UsingWomen UsingWomen Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Justice Nancy D.Campbell Routledge New York London Published in 2000 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE Copyright © 2000 by Routledge All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Campbell, Nancy Duff. Using women: gender, drug policy, and social justice/ by Nancy D.Campbell p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-92412-X (hb)—ISBN 0-415-92413-8 (pbk.) 1. Women—Drug use—United States. 2. Women—Government policy—United States. 3. Narcotics, Control of—United States. 4. Sex discrimination against women—United States. 5. Social justice—United States. I. Title. HV5824.W6 C35 2000 362.29'082'0973–dc21 99–087644 ISBN 0-203-80032-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-80036-2 (Adobe eReader Format) CONTENTS List of illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Drug Policy, Social Reproduction, and Social Justice The Politics of Women’s 11 Addiction and Women’s Equality 1 Containing Equality 19 Biology and Vulnerability 2 Governing Mentalities 33 Reading Political Culture Gendering Narcotics 55 3 Primitive Pleasures, Modern Poisons 67 Femininity in the “Age of Dope” 4 The “Enemy Within” 91 Gender Deviance in the Mid-Century 5 Representing the “Real” 112 Girl Drug Addicts Testify v vi Contents Mother Fixations 137 6 Reproducing Drug Addiction 144 Motherhood, Respectability, and the State 7 Regulating Maternal Instinct 169 A Politics of Social Justice 193 8 Reading Drug Ethnography 200 Conclusion 221 Postmodern Progressivism Notes 227 Index 261 ILLUSTRATIONS 1. Advertisement for antianxiety drug, 1969 2 2. A methamphetamine user, 1997 3 3. Advertisement for antianxiety drug, 1969 31 4. Advertisement captioned “Heroin is a religious experience,” 1997 57 5. Illustration from “Trapped by the Poison Gas in Her 61 Jeweled Vanity Case,” 1931 6. Illustration from “Exposing the Traffic in Dope,” 1930 65 7. Photograph captioned “A Japanese woman tried to smuggle 65 heroin in this unsightly fashion,” 1945 8. Illustrations captioned “Swanky Sin” and 77 “Woman in Kimono,” 1937 9. Illustration of physician injecting seductive woman, 1930 78 10. Illustration of book cover depicting white slavery, 1947 85 11. Photograph of the Kefauver hearings, 1950 93 12. Photograph of Women’s Building, 1950 121 13. Photograph of an addict entering the hospital, 1950 122 14. Photograph of addicts entering Women’s Building, 1950 122 15. Photograph of an addict leaving Lexington, 1950 123 16. Movie still from She Shoulda Said No, 1949 133 17. Movie still from She Shoulda Said No, 1949 134 18. Illustration captioned “Don’t give soothing-syrup to children,” 1887 145 19. Cover illustration from Junkie: Confessions of an Unredeemed 147 Drug Addict by William Lee (William Burroughs), 1953 20. Cover illustration from Narcotic Agent by Maurice Helbrant, 1953 148 21. Cover illustration from Marijuana Girl by N.R.DeMexico, 1960 150 22. Photograph depicting association between women as 155 initiation into heroin sniffing, 1951 23. Photograph captioned “lifelong casualty of drug abuse,” 1990 186 24. Cover photograph from When Drug Addicts Have Children, 1992 198 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I gratefully acknowledge the ongoing intellectual, spiritual, and technical contributions of Ron Eglash and the constant companionship of Isaac Campbell Eglash in the project’s final months. For inspiration I thank my parents, David and Sandra Campbell, and my extended family, who weathered their own crises and mine while this book was in process. My siblings and their families, Connie Campbell, Tony Diehl, and Alexandra Campbell-Diehl, David R.Campbell and Amanda E.Myers-Campbell, and Gary Campbell have long tolerated their older sister’s elusive endeavors. Finally, my friends Giovanna Di Chiro, Kathryn Keller, Deirdre O’Connor, and David Rapkin dissented and empathized but, most important, punctuated the long periods of silence that this effort required. This book began as a dissertation shaped from the outset by Wendy Brown, Angela Y.Davis, Barbara Epstein, and especially Donna Haraway of the University of California at Santa Cruz. The 1995 “Feminism and Discourses of Power” research colloquium at the Humanities Research Institute, University of California at Irvine, provided a congenial atmosphere for thinking through the conceptual framework. I would like to acknowledge the HRI staff and “fellows”: Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Rey Chow, Nancy Fraser, Angela Harris, Saidiya Hartman, Anne Norton, Jenny Sharpe, Jacqueline Siapno, and Irene Wei. The Ohio State University Department of Women’s Studies provided a unique setting in which to hone my ideas about gender, public policy, and political discourse. I would like to thank the following colleagues for extraordinary efforts on my behalf: Mary Margaret Fonow, Susan Hartmann, Nick Howe, Sally Kitch, Linda Krikos, Martha Wharton, and Ara Wilson. I am indebted to Margaret Newell for contributing the title. Additionally, I have benefited from the support of many people in Columbus, including Michele Acker, Elizabeth Allan, Lu Bailey, Rhonda Benedict, Angela Brintlinger, Hong Cao, Steve Conn, Cory Dillon, Ada Draughon, Lisa Florman, Stephanie Grant, Jodi Horne, Virginia Reynolds, Eulalia Roël, Linda and Brian Rugg, Birgitte Soland, Kate Weber, Judy Wu, Maria Zazycki, Tracy Zitzelberger, and many others. Most important, I have relied on two extraordinary research assistants, Kate Bedford and Jenrose Fitzgerald, each of whom made the project and its passions their own. For technical triage, I depended on Valerie Rake’s expertise and legendary calm. All of my students were generous in allowing me to develop as a ix x Acknowledgments teacher and theorist before their very eyes; I thank them for listening and responding to my ideas. My feminist reading group, PMS, provided pleasure during this process: Suzanne Damarin, Gia Hinkle, Patti Lather, Nan Johnson, Marilyn Johnston, Linda Meadows, Laurel Richardson, Amy Shuman, Pat Stuhr, and Amy Zaharlick. An unusual group of drug policy historians was assembled by David Musto with the help of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and my efforts seemed less isolated in their company. I would especially like to thank Caroline Acker, John Burnham, David Courtwright, Jill Jonnes, Stephen Kandall, Mara Keire, Joe Spillane, and Bill White for their insights and contributions to the field. My research was supported financially by a Coca-Cola grant for Research on Women awarded in 1998. For their assistance I thank the staff of the Anslinger Archives at the Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University; the Library of the New York Academy of Medicine; the New York Public Library; and the National Library of Medicine. I also gratefully acknowledge the Ohio State University’s generous professional leave and junior faculty development policies. A fellowship from the OSU Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities allowed me to complete the project in a timely fashion. Lastly, my editor, Ilene Kalish, had faith in this project and steered it to completion with grace and good humor. Introduction Drug Policy, Social Reproduction, and Social Justice Spectacular Failures Housecleaning has long been associated with legal drug use by white women (see Figure 1). “Mother’s little helpers” once pepped up 1950s middle-class housewives afflicted with the feminine mystique.1 Today a spick-and-span house or too-well tended yard may betray a methamphetamine user.2 “Meth” or “crank,” once the “blue-collar cocaine” of truck drivers and carpet layers, was declared the “pink- collar crack” of the 1990s. “Today, you have the sense that it’s moms trying to juggle a job and three kids and day care, and women working on their feet as waitresses for twelve hours a day.”3 Portrayed as a “white woman’s drug,” meth reputedly numbed the pangs of hunger and postpartum depression (see Figure 2). In 1992 in some areas of the country women tested positive for meth at higher rates than men. “That’s the first time we’ve seen that on any drug,” remarked Clinton administration drug czar William McCaffrey. “There may be a piece of it related to weight loss and a piece of it related to enabling prostitution—it’s a drug that allows you to deal with your feelings of remorse.” McCaffrey went on to associate crank with “crack,” an illegal cocaine-derived drug characterized as being used primarily by African-Americans. Both drugs were characterized as having a particularly powerful attraction for women—the power to “shatter a mother’s love for her children.” Both were thought to overcome women’s intuition, their “natural instincts,” and the redemptive power of maternal love. Women’s turn to these drugs thus signified that the scope and impact of illicit drug use in the late twentieth century had exceeded a natural limit. By this logic, women who use illicit drugs embody both individual deviance and social failure; the differences between drugs and their users have been racialized and their meanings encoded in the “figures” of drug-using women on which political discourse relies. This book recounts such gendered and sexualized meanings of women and drugs in 1 2 Introduction Figure 1 Advertisement for antianxiety drug, 1969. U.S Senate Committee on Commerce. The Relationship between Drug Abuse and Advertising. 91st Cong., 2d sess., 22 September 1970. order to show how public constructions are produced, how they circulate, especially in public policy, and the assumptions that shape them. White women use meth to endure dull and repetitive work, the economic and emotional travails of childbearing and child rearing, and the constant monitoring of their weight.