By Melissa Healy Los Angeles Times For many decades, drugs of abuse were a menace that mostly threatened the lives of men. In 1999, fewer than 1 in 25,000 adult women in the United States died of a drug overdose, and childbirth was twice as deadly. No more. Drug overdoses have become a prodigious thief of female lives in the U.S. And they are increasingly claiming women's lives deep into middle age,