A Qualitative Study of Women Prescription Drug Sellers

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In response to the National Institute of Drug Abuse Program Announcement (PA- 07-329), specifically “gender differences in opportunity to use drugs, access to drugs, patterns of drugs use and factors affecting these differences,” we have designed a renewal for our ongoing research project entitled “A Qualitative Study of Women in Drug Markets” (R01DA018159), an investigation of women’s changing roles in drug markets. While conducting the interviews for the parent study, we discovered that women are not only selling marijuana, heroin, stimulants and club drugs (the four target groups for our current study) but they also sell prescribed and diverted pharmaceuticals. We propose to interview 50 women and a comparison group of 50 men who sell prescription drugs (opioids, stimulants and Central Nervous System [CNS] depressants), including drugs that have been prescribed for them, those they have purchased from other patients and pharmaceuticals diverted to illicit markets. The overall aim of this proposed 24-month project is to conduct a qualitative study of women prescription drug sellers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Employing ethnographic sampling techniques, we will recruit 100 participants who have sold or exchanged prescription drugs five or more times in the prior six months, who are 18 years of age or older and who reside in the San Francisco Bay Area. By extending the study to relatively low level sellers of prescription drugs, we hope to interview a full range of distributors, from users/sellers to sellers who do not use, from initiates to long term dealers, from sellers who sell one drug only to those who sell other drugs as well, from women who sell their own prescribed medications to wholesalers who sell diverted pharmaceuticals, and from those who sell to strangers to those who sell to friends or relatives. Project findings will fill the gap in the extant literature regarding the impact of gender on distribution practices and personal use patterns and, in turn, the health-related dangers for women who sell prescription drugs. This exploratory project will provide much needed information in order to design more effective and appropriate public health initiatives and interventions that are designed to target gender-sensitive, gender-specific and drug-specific risk factors.