When I arrived home from work this afternoon I heard on the radio an interview with a semi-recovered addict. He called a dinosaur anyone who didn't swallow his Koolaid about harm reduction. Well, sonny, this dinosaur ain't extinct yet and he has a thing or two to tell you.
First of all, there appears to be a certain harm reduction dogma that has become au courant. It is almost like a kind of religious fundamentalism. Every addict is okay, does not need treatment and should be given all the public support and be supplied with publicly funded heroin or whatever to stay happy and content in their addiction, lest they get very unhappy and decide to break into a home, shoplift or mug an old lady to supply their habit.
Okay, that's a bit of a gross generalization. The fact of the matter is that harm reduction does save lives. It does precious little to help people recover from their addictions and this has to be factored in. But safe injection sites are cheaper than drug rehab. Duh! Which makes harm reduction a cynical smokescreen for saving precious government tax dollars. Meanwhile, the addicts have to get their stuff somewhere. So they buy from dealers who get their stuff from gangs and cartels and they usually get the money by robbing, stealing, mugging little old ladies and people in wheelchairs, home break-ins...Sounds more like harm production, if you ask me.
Don't get me wrong, Gentle Reader, I am in favour of harm reduction. I am not in favour of illegally obtained drugs that simply hurt more innocent people while we are expected to feel sorry for the poor little addict who never got enough hugs. Okay, probably they didn't get enough hugs. Neither did they develop a moral compass, and our current programs of harm reduction, rather than touching this little hot potato, would rather just feel sorry for them, continue to patronize them, coddle them, give them everything they want, and not treat them like adults.
There has to be a better way. Here's an idea. Legal heroin, yes. Legal cocaine, yes. But grown and cultivated and produced legally, obtained legally, and legally distributed to those who are severely addicted, but with one particular condition. Accepting the free smack obligates the user to accepting a lengthy, gradual and gentle process towards free treatment and rehabilitation. And with counselling, including religious and ethical counselling to encourage the development of an ethical and moral compass. This of course is never going to happen. Why? It costs too much money. And it treats addicts like responsible adults with the built-in expectation that they are eventually going to grow into adult behaviour.
There is of course another problem with my little solution. So many people with addictions have other problems: fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, mental illness, trauma from child abuse and abandonment, brain injury, and none of these things are going to be addressed with a punitive approach.
We cannot go on infantilizing addicts, but neither will punishment work, being as inhumane as it is counterproductive. Harm reduction is still in an early developmental stage and we are going to be tilting between extremes while trying to balance them.
In the meantime we still have to find ways of walking with those who are suffering from addiction in a way that is nonjudgmental, while still offering a reasonable and respectful expectation that they will eventually grow into fully responsible adults. Okay, maybe not an expectation, but the hope and faith that they can do this. And if they never get this far? We don't abandon them, and we also learn from them because they are our sisters and brothers and have important things to teach us.
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