Drug Use and Abuse among Women: An Overview

A review of the current literature and research on women's usage of three popular drug categories--heroin, marijuana, and the psychotropics--reveals that use and abuse of these drugs by women have been largely neglected in both research and treatment. Women's usage of these three drug categories bears investigation because use and possibly abuse, by women, of all three of these categories is increasing. Heroin addiction among women has increased at a much faster rate than among men, marijuana usage is estimated to equal that of men in some regions of the United States, and use of the psychotropics is consistently higher among women than among men. In all areas of female drug usage, a scarcity of data exists, with some studies including only male respondents. In still other studies, the female user is treated as a deviant user because she does not fit the conceptual models derived from studies of male abusers.