Abstract
Until very recently the term female drug user conjured up an image of a shadowy emaciated black addict streetwalker: devious, dirty, and desperate for another fix. The woman behind this stereotype is not the norm, as drug researchers have been discovering. Middle-class prescription users by far outnumber their ghetto sisters. In the ghetto itself, the female users of narcotics often engage in property crimes, shoplifting and short con games. Yet the image of the “jive dope fiend whoe”* is a haunting one, since she represents, in some sense, the pariah of the pariahs, contradicting norms of both sobriety and sexual ownership, being a pleasure-seeker who rents her favors.
Sometimes I like to pretend I’m Wonder Woman. —An Addict Prostitute
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Cleckner, P. (1978). Jive Dope Fiend Whoes. In: Hoch-Smith, J., Spring, A. (eds) Women in Ritual and Symbolic Roles. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2400-3_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-2400-3_13
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