Harm reduction sounds like someone is trying to help someone or remove a problem. It is not that but a way to characterize aiding drug addicts in receiving clean needles. It has also, blossomed into giving free spaces to shoot up and even in some cities give out free drugs. I became aware of the practice when I was a board member of our local Health Right. This organization offered free health care to those without insurance and were at or near the poverty level. Some of our clients were addicts and homeless but most were people working at fast food shops and the like making minimum wage and could not afford health insurance. Obama care made many of them eligible for Medicaid and removed them from our rolls. As our homeless population grew so did the number of addicts and alcoholics. Many of the addicts did not seek care or want to be noticed so we had very little contact with them unless they became very sick.
Addicts do not have the ability to get prescriptions for hypodermic needles so use other peoples' needles and use them over and over. Two diseases are transmitted by injection of used needles and they are HIV and Hepatitis C. Both of these diseases are death notices and while can be treated effectively, it is very expensive. One of the justifications of free needles was and is saving up to a million dollars for the treatment of any patient without health insurance for either of these diseases. The other justification was the ability to get the addict to trust the needle provider and allow an attempt to get them into rehab. I went along with these justifications for a while and we started to give out free sterile needles to the addicts when they returned their old ones. It is still in practice today and in many cities and communities.
Recently, there has been some written articles about the destruction of these programs and that they should be discontinued. I have had reservations about the program since it started because it seem to justify the addiction as legal and not a problem to the addict. Very few addicts responded to help with their addiction and because of their continued addiction have died with the Fentanyl crisis. I have wondered if giving a free needle to an addict that uses it to take a lethal dose of drugs would make the needle giver guilty of "aiding and abetting." This has not been mentioned or prosecuted yet but I expect that someday a family will sue over the needle gift.
I do not believe that anyone trying to make illegal drug use seem normal and aiding the addict in doing so is anywhere the answer to the problem. In fact, it encourages the addict to continue to avoid help and rehab. It is, also, a problem for me when the state or municipality thinks saving money is easier than spending money to really help the addict and return them to a normal life style. Most of our programs that have been started to help those that cannot help themselves has been spend the least amount of money and take the easy road instead of trying to cure the problem. We have the same problem with the homeless. We feed them and give them warming in the Winter and places to put up their tents if they happen to have one. There have been no attempts to separate them into the groups that combined make up the homeless such as the mentally ill, the vets suffering from ptsd, or the drug and alcohol addicted which would allow the situation to be handled differently for each instead of just lumping them together in one big homeless group. It seems that every time the government gets involved, money takes the lead in any solution. When the courts said that mental institutions had to stop locking people up without some kind of justice being involved, the politicians shuttered the institutions and did not rebuild them so now we have no facilities to house the mentally ill that are sleeping on the streets. The state hospitals have disappeared and without health insurance mental health care is not possible. The taxpayers' money that used to be spent on mental care has been sidetracked for other uses such as getting re-elected. The richer our country gets the more the poor seem to suffer because the riches are used for things other than education and health care. Housing in most major cities including mine has become so expensive many of those working in those locations cannot afford to live there. Our local politicians have asked our health clinic to leave town and partially paid for the move to remove the undesirable people that use it. The city is not available for anyone that is having a hard time but can only work for minimum wage. Their health care is secondary to the cities businesses that don't want to see them. We have a problem and it will not be resolved by politicians that are more interested in bike trails and pride marches than they are in the people they are supposed to represent.
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