Harm Reduction: An Attractive-Sounding Approach that Can Be an Alternative to Stopping Drug Users

IBH supports harm reduction when it is a useful first step from addictive drug use to abstinence with the ultimate goal being “recovery” meaning a voluntarily maintained lifestyle composed characterized by sobriety, personal health, and citizenship. However, in a deceptive twist of rhetoric, the term Harm Reduction has been hijacked in the drug policy world by advocates who see it as an alternative to abstinence and recovery, often enabling continued dangerous and unhealthy substance use.

Many Harm Reduction advocates see the primary harm from illegal drug use as the “harm” caused by anti-drug efforts including arrest and imprisonment for the production and distribution of illegal drugs. Advocates of Harm Reduction seek to reduce the pain that restrictive drug policies cause to individuals who use illegal drugs. They offer seemingly reasonable modifications to current drug policy that are designed to reduce the harm of illegal drug use.

Harm Reduction proposals dramatically range in scope and size, from fully legalizing drugs (so sellers would not face legal “harm”), to providing clean needles to intravenous drug users to reduce the spread of blood-borne pathogens, to providing an antidote to reverse opioid overdoses. Administration of naloxone is an essential life-saving step that IBH fully supports but by itself is not an answer to the overdose epidemic. Following the administration of naloxone, individuals who have overdosed need to be linked directly to treatment to get them the help they need. But too often Harm Reduction interventions do not point individuals on a path toward recovery. They often normalize illegal drug use, inevitably leading to more use of drugs which, just as inevitably, leads to more drug-caused harm. Real, successful harm reduction is not achieved by making illegal drug use easier, cheaper or safer; it is achieved by rejecting illegal drug use and calling it what it clearly is: unwise, unhealthy and unacceptable. It is easy to identify Harm Reduction initiatives because they all permit, if not encourage, the use of the drugs that are now illegal.

Today’s Harm Reduction movement is the reincarnation of the discredited Responsible Drug Use movement of the 1970s that resulted in the greatest use of illegal drugs in our nation’s history. For the past decade, Harm Reduction programs and initiatives have been lavishly funded by organizations and widely supported by many people who are well-meaning but often poorly informed. Sadly, many people who support Harm Reduction do not believe that the people with substance use disorders they serve can achieve recovery. To IBH, there are no hopeless cases.