Harm Reduction

Look, up in the sky, it's a bird, it's a plane, it's... Methadone Man? Harm reductionists are pulling out the stops, including calling on caped superheroes, to get their message out to the Olympic crowds in Vancouver as the Games get underway.

The Foundation for Research on Sexually Transmitted Diseases, Inc. (FROST'D) seeks a full-time Harm Reduction Counselor/Outreach Worker/Driver to work with their Integrated Harm Reduction Program.

At least seven heroin users have died from dope contaminated with anthrax in Scotland, and one in Germany. Harm reductionists and public health experts are demanding that government respond with more than "quit using."

New York City and national media have been abuzz all week over a city health department pamphlet that provides harm reduction tips to injection drug users. But despite the offensive led by a right wing tabloid and a handful of professional drug warriors, harm reduction won the battle -- but what about the larger war?

The Drug Policy Alliance's 2009 International Drug Policy Reform Conference took place in Albuquerque last weekend. It was quite a show. Here's a scene report.

Drug users are organizing in Asia. After two years of meetings, the Asian Network of People who Use Drugs (ANPUD) has been created in the vein of "nothing about us without us."

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime has issued a dire new report warning that the Afghan opium trade is spreading addiction, disease, and insurgency. Too bad it doesn't address the role of global drug prohibition in exacerbating all these problems.

More than a year after the DEA quietly reported that a veterinary anti-parasitic agent was showing up in cocaine, and after at least two US deaths linked to the tainted drug, federal public health officials have finally issued an alert warning doctors, treatment centers, and public health professionals of the menace.

And then there were two: Pennsylvania's Board of Pharmacy has issued new regulations allowing pharmacies to sell syringes without a prescription. That leaves Delaware and New Jersey as the only states that don't.

An Associated Press story at the end of August raised the alarm about levasimole-tainted cocaine, but the problem has been emerging for years. Now, while waiting for the feds to act, harm reductionists and public health workers grapple with how to respond.