WOMEN IN THE STREET-LEVEL DRUG ECONOMY: CONTINUITY OR CHANGE?

The issue Maher and Daly present is whether women played a greater entrepreneurial role, both in sales and in distribution, in the crack cocaine markets of the 1980s and early 1990s than in the heroin markets. of the 1960s and 1970s. By utilizing an observational and interview format, the authors examined and analyzed women drug abusers in a high-crime, drug-infested area of New York. Their findings, contrary to other research reports, found that crack cocaine markets have not offered very much opportunity for women to monetarily prosper in the sales and distribution of crack. Their research suggests that the newer drug markets remain male dominated and have not seen any significant movement of women dealers' assent to the higher profit circles of the drug trade. Instead, women predominantly remain at low-level auxiliary positions of the business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]