Year: 2016
Type: editorial
Abstract: Introduction: From Criminalization to Informed UseHarm reduction programs emerged out of the need for pragmatic strategies to minimize the risk of HIV transmission among people who inject drugs and evidence of successful needle exchange programs in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia in the 1980s (Erickson, Riley, Cheueng, & O'Hare, 1997; although see Seddon, 2010, pp.86-88, for a discussion of harm reduction in earlier periods).Both as theory and practice, harm reduction evolved as a critique and alternative to controlling drug use and drug users through legal sanctions.Its proponents claim that prohibitionist approaches aggravate both harms to health and society by stigmatizing and marginalizing drug users, in effect turning them into criminals.A wide range of harm reduction programs have evolved since the 1980s, targeting the use of substances ranging from heroin and amphetamines to cannabis, tobacco, and alcohol.Some programs provide users with safer means to administer substances such as clean needles to inject heroin or patches to deliver nicotine.Others promote safer alternatives such as buprenorphine or methadone to replace illegal heroin.Yet other projects create spaces that facilitate safer substance use and disseminate information designed to minimize harm rather than promote abstinence.The success or otherwise of such programs has been reported in regular conferences and a wide range of journals, including a journal dedicated to harm reduction, launched in 2004.Early harm reduction efforts that focused on ''high-risk'' groups such as injecting drug users and sex workers often assumed drug users to be relatively powerless in the face of potent substances, the victims of environments that mediate unsafe and illegal drug use (e.g., Duff, 2008;Rhodes, 2009).More recently, harm reduction efforts aimed at broader publics have called on smokers and drinkers to take responsibility for their own health.Such efforts have been analyzed extensively through the Foucaldian lenses of biopower and governmentality (Campbell & Shaw, 2008).
Source: Contemporary Drug Problems
Authors: Anita Hardon, Takeo David Hymans
Institution: University of Amsterdam
Language: English
Topic: HIV, Drug Use, Sexual Risk
Subfield: Epidemiology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,400
OpenAlex ID: W2484845923