The proposed project builds on Dr. Musto's perspective on U.S. narcotics policy during the 19th and 20th Centuries, gained over the course of his long career studying American drug use. The project will provide a picture of American women's experience with psychoactive substances between 1865 and 1980 that will be useful as a context for present day policy planning and public discourse. The thesis upon which the analysis will be based and around which the material will be organized is that there is a powerful dynamic between changing images of drugs and changing roles and images of women, and that this dynamic is, in turn, affected by the large social and intellectual currents that give special character to given """"""""ages"""""""" in our history. Some of the basic issues that must be analyzed in order to test this thesis include the role of gender and class as factors in incidence and prevalence of drug abuse among women; the impact of drug use on women's roles as wives, mothers, and sexual partners; the relationship between drug use and women's health issues; and finally the role that women have played in defining the policy debate on drug abuse. The project researchers will collect, organize, and analyze materials that respond to the subsets of the larger proposition from as great a variety of primary and secondary sources as possible, with an emphasis on the former. With a few important exceptions, the existing historical literature on the history of substance abuse among American women has relied primarily on secondary sources. Particularly with respect to debates on the narcotics problem, which are often highly politicized, primary sources in the form of unpublished archival material must be consulted where available in order to produce as unbiased an account as possible of both the actors' motivations and the actual state of the drug problem. After completion of this basic research, the full texts of hundreds of the most important historical documents will be prepared for publication on CD-ROM. Dr. Musto will also produce a print volume of analysis and commentary on these documents. It is hoped that the CD-ROM project will form a basic resource for both historical research and policy planning.
