The National Health Law Program expresses our support for harm reduction treatment for people who use drugs and our disappointment at the announcement by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) that it will exclude pipes from safe smoking kits in their recently announced harm reduction grant program. Decades of evidence has made it clear: harm reduction works. Treatment protocols like syringe exchanges, safe smoking kits, fentanyl testing strips, and safe consumption sites have been repeatedly shown to reduce overdose, prevent death, connect individuals to further treatment, and prevent transmission of infections such as HIV and hepatitis C (HCV). In particular, administering safer smoking equipment, including pipes, encourages inhalation over injection, reducing drug doses and thus risk of overdose as well as injection-related risks such as HIV or HCV. The research also shows that these services do not increase drug use, public consumption, or crime.
HHS should fully endorse evidence-based treatment that would save lives.
We are concerned that the agency has been influenced by outrage using terms like “crack pipes”– language which has been used for decades to invoke racist backlash against and stigmatize people who use drugs, especially those who are Black. Substance use disorder treatment must be driven by science, not stigma and backlash. We will continue to fight to end the failed War on Drugs that has done little to reduce the incidence of substance use disorder in the U.S., but has instead incarcerated countless people, especially Black and Latinx people, and made it harder for them to access necessary treatment. We continue to advocate for evidence-based options to address unhealthy substance use, including harm reduction.
