Free Movement

Many drug laws and policies over the past twenty years have had specific, devastating, and disparate effects on women, and particularly on women of minority backgrounds.There is a higher likelihood that women drug users will provide sex in exchange for housing, sustenance, and protection; suffer violence from sexual partners; and have difficulty insisting that their sexual partners use condoms. Women drug users may also rely on men to inject them with drugs and to acquire drugs and injection equipment, a behavior shown to increase the likelihood of injection with contaminated equipment. Fundamentally, women have different motivations to enter both drug use and drug treatment and in the personal dynamics that play a part in treatment success.  Despite evidence of important differences in drug use experiences and access to harm reduction services for women and men, gender-sensitive interventions have not been fully integrated in harm reduction. In this workshop, we’ll focus on the unique experiences of women who use drugs and their stories.