Neuroscience journalist Maia Szalavitz wrote this fascinating feature for TIme's Healthland section:
A crack pipe vending machine for addicts sounds like the punch line of a bad joke—but the same kind of ridicule has been lobbed at many measures to fight drug addiction and related harm that have now proven to save lives. From needle exchange programs for HIV prevention to providing heroin to addicts, and from supervised injecting rooms to “wet houses” where homeless alcoholics are given free booze, approaches that seem to “enable” users are in fact effective in helping them to survive and recover.
Crack pipe vending machines were first introduced six months ago in Vancouver by a drug program, and a second one was added earlier this week. In this case, supporters believe that reducing the sharing of crack pipes will reduce the spread of diseases like Hepatitis C, though there is little published data on the question. “There’s no evidence one way or the other,” says Keith Humphreys, professor of psychiatry at Stanford and former Senior Policy Advisor for President Obama’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, better known as the “drug czar’s office.”
Harm reduction—the idea that drug problems can be addressed by reducing drug-related harms like overdose and disease even if users don’t become totally abstinent—became a major but controversial trend in drug policy at the height of the 1980s AIDS epidemic. Vehemently opposed by the Bush administration, which banned federal funds for such programs—and even by President Clinton, who later apologized for being wrong—harm reduction programs continued to spread because the data consistently showed reductions in infections without the feared increases in drug use.
http://healthland.time.com/2014/02/12/when-the-road-to-recovery-is-paved-with-a-dash-of-addiction/
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