By Shira Hassan, Illustration: Good Studio/Adobe Stock, Yes!, January 19, 2023
Harm reduction, like many radical philosophies, was co-opted by institutions of public health, social work, and the medical industrial complex (MIC). Activists fighting for the rights and safety of drug users; people in the sex trade, street economy, and involved in sex work; and people with chronic illness and disabilities sought to make the philosophy of harm reduction a part of the United States’ public health strategy in order to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS in the late 1980s. As a result of the successful work of these revolutionary organizers, some of you may have heard about syringe exchanges, the most popularized example of harm reduction.
What you may not know is that while the risk-reduction strategies embedded in harm reduction (condom distribution programs, syringe exchanges, etc.) did eventually become part of public health’s standardized approach to HIV prevention in most states, much of what actually makes up the daily practice of saving our own lives—the core values of the philosophy of harm reduction—was stripped away inside these institutional settings. The truth is that harm reduction was designed and created by drug users, sex workers, feminists, trans activists, people with chronic illness and disabilities, those of us working to end violence without the police, and those of us working to end prisons and the violent state. It is a practice steeped in joy, in living into the beauty of our lives no matter how messy they may (appear to) be.
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