Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women

Citation

Polly Radcliffe (2015), "Women on Ice: Methamphetamine Use among Suburban Women", Drugs and Alcohol Today, Vol. 15 No. 2, pp. 119-120. https://doi.org/10.1108/DAT-05-2014-0024

Women on Ice is based on five years of ethnographic work undertaken in two studies, the first exploring the extent of methamphetamine use in a metropolitan area in the southeast USA, and the second investigating women’s use of methamphetamine in that same metropolitan area. The book describes the structural limits to agency for the mainly poor women in the suburban hinterland of an America hit by the Great Recession of 2007, where, apart from cannabis, Boeri found that methamphetamine was the most frequently used drug.

Via her informants’ accounts, Boeri illustrates the performance enhancing use of methamphetamine that she dubs the perfect drug for the suburbs. Providing “energy, weight loss and happiness” (p. 9), women interviewed by Boeri described how methamphetamine facilitates the perfect enactment of femininity, enabling them to stay up all night to clean their houses; to be active members of the school PTA; and to stay slim. The methamphetamine market described by Boeri’s informants is not a publically visible, street scene. The drug is sold privately from suburban houses. Such closed drug markets, where sellers only sell to buyers they know or who are accompanied or recommended by those they know, provide security both against violence and deception. Closed drug markets may additionally protect the status and respectability of middle class female dealers.

Not all methamphetamine use remains controlled, however. As she has argued elsewhere, drug users frequently move in and out of categories of drug use. Boeri reprises her typology of drug career phases (Boeri, 2004) where control over use is balanced with self-control. Adapted from Chicago School social control theory, Boeri argues that depending on their ability to maintain social roles and/or control drug use, users may move from “controlled, occasional user”, “weekend warrior” through to “problem addict”, “junkie” and “former user”. Differential access to social capital is critical in enabling women to move out of a drug using identity. As well as respectable middle class house wives, Boeri describes women who had been made homeless as a result of mortgage foreclosure; women who had lost their children as a result of drug use; and women who were living in borrowed trailers, made vulnerable to the vagaries of similarly marginalised associates. There is no safety net to speak of for this American precariate in communities without public transport and with recourse to few treatment services, or, pre-Obama care, to health care, and where methamphetamine using and hustling provides a way of life almost outside the cash economy for some women at the least controlled end of the drug career phase.

The closed and largely private nature of the methamphetamine market poses particular challenges for the ethnographer. Boeri is meticulous in describing the methods that she and her research assistants deploy in recruiting, engaging and building rapport with their research subjects in 24-hour ethnographic work that often involved them in seeking accommodation and services for their research participants. In a preface to Women on Ice, Boeri tells us that her interest in drug use and drug markets is not purely an academic enterprise but is rooted in her own childhood and early life experiences. Perhaps because of her personal connection to the subjects of her research, Boeri presents a compassionate and engaged ethnographic method yet does not lose her critical stance. She is sceptical, for example, regarding the 12-step, Narcotics Anonymous language of rock bottoms and turning points which, she argues, gives drug users hope even as they continue to deal and use methamphetamine. This accessible book contributes to drug knowledge and scholarship for a readership interested variously in methamphetamine use, gendered drug use or American social policy.