From Witches to Crack Moms

In this 2006 revised printing, 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 are 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. This fear should not necessarily be 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.

"This book provides a critical feminist analysis of the impact drug law and policy have on women in the U.S. compared with women in Britain and Canada… Providing insight into the intersection of the war on drugs and the regulation of reproduction, this book also shows how women's drug use is gendered, class-based and racialized." —CAUT ACPPU Bulletin, June 2004

"Boyd has written a superb feminist analysis of the impact of US and Canadian drug laws on women. She identifies a basic inconsistency in a system that encourages drug taking by women about to give birth, yet is extremely punitive toward those who use illegal substances to self-medicate… Boyd is a clear, concise author who brings a well-researched historical, medical, cultural, social, criminal justice, and legal perspective to her argument… Strongly recommended." — CHOICE Magazine, January 2005

"Susan Boyd is a pioneer in researching substance abuse and women… Boyd's introduction is spellbinding… This is an excellent text to use in an upper division gender and history course or specialized courses on women and drug use at both the graduate and undergraduate levels." — NWSA Journal, Iowa State University, 2005

"From Witches to Crack Moms is a fascinating historical and sociological overview of changing attitudes toward women's use of both legal and illicit substances. An associate professor at the Centre for Addictions Research at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Susan Boyd is well-positioned to offer a useful perspective on the efficacy of the North American drug war." — Women's Review of Books, January/February 2008