From the 1950s 'girl junkie' to the 1990s 'crack mom', Using Women investigates how the cultural representations of women drug users have defined America's drug policies in this century. In analyzing the public's continued fear, horror and outrage wrought by the specter of women using drugs, Nancy Campbell demonstrates the importance that public opinion and popular culture have played in regulating women's lives. The book will chronicle the history of women and drug use, provide a critical policy analysis of the government's drug policies and offer recommendations for the direction our current drug policies should take. Using Women includes such chapters as 'Sex, Drugs and Race in the Age of Dope'; 'Regulating Adolescents in the Postwar US'; 'Fifties Femininity'; and 'Regulating Maternal Instinct'.
Nancy D. Campbell is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The catalyst for her first book, Using Women: Gender, Drug Policy, and Social Reproduction (Routledge, 2000) was the claim that crack-cocaine-using pregnant women had somehow lost their "maternal instincts." See her article "Regulating 'maternal instinct': governing mentalities of U.S. drug policy in the late twentieth century" in Signs: Journal of Women, Culture, and Society, v. 24, no. 4 (Summer 1999).
Her second book was a history of the science of addiction research from the 1920s to the present. It is titled Discovering Addiction: The Science and Politics of Substance Abuse Research (University of Michigan Press, 2007). The book tells the story of human subjects research conducted by the US Public Health Service at the narcotic hospital in Lexington, KY. It is an example of scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The book looks seriously at the interpenetration of research on licit pharmaceutical drugs and illicit drugs. it tells the story of how addiction became defined as a "chronic, relapsing brain disorder," and how it became the object of neuroscientific investigation.
Her third book was co-authored with independent film-makers JP Olsen and Luke Walden, who made a terrific documentary called "The Narcotic Farm." The third book is a visual history of a legendary federal drug treatment facility outside of Lexington, KY. The book is titled The Narcotic Farm: The Rise and Fall of America's First Prison for Drug Addicts (Harry N. Abrams, 2008). Together Campbell, Olsen, and Walden sometimes do a performance piece titled "A Night Out at the narcotic farm" that premiered at The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York.
She is currently working on two book projects: a fourth book with feminist sociologist Elizabeth Ettorre titled "Gendering Addiction" (Palgrave) and a fifth book co-authored with historians Eric Schneider and Joseph Spillane, with psychiatric epidemiologist Rumi K. Price on the Vietnam Era Study directed by Lee N. Robins. She has also written on the history of harm reduction drug policy; sweat-patch drug testing; and feminist science studies.
She has two children, Isaac and Grace, and lives in Troy, New York. She was born and raised in Berwick, Pennsylvania, save for a brief sojourn in Olney, a neighborhood in North Philadelphia, to which she owes her abiding interest in drugs. She went to Bucknell University, did a master's in the English department at the University of Washington (Seattle), and her doctorate in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She taught at The Ohio state University in the Department of Women's Studies before moving to the Department of Science and technology Studies at Rensselaer.
