Les femmes paient le prix de la « guerre à la drogue » – Podcast Women Beyond Walls avec Marie Nougier

Marie Nougier révèle comment les lois punitives sur les drogues dévastent la vie des femmes, alimentent l’incarcération de masse et les inégalités — et appelle à des politiques des drogues féministes, humaines et fondées sur des preuves, axées sur le soin plutôt que sur la punition. Pour en savoir plus, en anglais, veuillez lire les informations ci-dessous.

For decades, governments have waged a global “war on drugs,” promising to eradicate evil and deter crime. Yet behind bars, the real casualties are often women—poor, marginalised, and criminalised for survival.

In this episode of Women Beyond Walls, researcher and advocate Marie Nougier, Head of Research and Communications at the International Drug Policy Consortium (IDPC), joins host Sabrina Mahtani to unpack how punitive drug laws fuel mass incarceration, deepen inequality, and fail to deliver safety. Speaking with clarity and compassion, Marie shares what a human rights–based, feminist drug policy could look like — and why it’s time for change.

Drug policies have long been built on the idea that drugs are evil and must be eradicated. But for countless women, those policies have meant imprisonment, poverty, and silence.

“I’ve been working for IDPC since about 2008–2009,” says Marie Nougier, Head of Research and Communications at the International Drug Policy Consortium, “and after a few years of working there, I realised that there was very little research being done around the impacts of drug policies on women in general. So we started doing a small piece of research on that, and we realised that a huge amount of women in prison were there for drugs.”

Marie and her colleagues uncovered “stories of extreme poverty, of marginalisation, coercion, violence,” showing that women’s involvement in the drug trade is often a matter of survival. “In Latin America, from the latest data that we have… we’re talking about 50 to 80, sometimes 90% of the prisons for women are filled with women suspected of or condemned drug offences. So even though they constitute a minority within prisons, they are the fastest growing prison population.”

She explains that harsh laws make matters worse: “Very often people suspected of drug offences are also not eligible for alternatives to incarceration, and many of the drug laws have very, very lengthy prison sentences… rather than the role of the person in the drugs trade.” Many of these women “are coerced by male partners or other relatives,” while others act “because they don’t necessarily have another way of surviving.”

For Marie, the global “war on drugs” has been a moral crusade built on failure. “Drug policies have traditionally been very focused on the premise that drugs are evil and that they have to be eradicated at all costs… We now know that this approach has been a complete failure.” Governments spend billions, she says, yet “the global drug market is as prominent as before… and there has been a terrible cost for human rights.”

Her alternative is rooted in compassion. “Harm reduction is an approach to drugs that recognises that people may be unwilling or unable to stop using drugs… to keep them alive and to reduce harms in however way possible, with responses that are not stigmatising, that are not punitive, but instead are based on care, on support and on compassion.”

Real reform, Marie insists, begins with decriminalisation and access to care. “First and foremost, decriminalisation of drug use and related activities… would remove a whole load of women and men from prisons.” Beyond that, she calls for “legal regulation… based on gender equality, social justice, racial justice.”

And she ends with a plea: “We’ve been thinking about what is a feminist framework for our advocacy for drug policy reform… and a plea for more feminist organisations to get an interest in this field… because they know what’s best. They know what they’ve faced. They know what responses they actually need.”

Access the podcast here.