Résister au patriarcat et à la « guerre contre la drogue » : La Communauté des femmes consommatrices de drogues de Bolivie et le Programme Libertas

The Community was born as a collective response to the invisibility, criminalisation, and systematic violence that women who use drugs experience in a deeply patriarchal and punitive context. The Community was formally established in 2023 in collaboration with the platform Programa Libertas de Cochabamba Bolivia, with many participants resisting due to individual experiences of exclusion, imprisonment, and discrimination in healthcare services.

Currently, the Community brings together more than 60 women through a closed national Facebook group, which functions as a safe virtual meeting space and expands territorially through in-person meetings. The constituents are diverse: women deprived of liberty, homeless women, women with challenges linked to substance use, women who use drugs as part of their spirituality or daily lives. The uniting factor is the defence of the right to exist without guilt, without violence and with dignity.

The Community of Women who Use Drugs in Bolivia vision is clear: to fight for the decriminalisation of drug use, from a gender, human rights, anti-racist, and anti-colonial perspective. The collective demands policies that stop criminalising women’s bodies and recognise human rights.

The Community propose:

• Exposing and punishing systematic sexual violence perpetrated by state agents.
• The reform of Law 1008 and the end of the criminalisation of drug use.
• The incorporation of a gender perspective into all harm reduction programs.
• The creation of specialised health centers, managed with the direct participation of women who use drugs.
• The strengthening of feminist and horizontal community networks which position themselves not only as spaces of support but also as political agents of transformation.