ABSTRACT
Women use drugs for a number of reasons. While some of the causal factors have been established as similar to the reasons that men use drugs, there are particular risk factors that predispose women to substance abuse, including relational subordination and exposure to intimate partner violence. When justice is included in the research questions and hypotheses, it can then be treated as an analytic category. The extent to which reallocating resources, changing institutional policies, restoring individual rights or other efforts towards decreasing social inequality will lead to reduction or desistance of substance abuse in women remains an empirical question. The criminal legal system has, in a sense, hijacked the notion of justice to such an extent that feminist researchers and other scholars interested in exploring questions of substance abuse and women have avoided mentioning the concept. Public policy that is aimed at changing that situation is likely to be more effective in resolving the problem of substance abuse.
