What is Harm Reduction?
Simple version: It’s helping people who need help.
Longer version: It’s a combination of community action and public advocacy that emphasizes meeting people where they are and trying to help them in a non-judgmental way by making sure they have their basic needs met in terms of both physical necessities and personal connection. It also tries to recognize that people have the autonomy to make their own decisions and that if somebody is going to do something that carries a level of personal risk to themselves, the best thing for us to do as a community is to ensure that they can do it as safely as possible, rather than punishing them to get them to behave the way we want.
How does this look in action?
What we do:
- Overdose prevention/response: One of our most important efforts is ensuring that people who feel they might be at risk of overdose have somebody they can talk to safely and who knows how to respond to an overdose and who will stay with them to ensure that they stay safe.
- Safety Supplies: An extension of overdose response & prevention efforts is making sure that people have supplies such as clean use supplies and testing strips to make sure that they can be as safe as possible and ensure they’re only consuming what they actually want to.
- Public outreach: Meeting people in the community and making sure they have basic necessities like food, water, and clean clothes.
- Direction to other resources: Many programs designed to help people are simply not well advertised or difficult to access and so we try to make sure people are aware of and can access programs designed to help them.
- Public engagement/advocacy: The only way for us to change problems over the long term is to change our public approach to them and work together. One of the most important parts of what we aim to do is destigmatize talking honestly about drug policy and community building and move our public discussions and policies in a direction that is more focused on unbiased evidence and empathy for our fellow community members. Among the policy changes we advocate for are the removal of laws criminalizing drug use, a housing first approach to homelessness, and greater public access to healthcare resources of all kinds.
What we don’t do:
- Encourage people to engage in dangerous activity: We don’t encourage people to use substances or engage in any particular lifestyle, we simply don’t judge them if they do.
- Harm reduction involves respecting people’s rights to make their own decisions regarding their own bodies and lives, and recognizing the futility of attempting to bully people into behaving how we want them to with threats of force
- Promote the current drug market: we don’t promote the growth of the black market that supplies people with a frequently toxic and dangerous drug supply.
- A key component of harm reduction’s public policy efforts are recognizing the failure of our current drug policy and moving towards a regulation based model of drug policy as opposed to our current failed criminalization model. We advocate for removal of outdated laws criminalizing drug use and the creation of a safe regulated market, the same as what we have for other substances like alcohol and cigarettes.
O.A.R.S. 