From Witches to Crack Moms: Women, Drug Law, and Policy Book

Susan Boyd examines how the regulation of altered states of consciousness and women's bodies is not new. Like the witches of old, women suspected of using illegal drugs today are persecuted and punished. From Witches to Crack Moms offers a critique of drug law and policy and its impact on women in the United States, and illuminates similarities and differences in Britain and Canada. Informed by a feminist sociological perspective, Boyd discusses how drug law and policy is racialized, class-biased, and gendered. She highlights how punitive drug laws inform and shape social service and medical policy and practice. Boyd also provides insight into how the war on drugs and the regulation of reproduction intersect, culminating in a volatile mix. Also examined is legal and illegal drug use, maternal drug use, and neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS), against the backdrop of the regulation of all women. In addition, Boyd examines how prisons, social services, medical treatment, maternity care, drug treatment, and drug court policy and practice have been restructured as a result of the war on drugs. Although the focus of this book is on women's experience of the war on drugs, it also examines how law and policy affect women and men in similar and different ways, and how the regulation of male drug users affects women, families, and communities. Boyd also discusses domestic and international drug policy, exploring how Western imperialism and colonization were accompanied by the condemnation of plants used in spiritual healing by indigenous peoples of North and South America. The impact of the war on drugs on women and indigenous peoples in Colombia is also discussed in order to reveal the connections between the regulation of drug use in Western liberal states and non-Western states. Boyd examines the "Americanization" of drug policy and how the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, and the war on crime are law enforcement initiatives that have that have become global in their reach. Boyd concludes that today, as the war on drugs advances, women have plenty to fear, but not necessarily from alleged drug users and dealers, but from moral regulation in all its guises, and from state, military, criminal justice, and corporate attempts to erode democracy to further their interests in Western and Third World nations. Boyd closes by stating that social justice, rather than criminal justice, is the goal to work toward. She proposes that ending the war on drugs is one strategy on the road to achieving social justice.Read More