"The “welfare queen” of the Reagan era was the dominant archetype of a female drug user...."

“The “welfare queen” of the Reagan era was the dominant archetype of a female drug user. Now, the culture, or at least a wider swath of it, is a bit more comfortable with varied portraits of women who like to get high. We’ve made micro-celebrities of writer-blogger hybrids for whom substances of all sorts are professional fodder. Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel; Cat Marnell, who gained notoriety for writing about sex, crack, and make-up tips online; and Megan Boyle, whose drug-fueled memoir Liveblog comes out this year, immediately come to mind. But that doesn’t mean the preface for Sisters of the Extreme is irrelevant. “Since 1960, more than a dozen anthologies of drug literature have been published in English,” the editors write. “Almost everything in these collections was written by men.” Thinking back to what I’ve had to endure in school from Kerouac, Burroughs, Kesey, and their fanboy disciples (too many of whom I’ve dated), Sisters appeared as a relief when I discovered it (Especially in the summer, when a mushroom trip just seems to be the logical way to spend a Saturday afternoon). In Sisters, Palmer and Horowitz’s thesis is simple: Doing drugs and writing about the experience is a woman’s game as much as it is a man’s, dating back to ancient myth.”

- Winona Ryder’s Mom Explains the History of Women, Drugs, and Literature