What are 'harm reduction' programs?
Harm reduction is the concept that has developed to supplement the three other main pillars of the drug problem responses: the first of these being control--police, prison, and so on; the second being prevention, telling people not to use drugs, or how to use drugs safely, or to wait until they are a certain age to use drugs, and so on, and the third being treatment. At one point, harm reduction came in as the "little sister." It was conceived of in Britain. At one place in Britain at Merseyside, close to Liverpool, the chain Marks and Spencers noticed that there was very little theft in their particular stores in that area and they wondered, "How come?" They found out that local doctors were prescribing drugs to drug users in that area and they saw that as a very, very effective crime fighter because people who got their drugs legally weren't stealing. So they proposed, let's have a conference on these kinds of policies. Because they envisioned that the theft rates in all of England could be significantly reduced. I think that was the first harm reduction conference. Harm reduction philosophy has its roots in the policy that tries to not eliminate the problem, but manage the problem, because one has come to acknowledge that it's not going to go away. The earliest forms of harm reduction actually were in colonial administration 100 years ago, where the indigenous peoples were using some sort of drug and you had the choice: do you want to have some sort of legal access, a state monopoly, or do you want to eradicate the access to that drug. That was the very first harm reduction dilemma, and different states went different ways. It's very interesting to see that for instance, the United States in the Phillipines opted for eradication of the problem. There were Chinese using opium there, and it attempted to block all access on the supply side of that drug. Whereas Holland and its colonies went for the other option, which is, let's try to manage it in the least harmful way. And that was really the harm reduction dilemma in historical terms. It has continued to this very day, a choice between managing it and choosing the lesser evil, or aiming higher and trying to eradicate the evil--and that's a discussion that's taken question by question, field by field.
