Mother’s Day is a time to celebrate women for the care and sacrifice they make to raise their children in today’s world. Today, mothers are raising their children in an era of existential uncertainty and political injustices enacted by the U.S. government, including (but not limited to) policies that continue to separate women from their children, criminalize their pregnancies, lock them out of economic stability, and remove women’s right to choose by restricting access to mifepristone and birth control medications.
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) was founded to challenge the harms of prohibition, but we are still confronting the same uncomfortable truth four decades later. For more than 50 years, U.S. drug policy has functioned as gender policy. It has governed women’s bodies, dictated who is deemed a “fit” mother, and imposed lasting punishment long after a sentence ends. While the War on Drugs has harmed entire communities, women have borne uniquely destabilizing consequences, particularly Black and Latina women and women living in poverty.
Increasingly, trans people are targeted through the criminalization of both illicit drugs and the prescriptions they need, facing daily, profound human rights violations in the carceral system. The compounded stigma faced by femmes is rarely represented in the data, so I implore you, reader, to remember: the harms and opportunities you’ll read about here are also compounded for femme and other genderqueer people.
Since the 1980s, the number of incarcerated women in the United States has increased by more than 600 percent, the predictable result of policies rooted in punishment rather than public health like mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The infamous 100-to-1 crack-to-powder cocaine (now 18-to-1) disparity that devastated Black families by significantly expanding incarceration, for example, still lands hardest on families already navigating systemic inequality.
One in four women in the carceral system, double the rate of men, are locked up for drug offenses that are often low-level, nonviolent offenses entangled with poverty, coercion, or survival. Many are survivors of domestic or sexual violence. Two-thirds are mothers with children under 18. This deserves to be reiterated: around 50,000 American women are incarcerated today for low-level drug offenses. In the name of protecting children, we are actually causing children to be separated from their mothers and sowing the conditions that make incarceration and mental health challenges more likely for the next generation.
And increasingly, they are not in prison following a conviction; a majority are in jail awaiting trial. Nearly 60 percent of women in jails have not been convicted of a crime, often detained simply because they cannot afford bail. For women, incarceration is frequently less about risk to public safety and more about poverty.
When a woman is jailed or imprisoned, the impact rarely stops with her. Mothers are far more likely than fathers to be primary caregivers. Jail churn destabilizes entire families, pushing children into foster care and households into crisis. Pretrial detention, which can last weeks or months, can cost women jobs, housing, and custody before guilt is ever determined.
Drug enforcement has also criminalized pregnancy. From the “crack mother” panic of the 1980s to modern-day prosecutions, the drug war has policed our bodies and deemed whose motherhood is worthy of protection. Between 1973 and 2022, more than 1,800 cases were documented in which pregnant people were arrested, detained, or prosecuted in the name of protecting “unborn life,” most often tied to substance use allegations. Pregnant women who use drugs are met with surveillance, physical restraints, punishment, and separation from their newborns. These approaches, medical experts warn, deter prenatal care and worsen outcomes for families; care and evidence-based treatment are safer supports for family stability.
Inside correctional facilities, women face high rates of prior trauma and disproportionately high rates of mental health challenges. Women in jails die of drug and alcohol intoxication at twice the rate of men. Yet access to trauma-informed substance use treatment remains inadequate. The use of restraints on pregnant women, though increasingly restricted, still occurs in some facilities. These practices are not reflections of safety. They are reflections of a system designed for control, not healing.
Even after release, punishment continues. Federal law once imposed lifetime bans on SNAP and TANF benefits for people with drug felony convictions, and while states can opt out or modify those bans, barriers remain for two-thirds of returning citizens. “One Strike” public housing policies have enabled eviction based on drug-related activity, destabilizing entire families. Professional licensing restrictions block access to stable employment. Across the country, more than 40,000 laws, regulations, or restrictions can limit opportunities long after a sentence ends.
These are not isolated policies. They are interlocking systems that punish the poor, make women’s survival needlessly difficult, and burden their children with adverse childhood events.
Decades of evidence tell us that substance use disorders are most effectively addressed by stable housing, access to health care, community support, and trauma-informed treatment. Yet we have built a system that withholds those stabilizing supports while expanding criminal penalties.
Today, we stand at another inflection point. Cannabis is legal for medical or adult use in most states. Psychedelic therapies are moving through clinical research and the F.D.A. with unprecedented momentum. These developments hold enormous promise for healing, but legalization alone does not equal justice.
Even in states that have legalized cannabis, racial disparities in enforcement have persisted. Commercial markets have flourished while many Black and Brown women, survivors of the drug war, remain burdened by criminal records, excluded from capital, and locked out of opportunity.
We have a choice: as lawmakers debate how to regulate cannabis and consider new frameworks for psychedelic access, we can replicate the inequities of prohibition under new regulatory regimes, or we can build a post-prohibition future rooted in health, consent, dignity, and repair.
Repair means automatic expungement and retroactive sentence relief. It means ending the criminalization of pregnancy. It means eliminating collateral consequence barriers to housing, public benefits, and professional licensing. It means reducing reliance on pretrial detention and cash bail. It means investing in community-based mental health care and trauma-informed services in the communities most harmed by the drug war. It also means ensuring that emerging legal markets expand opportunity without extracting wealth from those already destabilized.
Women have long led the fight to end the drug war, organizing to end alcohol prohibition, for sentencing reform, for harm reduction, for the right to parent, and for the right to heal. We have built coalitions across differences and insisted that safety and justice are deeply connected goals.
When I organized my first action at 13 years old, it was attended by one person: my mom. I learned early that change requires persistence, partnership, and the loving support of women and femmes we admire. Nearly two decades into this movement, the lesson remains the same. We must be bold enough to imagine something better and disciplined enough to build it together.
This Mother’s Day, lawmakers have an opportunity to prove that drug policy reform is not just about markets or medicine: it is about mothers, children, families, and the right to heal without fear of punishment.
The future of drug policy should not be defined by who profits. It should be defined by who heals.
