front cover of addicted.pregnant.poor
addicted.pregnant.poor
Kelly Ray Knight
Duke University Press, 2015
For the addicted, pregnant, and poor women living in daily-rent hotels in San Francisco's Mission district, life is marked by battles against drug cravings, housing debt, and potential violence. In this stunning ethnography Kelly Ray Knight presents these women in all their complex humanity and asks what kinds of futures are possible for them given their seemingly hopeless situation. During her four years of fieldwork Knight documented women’s struggles as they traveled from the street to the clinic, jail, and family court, and back to the hotels. She approaches addicted pregnancy as an everyday phenomenon in these women's lives and describes how they must navigate the tension between pregnancy's demands to stay clean and the pull of addiction and poverty toward drug use and sex work. By creating the space for addicted women's own narratives and examining addicted pregnancy from medical, policy, and social science perspectives, Knight forces us to confront and reconsider the ways we think about addiction, trauma, health, criminality, and responsibility. 
 
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Cocaine Addiction
Theory, Research and Treatment
Jerome J. Platt
Harvard University Press, 1997

It inspired written testimonials from William McKinley, Thomas Edison, and Sarah Bernhardt; merited a medal from Pope Leo XIII; produced "exhilaration and lasting euphoria" in Sigmund Freud. Once the stimulant of choice of the enlightened and the elite, cocaine has become, a century later, a plague, ravaging the lives of millions. This book is the first to draw together all the facts about this pervasive drug--from its natural occurrence in a tea-like native South American plant to its devastating appearance as crack in the inner cities of the United States.

Drawing on the latest work in medicine, psychiatry, neuroscience, pharmacology, epidemiology, social work, and sociology, the volume is a highly accessible reference on the history and use of cocaine, its physical and psychological effects, and the etiology and epidemiology of cocaine addiction. It also provides a critical evaluation of the pharmaceutical agents and psychosocial interventions that have been used to treat this addiction. Author Jerome J. Platt answers such basic questions as: What is cocaine? What forms does it come in? How is it administered? What does it do? What are the medical complications of cocaine addiction? What are the treatments, and how successful are they?

Uniquely comprehensive, Cocaine Addiction makes all the latest information on this urgent subject readily available to medical professionals and practitioners, social workers and scholars, and anyone who cares to know more about this perennially troubling drug.

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Misconceiving Mothers
Legislators, Prosecutors, and the Politics of Prenatal Drug Exposure
Laura Gomez
Temple University Press, 1997
A tiny African-American baby lies in a hospital incubator, tubes protruding from his nostrils, head, and limbs. "He couldn't take the hit," the caption warns. "If you're pregnant, don't take drugs." Ten years earlier, this billboard would have been largely unintelligible to many of us. But when it appeared in 1991, it immediately conjured up several powerful images: the helpless infant himself; his unseen environment, a newborn intensive care unit filled with babies crying inconsolably; and the mother who did this -- crack-addicted and unrepentant.

Misconceiving Mothers is a case study of how public policy about reproduction and crime is made. Laura E. Gomez uses secondary research and first-hand interviews with legislators and prosecutors to examine attitudes toward the criminalization and/or medicalization of drug use during pregnancy by the legislature and criminal justice systems in California. She traces how an initial tendency toward criminalization gave way to a trend toward seeing the problem of "crack babies" as an issue of social welfare and public health.

It  is no surprise that in an atmosphere of mother-blaming, particularly targeted at poor women and women of color, "crack babies" so easily captured the American popular imagination in the late 1980s. What is surprising is the was prenatal drug exposure came to be institutionalized in the state apparatus. Gomez attributes this circumstance to four interrelated cause: the gendered nature of the social problem; the recasting of the problem as fundamentally "medical" rather than "criminal"; the dynamic nature of t he process of institutionalization; and the specific feature of the legal institutions -- that is, the legislature and prosecutors' offices -- the became prominent in the case.

At one level Misconceiving Mothers tells the story of a particular problem at a particular time and place -- how the California legislature and district attorneys grappled with pregnant women's  drug use in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At another level, the book tells a more general story about the political nature of contemporary social problems. The story it tells is political not just because it deals with the character of political institutions but because the process itself and the nature of the claims-making concern the power to control the allocation of state resources.

A number of studies have looked at how the initial criminalization of social problems takes place. Misconceiving Mothers looks at the process by which a criminalized social problem is institutionalized through the attitudes and policies of elite decision-makers.
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