General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsIn regards recent overdose news - Principles of Harm Reduction (Harm Reduction Coalition)
I work with a local syringe exchange program. We are incorporating Narcan (naloxone) availability for home use in our services following CA legislation to allow broader access for overdose interventions. Our volunteers and our participants really welcome this real time, real world approach to harm reduction. And effective OD fatality prevention.
This is from a national organization working on it all -
Principles of Harm Reduction
Harm reduction is a set of practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Harm Reduction is also a movement for social justice built on a belief in, and respect for, the rights of people who use drugs.
Harm reduction incorporates a spectrum of strategies from safer use, to managed use to abstinence to meet drug users where theyre at, addressing conditions of use along with the use itself. Because harm reduction demands that interventions and policies designed to serve drug users reflect specific individual and community needs, there is no universal definition of or formula for implementing harm reduction.
However, HRC considers the following principles central to harm reduction practice.
- Accepts, for better and or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
- Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.
-Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-beingnot necessarily cessation of all drug useas the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
- Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm.
- Ensures that drug users and those with a history of drug use routinely ha.ve a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.
- Affirms drugs users themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use, and seeks to empower users to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.
- Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both peoples vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm.
- Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with licit and illicit drug use.
http://harmreduction.org/
get the red out
(13,468 posts)I have been reading about harm reduction on another message board I frequent and it sounds like a very good step in the right direction. I just hope our nation can modify our thinking from the "all or NOTHING, and RIGHT NOW" views we have now toward addiction treatment/management. Puritanism doesn't work for everyone, or even most.
pinto
(106,886 posts)Folks have a big misconception around opiate use, abuse and addiction.
get the red out
(13,468 posts)I have read that in my area, many people are turning to Heroin because the supply of Oxycodone has been curtailed. Addiction isn't choosy, and neither are people who have become addicted, so I'm not surprised that stereotypes don't carry through.
pinto
(106,886 posts)At least not so easily as before. Pharmaceuticals have worked to address misuse by rendering the pills less liable for injection. And apparently the heroin supply & content has fluctuated widely. Some of it lethal even to long term maintenance users.
And, yeah, doctor shopping has been curtailed.
Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Comrade Grumpy
(13,184 posts)Making naloxone, the opiate overdose reversal drug, more widely available is a harm reduction move.
Encouraging the passage of 911 Good Samaritan laws, where you can report an overdose without fear of arrest on drug charges, is a harm reduction move.
Holder mentioned both of those.
Needle exchange programs, safe injection sites, and opiate maintenance programs are all harm reduction moves, too.
So is providing condoms to teenagers.