9 - Gender, Drugs, and Crime

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The relationship between gender and drug use has been referred to as ‘the big neglected question’ in the field of substance misuse (Measham, 2003, p. 22). Historically, the addiction literature has focused on male drug users, and less attention has been given to the problems of female users (Neale, 2004a). During the 1990s, this focus began to change, and female drug users became a topic of interest among researchers (Broom, 1994). However, it did not wholly answer the question of whether there were gender differences in drug misuse (Broom, 1994). As a result, relatively little research was done on the broader issue of whether women and men were fundamentally different in any way in the characteristics of their drug misuse and the problems associated with it.

Nevertheless, information relating to gender differences is now emerging. Recent research has shown that female and male drug users differ in terms of the nature of their drug use and in associated problems, including patterns of drug use (Neale, 2004a), the development of drug-use careers (Kandel, 2000), drug-use initiation (Eaves, 2004), and treatment outcomes (Hser, Huang, Teruya, and Anglin, 2004). These findings are important and suggest that both the nature of the problem and the nature of the solution might be different for women and men. However, the number of studies investigating any single issue within this broad area is small and the results obtained so far are contradictory (Hser et al., 2004). Hence, generalization is difficult and few definitive findings have emerged.