Harm Reduction: A Perspective

a personal story that sheds light on a societal crisis

The Personal Shouldn’t Be Political

I had a powerful experience this week, one that I think sheds light on an American crisis. It’s a crisis that most people are aware of, but often do not understand in any great detail.

Because I’ve sworn off writing about politics and the culture war—it is tedious, toxic, and for centrists like me who piss off all sides, dangerous—I almost didn’t publish this.

I wrote it because writing is how I clarify my thoughts to and for myself.

I decided in favor of publishing it because my focus is primarily on understanding the ramifications of my own experience, and I think there’s a good chance that readers can use my experience to better inform their own processes of forming of their own views, which is appropriate.

More than anything else, this is a kind of case study.

Harm Reduction

In the name of harm reduction, many governments — San Francisco, Detroit, and others, including Burlington, Vermont — provide addicts with clean needles and lifesaving narcan treatment. Narcan can bring a person back from the brink of death by reversing an opioid overdose, and the American taxpayers are paying for this to be done for a tremendous number of opioid addicts — over and over again.

Recently, in Burlington, the same person was revived with narcan seven or eight times in a 24-hour period, if internet scuttlebutt can be trusted. That same week, there was a day when the local firefighters did eleven reversals, a number on par with urban centers, while Burlington’s population sits at 40,000.

Local firefighters do opioid overdose reversals far, far more often than they fight fires.

Between safe injection sites, clean needles, no-prosecution policies, narcan reversals, and other policies of “harm reduction,” taxpayers fund the addictions of people who are deeply addicted—to dangerously high doses that can only be obtained through the commission of crime.

This is the story of how I came to understand what “harm reduction” policies promote, incentivize, and sustain.

My opinion will be clear, but I recognize that some readers will come to the opposite conclusion. That’s fine, since this isn’t a polemic.

It’s not even an argument, really.

It’s just a story, one that I hope will make some of what’s going on in our country more clear to readers.

It certainly provided some clarity to me.