Parts One and Two of this book examined how women who use illicit drugs are governed by analysing how they are constituted within official and academic discourse. The operation of three technologies of power as they are expressed through academic and drug policy discourse was explored. Official discourse ascribes multiple and contradictory characteristics to women who use illicit drugs, and in so doing makes them amenable to governmental regulation. Particular norms of behaviour are established through official discourse, and various techniques and tactics are set up to control and regulate female illicit drug users who deviate from these norms. They are constituted as responsible for becoming dependent on drugs, and for the perceived harm they cause to themselves and to others.

How these technologies operate in the lives of the 40 women in this study who use illicit drugs is now explored in an analysis of the subjectivities the women adopt for themselves, in relation to how these are constructed in policy. Their accounts of the characteristics they ascribe to themselves, their view of normality, and what they felt responsible for was in some ways the same, but in other ways different from those constructed within academic and drug policy discourses. The female users in this study imputed new and different meanings to the technologies of power they are subject to by placing themselves into the process of their governance. They take the subjectivities constructed for them and the regulations imposed on them within drug policy discourse, and modify and reshape them at the level of discourse.

This chapter and the next explore the narratives the 40 women provided about their drug use. The women interviewed for this study were taken from three English cities: Bristol, Reading and London. The most dominant stories the women told were psychosocial stories of drug use, in which it featured as a solution to the emotional problems they were experiencing, but which eventually brought them more problems. The women related their experiences of drug use and the social conditions in which this drug use occurred to their psychological wellbeing, reflecting the broader sociopolitical context in which their narratives emerged, wherein illicit drug use is both psychologised and individualised.