Each recreational drug was assigned a schedule based on its potential for addiction and abuse, its acceptable medical uses, and its safety profile.
Simultaneously, the advent of crack cocaine in New York City severely impacted inner-city areas and increased the public's political opposition to drug use.
Bloom, Owen and Covington (2004)[7] additionally state that the majority of women offenders are poor, undereducated, and underemployed, hurting their chances of desisting properly and increasing their risk of recidivism after leaving prison.
The advent of crack also came at the same time as the peak of the War on Drugs and its increasingly more punitive laws and focus on defunding welfare programs.
Additionally, many women were pressured or chose to perform sex work in order to support their “urgent need for drugs”.
[10] Since the 1980s, cheaper imports have been competing for domestically manufactured goods in the United States, leading to deindustrialization, particularly in urban areas.
[13] While Bourgois in 1989 states that women are free to take part in the drug trade now that they have been liberated from being wives and mothers, he qualifies this by saying that “traditional gender relations still govern income-generating strategies in the underground economy”.
[12] His ethnographic research shows that the majority of women in the Spanish Harlem crack market become sex workers to support their addictions.
[12] Sociologists Lisa Maher and Kathleen Daly in 1996 performed an ethnographic study of women in the Bushwick drug market in Brooklyn.
The runners, steerers, coppers, and casual sellers occupy the lowest-power and lowest-income positions of this market, and have the most women participants.
Furthermore, while the influx of crack lowered prices significantly, Maher's book does not support the idea that women frequently exchange sex directly for drugs.
In Sexed Work, Lisa Maher states that some women adopt a “badass” or a “crazy” persona in order to survive amongst violent male counterparts.