GETTING REAL: THE HARM REDUCTION PROJECT

'Soft On Drugs' Charge Is Absurd

Nobody wants their daughter taking meth. Nobody wants their son shooting
heroin. Not because those behaviors are illegal - though they are and
almost certainly always will be - but because that junk kills people. But
no parent protects her children by denying that drug abuse exists. Even the
most bellicose of the drug warriors will tell you that. And when the
anti-drug crusaders condemn such reasonable and realistic efforts as the
Harm Reduction Project as somehow being soft on drugs, then it is the drug
warriors who are in deep and harmful denial. Harm Reduction advocates know
better than anyone that drugs kill people. In many cases it is their own
children who have died, or who have come much closer to death than any
parent wants to imagine.

But they also know that a one-track approach to drug abuse - arrest, jail,
disgrace, rap sheet, deeper addiction - is no cure and, if anything, makes
death from accidental overdose even more likely. No matter how many laws we
pass or how many prisons we build, no matter how many dedicated police
officers and brave DEA agents seek to enforce those laws and fill those
prisons, drug abuse is not a law enforcement problem susceptible to a law
enforcement solution. It is a public health problem that will only be
addressed - addressed, not eliminated - with a public health approach.

The Harm Reduction Project, bravely hosted in Salt Lake City this past week
by Mayor Rocky Anderson, is in the enlightened public health model of
dealing with drug abuse and addiction. Harm Reduction abandons the pipe
dream of a world without drugs and concentrates instead on educating people
on how to avoid drugs, how to avoid overdosing on drugs and what to do if
someone has overdosed.

The idea is not to judge or punish, just to save lives. The approach wisely
mirrors the attitude of doctors who are prepared to treat the results of
germs, viruses, firearms, sharp objects and inattentive drivers but who,
unlike those who take a more enlightened approach to drug abuse, are not
accused of favoring disease or disaster. There is no shortage of examples
where someone headed down the suicidal road of drug addiction was indeed
saved by being busted.

If, that is, the cops got to them before the needle did. For those who
aren't so lucky, the clear-eyed approach of the Harm Reduction Project is
the best answer we have.