The text traces women's use of psychoactive substances as well as society's reaction to their drug use, including physician prescribing practices, treatment, and punishment. The discussion notes that opium, laudanum, and morphine were primary ingredients in the curative powders and strengthening tonics that physicians freely prescribed and pharmacists dispensed to woman 150 years ago. In addition, women could easily dose themselves with narcotics and alcohol in the readily available form of patent medicines sold in every town and touted in popular magazines. In the 19th century, women used these remedies for conditions given names such as womb disease and congestion of the ovaries, as well as for neurasthenia, a widespread but vague nervous malady attributed to females' weaker, more sensitive natures. By the latter half of the 19th century, the majority of opiate addicts in the United States were women. The text notes the dependency remained an issue for women, through the heroin of the 1930s and 1940s, the tranquilizers of the 1950s, the consciousness-raising or prescription drugs of the 1970s, and the increase of crack cocaine use in the 1980s. It also critically examines the treatments that have followed this trend, including maintenance clinics in the early 1920s, the Federal farms of midcentury, and detoxification efforts and methadone maintenance in subsequent decades. The analysis notes that current policies and funding focus on drug interdiction, prisons, and punishment, but offer little treatment, hope, and genuine help. The author is Chief of Neonatology at a New York City Hospital and a medical school professor and testified as an expert witness on behalf of Jennifer Johnson, who was convicted in 1989 of delivering a controlled substance to her unborn child. Photographs, illustrations, notes, index, and approximately 600 references (Publisher summary modified)