The Meaning and Gendered Culture of Getting High: Gang Girls and Drug Use Issues

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This paper explores drug use in the lives of female gang members. Gang researchers have traditionally neglected the roles that females play in street gangs. More recent efforts have begun to examine the social life of young women and to uncover the extent to which the women develop a subculture within a male-dominated environment. In analyzing the culture of drug use in gang life, we uncover the extent to which women use illicit drugs in a highly gendered way. We focus on the ways in which female gang members use drugs in a recreational manner, in a social setting where drug taking is normative behavior. Data for this paper are drawn from an ongoing study of street gangs in the San Francisco Bay area in which 168 female gang members were interviewed using both a quantitative and a qualitative interview schedule.