Search results

This chapter explores the norms and assumptions that frame and sustain international drug policy and the international drug control regime. Drug policy is conceptualised as a ‘policy fiasco’ that persists despite extensive evidence of goal failure. The absence of effective monitoring and evaluation, impact assessment, stakeholder participation and mainstreaming of rights-based approaches, conflict sensitivity and gender sensitivity is emphasised, substantiating the argument that drug policy is a case study of ‘institutional path dependence’. Drug policy has repeatedly missed targets for achievement of a ‘drug free world’. This is explained through reference to the counterproductive and ‘unintended consequences’ of a drug policy approach of criminalisation. The impacts of drug policy enforcement are shown to be negative, pernicious and disproportionately born by the poor, by vulnerable communities and those subject to discrimination on account of race, gender and class.

This chapter paints a picture of the war on drugs, and the structures of prohibition and punishment that drive it, as extensions of broader systems of state and interpersonal violence. I outline the failures of prohibition through the criminalisation of drug-related activities and put forward a framework for harm reduction that has as its foundation a radical critique of punishment in all spheres of our lives. This chapter urges those who advocate for drug policy reform to build broader alliances with the many communities around the world that organise against the continuation of the prison industrial complex (PIC) as a whole, including: people in prison, gendered, racialised and LGBTQI+ communities, sex workers and prison abolitionists. I conclude by offering a vision for abolitionist drug policy, whose ultimate goal is to resist the expansion of the PIC globally and in doing so, to foster greater community resilience both across difference and beyond our increasingly siloed fields of expertise. As drug policy experts, the author can choose to situate the millions of people who use drugs worldwide within global contexts of ongoing state violence and control, so that the reforms the author advocate for match the fullness and complexity of the people and worlds the author are fighting for and tackle the root causes of the many harms our communities face.

Women are increasingly involved in a range of drug supply activities, but their role is overlooked in scholarship and policy processes. Women are key actors in plant cultivation (opium poppy, coca and cannabis), trafficking and distribution, but roles in the illegal drug economy are highly gendered stratified. Women most usually occupy low levels in supply and distribution chains, with their access to markets mediated by men. Nevertheless, participation by women in drug supply enables them to support precarious household incomes and/or cover the costs of dependent or casual drug use. More women are coming into drug supply and use at a time when a number of countries are adopting more repressive and punitive drug policies. The impact of enforcement is a sharp increase in numbers of incarcerated women, with implications for care of families and children.

Over the past decade, an increase in the numbers of women prosecuted, sentenced and imprisoned for drug-related offences has prompted concern and debate amongst criminal justice practitioners and policymakers. The female prison population in Southeast Asian countries is high compared to other regions. The direction of national drug policies and law enforcement are critical determinants of this situation. This chapter discusses the trends in the illicit drug market, the different types of policy responses, and the impacts on correctional services in the region. It provides an overview of women prisoners’ profiles, their backgrounds and their involvement in drug-related crimes. Key issues relating to the treatment of women in Southeast Asian prisons are analysed and addressed through the lens of the relevant provisions of the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders.

Colombia has been one of the main cocaine producing countries. The state’s response has been a repressive approach against the primary levels of the coca economy, such as cultivators and consumers. Although recent literature has documented the gendered impacts of drug policy, that is not the case for women who grow illicit crops. This chapter examines the ways drug policy has impacted women coca growers, cocaleras, in Putumayo, Colombia. Cocalero or cocalera is the term referred to rural workers dedicated to the cultivation and harvest of coca leaf. The term is a vindication from these communities, dignifying the rural activities they perform. In this chapter, we will use the term cocalera to refer to women coca growers.

From an intersectional gender perspective, the chapter explores the implications of rural life, gender, armed conflict and illegality over the trajectories of cocaleras in Putumayo, southern Colombia, a region where non-state armed actors, poverty and a precarious state presence converge. In this context, cultivating coca has become the main livelihood for rural families. It has transformed women’s roles within their communities, providing them with economic autonomy they previously did not have, but also located them in vulnerable positions. This chapter – which is an adaption from some chapters of the book ‘Voices from the coca fields: Women Building Rural Communities’ (Dejusticia, 2018 ) – is the outcome of research undertaken through in-depth interviews and social mapping exercises.

This chapter addresses the differential impact of drug policy enforcement on women and the interactions of these processes with other sources of social marginalisation. It explores how broader processes of stigmatisation and exclusion play out in the context of global drug policy enforcement, limiting women’s access to effective voice and representation. The author illustrates the increasing salience of this issue through an exploration of global rightwing pushbacks and the intersectional impacts on those whose voices and identities are increasingly criminalised. The framing of women who interact with drugs or drug markets as deviant and anomalous by policy actors is constrictive of their rights, and it is crucial that reform agendas be advanced.