Commentary
Marriage, mortgage, motherhood: What longitudinal studies can tell us about gender, drug ‘careers’ and the normalisation of adult ‘recreational’ drug use

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Abstract

Through a consideration of quantitative and qualitative data obtained from young women aged 18–28 in the later years of the North West England Longitudinal Study, this paper explores how women's drug careers develop, progressing the authors’ normalisation thesis of ‘recreational’ drug use from adolescence into adulthood. Longitudinal studies are here compared with repeated cross-sectional surveys more usually favoured and funded by governments. The authors argue that firstly, in relation to methodology, longitudinal studies provide a unique opportunity to elucidate how drug careers develop across the life course and to chart the various impacts of life events and transitions on these careers and vice versa. Secondly, through this exploration of gender differences in drug careers and life transitions, we develop an age and gender-sensitive understanding of how recreational drug use fits into women's adult lives. The paper concludes that the challenge for policy makers is how to address adult women's ‘normalised’ recreational drug use, in the face of a regime focused on educational provision aimed at adolescent prevention; public health information designed for teenagers; and treatment resources focused on predominantly male and non parenting problem drug users, and the links between addiction and acquisitive crime.

Introduction

In the last two decades UK drug policy has increasingly focused on the drugs–crime relationship, through a prioritisation of the aims of control, crime prevention and coercion over those of health, harm reduction and individual voluntarism (Hough, 2001, Hunt and Stevens, 2004, Reuter and Stevens, 2008). Under the previous Labour government, a quasi-compulsory drug treatment programme drug tested those arrested for trigger offences, such as shop theft, and if they tested positive for heroin or cocaine, mandated treatment. Given that the UK has a higher proportion of male to female drug users in treatment (at a ratio of 3:1) and drug users coming through the offender pathway to treatment (NTA, 2010), compared to a 2:1 male to female ratio for drug users more generally (Hoare & Moon, 2010, p. 32), this policy disproportionately targets male ‘problem drug users’ and their links to acquisitive crime.

Female drug users have been neglected in policy responses which presume that drug users, particularly ‘problem drug users’, are male by default; female drug users can be cloaked by invisibility and the implications of policies for them are easily overlooked. If the ‘drug problem’ comes to be defined as men's problems, or indeed problems with men, then not only does it overlook about a third of drug users, but where women's drug experiences differ from men's, they may receive less appropriate responses and resources. Although female drug users are as likely to access services and more likely to be parents in treatment (NTA, 2010), some women may feel excluded from services, particularly given the conflict of identity between drug use and motherhood, discussed further below. Furthermore, when women's drug problems do reach the attention of policy makers, or indeed the press, they are often defined by their gender: as mothers/future mothers, as sexual partners or sex workers (Ettorre, 2007).

From the 1980s, feminist methodologies have challenged positivist and quantitative methodologies dominated by ‘malestream’ academics (e.g. Harding, 1992, Stanley, 1990). As Taylor (1993) and Maher (1997) noted, male drug researchers have been more likely to research inner city ‘hard’ drug use and crime. Although since the 1990s, there has been an increasing focus by female drug researchers on women's use of ecstasy and other dance drugs, with an emphasis on women's agency, pleasure seeking, and broader leisure lifestyles (for review see Measham, 2002), qualitative studies are still favoured in research by women and about women (e.g. Henderson, 1999, Hutton, 2006). This is not to deny the feminist quantitative research tradition in the social sciences. Oakley has long advocated the case for feminist researchers to use mixed methods – including the rehabilitation of quantitative methods – arguing that the integration of a range of methods is necessary to create “an emancipatory social science” (1998, p. 707).

Picking up this methodological debate, this paper argues firstly, for the unique potential of longitudinal studies to identify drug careers through an exploration of the relationship between starting, stopping and restarting drug use and key life transitions in early adulthood. Secondly, we consider the relevance of our normalisation thesis of adolescent ‘recreational’ drug use (Parker, Aldridge, & Measham, 1998) to our longitudinal cohort after they reached adulthood, seeing how occasional and weekend drug use entwine with women's careers, parenting and domestic work. Whilst critics of the normalisation thesis have emphasised prevalence measures as a key determinant of the existence or otherwise of normalisation (Shiner & Newburn, 1997); here and elsewhere (Aldridge, Measham, & Williams, 2011) we instead emphasise the social and cultural acceptance of drugs in everyday lives.1 Finally, we conclude that qualitative and quantitative longitudinal data such as ours can be invaluable in informing gender-sensitive and feminist-driven policy.

Section snippets

Comparing cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys

Repeated cross-sectional surveys that produce ‘trend’ data, like the British Crime Survey in the UK (hereafter BCS), allow researchers to identify population level trends in drug taking, thus providing answers to questions such as whether the use of a particular drug is increasing, decreasing, or remaining stable. Surveys like these can provide policy makers with important information about fluctuations in the availability and preferences for specific drugs, such as the increasingly widespread

The gendering of general population surveys

General population surveys (GPS) like the BCS have for decades documented a roughly 2:1 ratio of male to female drug users for most drugs (Hoare & Moon, 2010). However, there is considerable evidence to suggest that the samples produced by the BCS are not representative of the general population from which they are drawn, and in particular, that they under-represent some kinds of drug taking.3

Women's drug taking in the BCS

We turn now to a sketch of women's drug taking gleaned from the BCS. Keeping in mind its limitations as discussed above, data like these are especially useful for identifying trends over time and group differences in drug taking. The 2009/10 BCS reports past year drug taking rates for women (5.4%) at about half of that for men (11.9%); and in spite of an overall decline in drug taking since 1996, the male:female ratio in past year drug use rates has remained roughly similar in the interim.

The NWELS: gender, drug careers and normalisation

The data here comes from three key stages of the NWELS when the sample was aged 18, 22 and 27/8. Data collected from the sample at age 27/28 formed part of Williams’ doctoral research and analyses of the life transitions qualitative data is presented in her thesis and other publications (see Aldridge et al., 2011, Williams, in press). We present here for the first time analyses of quantitative data by gender and qualitative data relating to policy implications. Our analyses focus on the cohort

Policy provision and gender-sensitive possibilities

What are the policy implications of these women's drug careers we have charted through adolescence and into adulthood? Adult women's ‘recreational’ drug use takes place largely in a policy vacuum. We discuss here how female users fall through the education and treatment nets.

  • (a)

    Drugs education, official and lay knowledge

In the NWELS one of the first sources of drugs information was formal drugs education at school. In addition to this, some interviewees described how they sourced information about

Conclusion

Cross-sectional population surveys are able to provide population-representative understanding about drug taking across the age range. However, with declining response rates, non-response bias, unwillingness to disclose, and public sector funding cuts, we would argue that they are not – on their own – a sound basis for complex policy decisions. Longitudinal studies, by contrast, provide a unique opportunity to explore individual drug careers across the life course through the collection of

Acknowledgement

Thanks to the three anonymous reviewers for comprehensive and constructive comments.

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