Why Women Were Targeted in War on Drugs?
Drugs are characterized as having an immensely powerful attraction for women. It’s the kind of power that shatters mother’s love for her children. In 1992, the United States witnessed an unexpected proliferation of women tested positive for meth at higher rates than men. Barry McCaffrey, former director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONCDP), or Drug Czar, put a remark on methamphetamine, “meth” or “crank”, is relatively associated with “crack”, an illegal-cocaine derived drug primarily used by African-American women. Drugs are thought to overcome and undermine women’s autonomy, intuition, the natural instincts and their redemptive power of maternal love. It is visible that women’s propensity of using any illicit drugs, has such enormous impacts and signifies a scope that had exceeded the natural limits of women.
Women who use drugs are immediately identified as part of social deviance and failures, but the differences in using drugs and the individuals have been racialized and their meanings encoded in their “figures” of drug-using women on which political discourse relies. It needs to be understood the ramification of racialized categorization in women using illicit drugs is controversial and compelling. White women tend to use drugs to suppress the stress of repetitive work and dullness, the economic and emotional travails of childbearing, and the constant monitoring of their weight. White women are specifically perceived to “cleaner” than women of color, in terms of using illegal drugs. This indicates somehow, white women particularly use drugs to remain functional, productive and in order, while women of color are subjectively depicted to be nonproductive subjects, representing chaos, deviance and bohemianism.
When women use drugs, they are not compulsive to do cook, clean, work or care children. They are identified as sexual compulsives, unacceptable wife and mother, a willing prostitute who lacks capacity of showing remorse. The violation of using drugs utterly brand women a spectacular failure, which surreptitiously construct their lives. Women, nonetheless, are targeted for governance of their behaviors and decisions.
This growth of social inequalities signals how women are assigned with the cultural practices of responsibility for sexual reproduction. It seems their obligation to “reproduce” society and its productive forces are unquestionably unremunerated and unremarked, but they are not absorbed without cost. Thus, women embody the collision of normative expectation of how citizens conduct themselves as true citizens and how women should behave like women.
The shared beliefs, values, figures and cultural experiences, and knowledge production are encoded in government mentalities. Drug policy is heavily shaped by how cultural figures that most U.S political discourses utilize to comparatively describe, presume and reiterate. The whole sum of a collection of fantastical figures includes “morphinist mothers” and “opium vampires” in the 19th and early 20th century, the “enemies within” and the “girl drug addicts” in 1950s, the “heroine mothers” in 1970s, to the “crack moms” as the latest. Upon the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986, lengthy minimum natatory sentences were imposed on both male and female drug addicts. The country experienced an unimaginable growth of incarceration rate, women as mothers of fatherless families or imprisoned convicts would suffer major consequences. Therefore, they would be entrapped in a cycle of incarceration, degrading social conditions, and reduced into much less productive positions.
The paradox here lies in the core of drug policy that deliberately downplays the nature of women’s economic, social and political autonomy, and how drug policy inadvertently conveys the reiteration of women’s responsibility in social reproduction. That is, women’s rights depend on the degree which women fulfill their responsibilities as productive and contingent workers, consumers, and caretakers. The autonomy becomes the consumer’s good, an object to be purchased at the price of good behaviors and social conformity. This social justice I’m talking about certainly place women in positions with responsibility for absorbing the cost of social production that men do not experience. It has become clear that women will forcibly refuse to be “women”, to contest and liberate them from social captivity. Which means, they will refuse to play the role in social arrangements, which subordinate women to men, women of color to white women, and single, queer, homosexual and bisexual women to women normative family model. I assume that the undeclared war against women, made by Republicans always target at various aspect of women, beside of reproductive rights, abortion restriction, and birth control.
I must say if we are serious about building polity that exceeds the sum of our impulsive selves, fairness can only be done by sharing the responsibility of social production more equitably. Drug policy has been known for debating to re-inscribe women’s over-accountability for the social cost by constructing maternal responsibilities for even those whose social relation originating outside a mother’s experience. Traumatized by fear that women will become unfit and unwilling to serve as they have been in the past, drug-using women are targeted by policy makers as a sign of distortion of maternity and femininity. Dug policy relies on policy-makers in an attempt to uncover the truth about “addiction”. Looking at the process of policy-making, it demonstrates a remarkable manifestation of cultural practice in governance. Whatever this “truth” of addiction is about, policy making process has been limiting how stories about drug must be told with accusatory tone. Drug, for instance, is the main vehicle that drive addiction narratives, displacing economic dislocation, deteriorating social conditions.
What we are dealing with is not why women use drugs, but why women, why women addicts haunt political dramatized theater in which public knowledges are stages, fabricated, exaggerated, identities performed, and policy produced. Nevertheless, drug addicted women produce endless dramatized repetitions of the truths and consequential outcomes of using drugs in political vision. When drug using is constituted as social problem, women who use drugs will appear as a singular problematic issue. Policy-makers see the dissatisfying and unpleasant aspect of interconnectedness between drug use and non-normative racial ethnic, gender, class formations to obtain their political aims. According to the sexual identity, racial-ethnic formation, and reproductive status, women’s social subordination positions them very differently before the law in ways that vary.
It is specifically stated in the passage of Harrison Act 1914 which effectively criminalized the sale and purchase of narcotics, and implemented association between drug use and interracial sexuality. The distinctive linkage between drug use and threatening forms of cultural differences was built into law, policy, popular culture and public discourse. Still, after 103 years since the enactment of the federal government that first outlawed narcotics drugs, public and police attitudes toward the dangerousness of drugs plaguing the society, are shaped by the ignorance of the impact and mistaken prejudices regarding the drug users. The old construction of drug use as an aspect of femininity was increasingly racialized. Beyond the remarkable spectrum of whiteness, drug use became surreptitiously linked with “blackness”. Which means, the autonomy of femininity, transmuted from sexual form that turned women either sexual predator or victim-prey to maternal form. It seems unsettling to witness how the figure of drug-using women, even in the stage of pregnancy, being demonized and mendaciously identified as groups of unhinged nuances.
Drug policy certainly involves in the interplay of governing mentalities, in shaping how we think, talk, and make policy related to drugs, relying on our dependency, femininity, and sexual deviance. Still speculating whether drug policy aims to incapacitate, devalue women into the definitive role in social reproduction, and make them being superfluous, women’s social subordination positions them differently before law is issued, according to their sexual identity, racial-ethnic formation, reproductive status. Drugs are importantly represented as to burst the boundary of women, erode and edifice the dominant culture. And women are caught in theatrical drama.
