According to data from “Gendarmería de Chile”, the uniformed national prison service, the number of incarcerated women never exceeded 1500 until 2005. Since then, this number has increased steadily, reaching 4639 as of April 2024. Of these, 60% are imprisoned due to Law No. 20,000, passed in 2005, which penalises illicit drug trafficking. This equates to over 2500 women serving a sentence or awaiting conviction for drug-related offenses. This phenomenon is not unique to Chile. Across Latin America, prohibitionist policies have emerged within the so-called war on drugs, relying almost exclusively on criminalisation and imprisonment. This has led to a continuous rise in the prison population for these crimes, especially among women, despite widespread consensus on the failure of this strategy. Women are incarcerated at higher rates for these crimes than men, of whom only 19% are imprisoned for drug trafficking globally versus 35% of women. Paradoxically, the women incarcerated generally represent the weakest links in trafficking networks, entering the business mostly due to economic need to perform “low-ranking” tasks. This overrepresentation raises critical questions about the causes and effects of their systemic incarceration. This chapter examines how the intersecting socio-economic factors and gender-based violence within drug criminalisation exacerbate women’s vulnerability to violence, exploitation, and imprisonment. It examines in particular the impact on Indigenous and marginalised communities in Chile and Latin America, where colonial legacies and structural inequalities shape contemporary drug policies, highlighting the intersecting oppressions faced by women of historically marginalised groups at the nexus of gender, ethnicity, and socio-economic status. By centring the experiences of marginalised women, this chapter calls for gender-sensitive drug policies prioritising public health, human rights, and social justice.