Building Black feminist visions to end the drug war

Mainstream conversations, advocacy, and organizing aimed at addressing the harms of both drug use and the drug war through law, policy, and service provision have largely failed to take into account or respond to the experiences of women, girls, and trans people. They have also failed to address drug war logic— which prioritizes and justifies enforcement of abstinence, drug prohibition, criminalization, and punishment to address the real and perceived health and societal harms of drug use. Despite drug policy reform efforts, drug war logic continues to permeate systems and institutions proffered as “solutions” such as treatment, healthcare, and public benefits.

Building a Black feminist approach to ending the drug war offers an opportunity for organizers and advocates to come together across movements and borders to build a shared analysis and a common agenda shaped by the experiences and visions of Black women, girls, and trans people around the world. It creates the potential for a cross-sectoral, internationalist framework for resistance that exposes and challenges the racially gendered controlling narratives and carceral logics driving drug policy, and advances liberatory approaches to individual and collective healing and self-determination.

In order to gain a greater understanding of existing Black feminist organizing against the drug war and bring Black feminist frameworks into the mainstream of drug policy work, Interrupting Criminalization, the Drug Policy Alliance, and the In Our Names Network hosted a two-day convening in June 2023, during the week Breonna Taylor should have been able to celebrate her 30th birthday. The gathering brought together dozens of Black feminist leaders and allies from drug policy reform, narco feminist, reproductive justice, and queer and trans liberation movements from 6 countries to explore the possibilities for a shared Black feminist vision and plan of action toward a world that centers bodily autonomy and self-determination in all forms.

The goals of the convening were to:

• Build and deepen relationships between movements for drug policy reform, reproductive justice, narco-feminism, and queer and trans liberation
• Deepen a collective Black feminist analysis of the drug war and how to end it
• Explore possibilities for articulating a collective vision for a world beyond the war on drugs—a world in which Breonna Taylor, and countless other Black women and trans and gender nonconforming people whose lives were ended or profoundly impacted by the war on drugs, could survive and thrive

This report is a summary of the impacts of the global drug war on Black women, girls, and trans and gender non-conforming people, as well as the Black feminist visions, analysis, and needs articulated during the convening

This document is intended as a contribution to these and ongoing efforts to articulate and advance a transnational Black feminist agenda to end the drug war rooted in the experiences, resistance, and dreams of Black women, girls, and trans and gender nonconforming people.