Tough-on-drug policies often hit women hardest

SVITLANA MOROZ started injecting opium as a 16-year-old in Ukraine. Soon she grew accustomed to policemen and their friends taunting her, or assaulting her. Their attitude, she recalls, was “you are a woman who uses drugs, so we can use you how we want.” At 19, she received a double diagnosis: pregnant and HIV-positive. Scared of harming her baby, she decided to quit drugs, but to do so alone. If she sought treatment she would need to register as a drug user with the state. Then would come coaxing by doctors to have an abortion, or later, threats of losing parental rights: drug abuse is grounds enough. If that happened, she would need proof of maternal stability—an income, a residence—to get her child back. But a drug-user designation scares off employers.

Such cycles churn across much of culturally conservative eastern Europe, where drug use is high and punishments are severe. Devised in the Soviet Union and known today in Russia as “social intolerance”, the region’s standard approach is to make drug users’ lives miserable so they will stop. Western Europe, by contrast, inherited another strategy, this one from Switzerland in the 1980s and other countries. “Harm reduction” encourages people to address their addictions gradually with support rather than punishment. On paper, the western way has gained ground. In 2019 all eastern European countries except Russia had some national commitment to harm reduction (though implementation is patchy). Almost none focused on the problems of female drug users; globally, too, just 2% of resolutions adopted by the United Nations Commission on Narcotic Drugs over nine years (2009-18) did so. Yet women often suffer the most.