11.5 Recovery is Social Justice
Kelly Szott and Kimberly Puttman
Though the continued opioid (and now fentanyl) crisis may be a reason to despair, there are many individuals, social movements, and other organizations who are working to address problems associated with substance use. Social science, public health, biomedical, and legal scholars and researchers are diligently producing more evidence-based knowledge to guide societal efforts toward more humane and pragmatic responses to substance use. Reducing harmful drug use is social justice.
Harm-Reduction Movement
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0I0uV-XqpI
Harm reduction offers a lens through which we can understand and address issues associated with substance use. The first minute of the video in Figure 11.17 provides a list of the ways that harm reduction creates a safer environment for everyone. Harm reduction can be understood as a set of practices. It can also be understood as a social justice movement. The philosophy behind harm reduction revolutionizes the way we respond to human problems, namely addiction, drug overdose, and HIV.
Harm reduction uses a grassroots approach based on advocacy from and for people who use drugs and accept alternatives to abstinence that reduce harm (Marlatt 1996). According to the Harm Reduction Coalition, the central harm reduction organization in the US, a core principle of harm reduction philosophy “accepts for better 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.”
Syringe exchange programs, or their more current name—syringe service programs—were one of the early harm reduction efforts made to address the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. The Harm Reduction Coalition states that “Syringe service programs (SSPs) distribute sterile syringes, safer drug use supplies, and education to people who inject drugs.” The current opioid crisis in the United States is causing a dramatic increase in infectious diseases associated with injection drug use, such as HIV or hepatitis C. Syringe service programs are known to reduce HIV and hepatitis C infection rates by an estimated 50 percent (Platt et al. 2017). When paired with medication-assisted treatment to treat opioid dependence, syringe service programs can reduce HIV and hepatitis C transmission by over two-thirds (Platt et al. 2017; Fernandes et al. 2017).
Sometimes people oppose syringe service programs because they think it might enable drug use. Research shows the opposite. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2019), new users of syringe service programs are “five times more likely to enter drug treatment and three times more likely to stop using drugs than those who don’t use the programs.”
Syringe service programs can also prevent opioid overdoses by educating people who use drugs about ways to prevent overdose. Syringe service programs provide training on how to recogniz