The main norms of control of illicit substances perpetuate the perspective of a supposedly neutral war on drugs, without gender, race or class. Even so, the percentage of women incarcerated for drug-related offenses in Latin America, around 50 percent, is significantly higher when compared to the male population incarcerated for the same offenses, around 20 percent (WOLA, 2020, p. 14). Based on structural inequalities, guided by phenomena such as the feminization of poverty and the female social role of care, we seek to understand the disproportionate growth of incarceration rate of the female population compared to the male population. Between 2000 and 2017, the increase was 53 percent for women compared to a 19 percent increase for men (WOLA, 2020, p. 11). The Bangkok Rules emerge, in this context, as an international norm that applies principles of critical, intersectional and feminist criminologies and understands the importance of thinking about gender in prison based on their specific needs, in addition to addressing non-custodial measures as an ideal for the female audience that commits low-severity crimes. These rules are adopted, adapted and transformed into the Costa Rican psychotropic law in order to introduce sentence proportionality and gender specificity for women incarcerated for drug offences. In this sense, we seek to offer, from the literature of norms together with feminist and gender discussions, mainly within the scope of critical criminologies, a reading of the normative diffusion process of the Bangkok Rules for the case of Costa Rica criminal reform, exposing from social markers of difference, the need to think about criminal justice with a gender sensitivity perspective for alternative measures to incarceration.