criminology, 130.

12. Most incarcerated women “face the potential if not actual loss of their children”; male prisoners report that others are caring for their children. See Chesney-Lind, “Sentencing Women,” Race, Gender, and Class in Criminology, 130.

13. In 1984 drug offenders served an average sentence of 27 months; under “neutral” sentencing guidelines, the average sentence lengthened to 67 months.

14. Karen J.Swift, Manufacturing “Bad Mothers”: Critical Perspectives on Child Neglect (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 122.

15. What counts as truth changes over time, depending on the knowledge-production practices of the moment. The sociology of knowledge provides a useful perspective, as do historical and cultural studies of law, science, and medicine.

16. Critical legal studies, critical race theory, and critical race feminism emphasize the narrative power and political scripting of law. See Thomas J. Kaplan’s essay in The Argumentative Turn in Policy Analysis and Planning, eds. Frank Fischer and John Forester (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Kaplan asserts that each element of narrative analysis—agent, act, scene, agency, and purpose—can be connected to achieve a level of coherence and thus establish truth (178). He fails to see that “what counts as truth” emerges from social interaction.

17. Not all cultures consider addiction permanent or transformative. See Marilyn Strathern, “Relations without Substance,” in Lamont Lindstrom, ed., Drugs in Western Pacific Societies: Relations of Substance (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987), 231–254.

18. See Philippe Bourgois and Eloise Dunlap, “Exorcising Sex for Crack: An Ethnographic Perspective from Harlem,” in Crack Pipe as Pimp: An Ethnographic Investigation of Sex-for-Crack Exchanges, ed. Mitchell S.Ratner (New York: Lexington Books, 1993), 129.

19. The “culture of no culture” is Donna Haraway’s summary of Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Life-times: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

20. Eva Bertram, Morris Blackman, Kenneth Sharpe, and Peter Andreas, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996), 56.

21. See Frank R.Baumgartner and Bryan D.Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

22. Mary E.Hawkesworth, Theoretical Issues in Policy Analysis (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988); Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique (New York: Routledge, 1994); Sanford Schram, Words of Welfare (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Dorothy E.Smith, Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (New York: Routledge, 1990); Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox and Political Reason (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, and Company, 1988).

23. Catherine S.Marshall, ed. Feminist Critical Policy Analysis. (Washington, DC: The Falmer Press, 1997).

24. Emery Roe, Narrative Policy Analysis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 2.

25. See Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F.Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 169–170. The phantasm is not a mere sign but an “incorporeal materiality”: Phantasms must be allowed to function at the limit of bodies; against bodies, because they stick to bodies and protrude from them, but also because they touch them, and multiply their surfaces; and equally, outside of bodies, because they function between bodies according to laws of proximity, torsion, and variable distance—laws of which they remain ignorant. Phantasms do not extend organisms into an imaginary domain; they topologize the materiality of the body.

26. Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, 177.

27. Drug prohibition worked better than alcohol prohibition because the law-abiding professionals who regulated narcotics wanted to maintain their social authority. See Joseph F.Spillane, “Doctors and Drug Laws: Defining ‘Legitimate’ Sale and Use,” paper presented at the National Policy History conference, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, June 5–7, 1997.

28. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 57. Racialization is a cultural process by which racial meanings are extended to previously “unclassified” relations and social practices.

29. Bertram et al., Drug War Politics; Craig Reinarman and Harry G.Levine, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Feminist organizations and the ACLU deterred most policy-makers from punitive measures in the maternal crack-cocaine crisis of the early 1990s. As Laura E.Gomez documents in Misconceiving Mothers: Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1997), feminists recast maternal drug use from a narrow issue to one that implicated all women. This political redefinition was as much a reframing of drug discourse as a series of policy arguments.

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