A dead person never recovers
The needle exchange I worked at handed out naloxone and reversed overdoses in the parking lot. A man we revived four times got clean on the fifth year. If we’d taken the prohibitionist line and waited for him to hit bottom on his own, the bottom would have been a coroner’s report. That is the entire argument, and it is not complicated: you cannot treat a corpse.
We are the street nurses, the outreach workers, the people who meet addiction where it actually is instead of where the policy debate wishes it were. Clean syringes, fentanyl test strips, supervised consumption, low-barrier methadone — none of it endorses drug use. It keeps people breathing long enough to have a future, and it pulls them into contact with a system that might, on some later day, become a way out.
We are natural allies of the decrim camp, though we care less about the law than about the overdose tonight. And we have a real argument with the recovery camp: abstinence is a beautiful goal and a terrible precondition. Demand it at the door and the people who need help most never walk in.
Where we concede ground: Harm reduction can slide into harm acceptance — keeping someone alive in addiction for years without ever pushing toward an exit.
What would change our mind: If harm-reduction-saturated communities kept people alive but showed no better path into recovery than tougher-love models over a decade.
Read the full synthesis: What does sensible drug policy look like?