The Governance of Female Drug Users
Year: 2015
Type: book
Abstract: She has extensive research experience in drug use and policy and has also conducted research on restorative justice and self-injury.Before receiving her PhD at the University of Bath in 2006, Natasha worked in women's therapy and crisis centres for seven years, co-ordinating and training helpline volunteers and training professionals on women's mental health.The governance of female drug users drug policy and the social order.Finally, it provides an outline of the book's contents.'war on drugs' is viewed as not actually founded in scientific knowledge about the dangerousness of drugs.Rather, it is viewed as originating in colonialism, imperialism, the control of 'immigrants', Christian morality and the moral regulation of female sexuality (Boyd, 2004).The 'problem' of women's drug use within this framework can be seen as not to do with individual, pathological behaviour, but as rooted in a war that has been waged on them.This framework can also, of course, be used to understand men's illicit drug use (see 'A feminist sociological perspective', p 7-8).Political power is not understood as emanating simply from the actions of the state and its agencies (Rose and Miller, 1992, Rose, 1996).The state is just one instrument of government (Carrington, 1993, p xv).The governmentality approach draws attention to the diversity of forces that, in heterogeneous ways, seek to shape, guide,The governance of female drug users including during pregnancy, as mothers, and generally, in relation to their sexual behaviour. A comparative approachThe book takes a comparative approach to the analysis of drug policy, and evaluates the evidence regarding its impact on female users in the UK, US and Canada.It explores how drug policy has an impact on the lives of drug-using and offending women in the UK, and compares and contrasts this with impacts experienced by women users and offenders in other Western neoliberal states.The UK, US and Canada are all subject to the same global prohibition approach established by the United Nations (UN) Single Convention of 1961, the same approach which applies to a greater or lesser extent to countries all over the world.The US is of comparative interest as it has led the world in instigating and leading global drug prohibition, and continues to be seen as one of the most punitive Western countries in terms of drug law enforcement and the incarceration of its drug offenders.It provides an illustration of some of the harshest impacts of governmental technologies on female and male illicit drug users in the Western world.At one time the UK was seen as one of the leading countries in the world for its treatment rather than criminal justice and punishment-focused approach to drug law enforcement.In recent decades, however, it seems to have moved towards a more criminal justice-oriented US regulatory model, as have other Western countries, such as Sweden, although it is acknowledged that there are other Western countries, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and the Czech Republic, and some US states such as Colorado, Washington and California, that have moved in the other direction.As a comparative country, Canada sits somewhere between the US and the UK in terms of its emphasis on punishment and treatment respectively.Regardless of the emphasis placed on criminal justice, treatment or welfare, the UK, US and Canada all provide a good illustration of the regulatory powers of the 'helping' professions, and how treatment, welfare and punitive forces can combine to create a complex and efficient form of governmental control, surveillance and regulation in the lives of female (and male) drug users.The book does not provide a comprehensive review of all the evidence available for the three countries; rather, it provides an analysis of the impact of the operation of governmental technologies of power on the lives of female drug users.Selected substantive examples from the three countries are used to illustrate specific points of analysis.The approach is consideredThe governance of female drug users of power underpinning them, including prohibition, medicalisation and welfarisation in the lives of female drug users.Chapter Three focuses on the impact of the technology of prohibition.It examines how the war on drugs is a war on women.The research evidence on the impact of drug policy on the lives of women users is discussed.How drug policy discourses in the UK, US and Canada construct the problem to be governed, including in terms of harm to the individual female user, to the community, children and foetuses, is explored.The chapter then outlines the proposed solutions to the 'problem' of women's drug use.Not all women are treated equally in the war on drugs, and some are responsibilised more than others, including black, poor and vulnerable women.Arguably, the war on drugs causes more harm to women than the drugs themselves.This idea is explored through research evidence on women in prison, the criminalisation of pregnancy and drug-using women's punishment and medicalisation as both offenders and victims of crime.Chapter Four is concerned with the public health strand of drug policy discourse and the technology of medicalisation underpinning it.Medicalisation operates as a form of control and regulation whereby social structural issues such as poverty and social inequalities are individualised and deflected into the realm of disease.This chapter discusses the disease model of addiction, the construction of drug users and drug-using women in particular as pathological.How female users are situated in contemporary drug policy, as, on the one hand, irresponsible, bad choice makers, and on the other, as responsible for their predicament and for coming off drugs, are explored.Harm minimisation and recovery discourse, coercive policies and the marginalisation of women in treatment is discussed.It is argued that medicalisation has been deployed in part to facilitate and reinforce punishment regimes, widening the net of social control, and failing to address the social problems female users face.Chapter Five discusses the social welfare strand of drug policy discourse and the technology of welfarisation.Welfarisation constructs individuals or groups as needing social support, or constitutes them as unworthy of it.How female drug users are targeted for welfarisation or 'soft policing' through formal and informal social control mechanisms is explored.Interventions in the lives of female users presented as policies and practices of welfare (concerned with their wellbeing) are often experienced as intrusive, coercive and punitive.This chapter investigates the surveillance and regulation of drug-using women through welfare and social work policies and practices.Some contextual background is provided, including neoliberal policies focusing on risk
Source: Policy Press eBooks
Author: Natasha Du Rose
Institutions: University of Bristol, University of Chicago
Language: English
Topic: HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4299302186