Liberatory Harm Reduction on the Abolitionist Horizon

The incorporation of harm reduction into public policy has tended to be framed as replacing the dominance of criminal legal approaches to drug use with public health frameworks. However, little consideration has been given to the ways in which continued reliance on, and proximity to, the state remains problematic for the communities most harshly impacted by carceral systems. Reflecting on this tension, we draw on the work of community organizer Shira Hassan and her call for a return to the liberatory politics of the “original harm reductionists.” This paper explores the similarities between what Hassan refers to as Liberatory Harm Reduction and the long-standing traditions of Black, Indigenous, and people of color community organizing to defund the police and abolish prisons. Liberatory Harm Reduction and abolitionist movements share a structural analysis that the cruelty and racism of the carceral system is not evidence that it is broken, but rather that it is working as intended—to secure and (re)produce a social ordering of society based on colonial, raced, classed, and gendered systems of power. The paper brings together Liberatory Harm Reduction and abolitionist theorizing to invite deeper thinking around how much contemporary harm reduction results in differential and often unconsidered harms. In the paper, we ask what kind of public health harm reduction could be considered liberatory, and, by extension, what kind of harm reduction practices belong on the road toward, what Mariame Kaba calls, the abolitionist horizon? We explore these questions through case studies on diversion, peer-led safe spaces, and prison-based needle and syringe programs to demonstrate the issues, tensions, and liberatory possibilities of harm reduction across the spectrum of proximity to state apparatuses.