September 7, 2007
HARM REDUCTION JUNCTION
Protect your neck, practice harm reduction! |
Seat belts, bike helmets, needle exchange, high-quality housing and services for all, Narcan on hand just in case, safe sex education for sex workers, good hot food at the crack users' breakfast and new advocacy efforts to fight discrimination and stigma. It's all harm reduction and we're all about harm reduction at Housing Works— especially this month.
September is our first-ever Harm Reduction Month, and clients and staff are being swept up in an activist-driven wave of education, events and an agency wide rededication to practical—and lifesaving—harm reduction principles.
"Housing Works was created to house active drug users when no one else would—harm reduction is in our DNA," said Nina Herzog, Housing Works' Vice President of Harm Reduction Programs. "This month is all about making sure we're serving users well, and that every person who works or volunteers here knows what it takes to do that."
Herzog has helped lead months of planning by a harm reduction task force that has brought together dozens of clients, staff and volunteers from HW's housing, health care, advocacy, marketing departments and thrift shops to boost harm reduction principles, services, education and advocacy all over the agency.
The team has scheduled discussion groups, trainings at all Housing Works sites, movies, in-house blogs and new advocacy efforts (like fighting discrimination that withholds benefits from some active users at the NYC HIV/AIDS Services Administration), all designed to get the harm reduction message to every one of our 403 employees and to our thousands of clients.
(You can see the schedule here.)This week's kickoff: a simultaneous reading of a statement of harm reduction principles at noon on Tuesday. "It was like a harm reduction pledge of allegiance!" said terri smith-caronia, NYC advocacy chief and another leader of the HRM effort. Here's the statement we all read—and we'll have more harm reduction articles all month in the Update (trying to do our part!):
HARM REDUCTION PRINCIPLES—A STATEMENT
"In essence, a policy of harm reduction requires an approach of pragmatism rather than purism—an acceptance that it may sometimes be better to go for probable silver than a possible gold."
—John Strang
Harm reduction is a set of practical strategies that reduce negative consequences of drug use and other potentially harmful behaviors and activities, incorporating a spectrum of strategies from safer use, to managed use to abstinence. Harm reduction strategies meet drug users "where they're at," addressing conditions of use along with the use itself.
Because harm reduction demands that interventions and policies designed to serve users reflect specific individual and community needs, there is no universal definition of or formula for implementing harm reduction.
Harm Reduction:
- Accepts that licit and illicit drug use and other potentially harmful behaviors and activities is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize their harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn these activities;
- Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others;
- Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being, not necessarily cessation of all drug use and other potentially harmful behaviors and activities, as the criteria for successful interventions and policies;
- Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and other potentially harmful behaviors and activities and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm;
- Ensures that drug users and those with a history of drug use and other potentially harmful behaviors and activities routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them;
- Affirms drug users as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their action, and seeks to empower individuals to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use;
- Recognizes that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people's vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related and other harm;
- Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with licit and illicit drug use and other potentially harmful behaviors and activities.
If you're interested in finding out more about harm reduction at Housing Works or about how your group can get in on the effort, shoot an email over to Nina Herzog at n.herzog@housingworks.org.