Undoing Drugs

Let me start by saying I may be a little biased because I work in the addiction recovery field, in a hospital more specifically, so I'm very much in the trenches. As a person who had over a decade of abstinence based recovery when I started this job, harm reduction was difficult for me to wrap my head around. I could look at statistics for needle exchanges, legalization, and Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) and see that there were definitely some benefits, but working with people still very much ambivalent or not ready to make a change was tough for me to handle. I wasted a lot of time and energy wondering why someone wasn't ready to stop, or even make slight changes, and what the point of my role as a peer was in helping them when they obviously weren't committed to recovery was supposed to look like. I hadn't yet come to the understanding that recovery is “any positive change”, and that just because I myself am uncomfortable with how someone is leading their life (or, now, advocating on the behalf of people to mostly clinicians), doesn't mean that I should force or impose my own views on what recovery should look like onto them.

Szalavitz does a really good job of presenting a lot of the concepts, ideas, and questions that I came to through conversations with people more experienced in harm reduction than I was at the time. She does a really great job of collecting the disparate threads of history of a mostly decentralized movement, whose scope and priorities have shifted and expanded over the years, and built a very easily digestible and understandable history of the movement in the process. Most other authors would create something that might crumble under the weight of it's own scope, but she really excels in collecting history, research, and philosophy here, and it makes a very compelling argument. If this book continues to be updated and expanded I would love to see more on how the term “harm reduction” has been expanded to other political and social spheres as is touched on very late in the book- primarily in terms of the 2020 election, and how that is being felt as co-opting and cheapening the term and concept.