Harm Reduction– any program, organization, or action which attempts to mitigate the negative side-effects of drug usage. This can include housing programs, safe injection sites, or diversion programs.
Pre-Arrest Diversion– refers to city programs where people can avoid getting convicted of drug-related crimes. This often involves demonstrating enrollment in rehabilitation programs.
Paul: That’s a position that we face in terms of… … deprivation that exists in the schools and in the jobs and the opportunities, mass incarceration, and now they want to be, now they want a lighter approach to drug users and they want to do harm reduction, they want to open up an overdose prevention site. Which seems good, but it doesn’t get to the problem. What are your feelings, what are your specific feelings, and then the feelings of people in your world?
Moses: I’m for harm reduction, I’m completely for harm reduction. My family, immediate family and most of my family is for harm reduction. The ones that understand what harm reduction is, a lot of people have a misconception. They don’t understand harm reduction. People aren’t dumb… …but they’re not always highly educated. So when you talk to them with really big words and they don’t understand it, and the first thing they say is, “You just want to let them do drugs. That’s all you want to do.”
So to me, in order to break it down, you’ve got to just break it down to them in layman’s terms. I feel that harm reduction is necessary, because it’s going to save lives. It’s going to save families. It’s going to bring awareness. For people that don’t understand that and if you don’t expand from that, they’re going to think that it’s just about people shooting up, it’s just a place where people are going to shoot up and kids are going to see they’re shooting up, they’re going to think it’s okay. Not understanding that they have a disease, a disease of addiction, and it just so happens that they may shoot up heroin. That’s their addiction, so we need to help them not hurt themselves. Because it’s harm reduction, we’ve got to help them.
Paul: When we’re talking about tax dollars, people need to be educated. I can’t see it totally. What are your views of some of the hypocrisy of our state? How do you come to harm reduction, even though there are so many things?
Moses : The things that made me want to work with harm reduction and why I believe in harm reduction is because my family members. The ones that didn’t get the chance to have a place to go where they would have resources, like you can talk to a counselor or take a shower. At our house, they weren’t allowed to take a shower. I wish that there was something like this for my uncles, because two of them would be alive right now. I had a girlfriend a few years ago… …who died of an OD, she was addicted to prescription pills and she died. So that’s it. To me, it’s so close to me that I can’t see why I wouldn’t want to help people that were suffering.
Because even, you look now at people in North Philadelphia, a lot of people pop pills. They don’t see that as an issue. They’re addicted, they have an addiction problem. A lot of people die from Xanax, nobody goes, “They were addicted to Xanax, maybe they needed help.” They go, “He was just popping pills,” like it’s something normal. But the addiction stems from the fact that they’re young, until they get older, some of them just live through it and some don’t. But it starts early, it starts early in their life with some of the things like Xanax. When I was in the Army, before I retired, I got diagnosed with PTSD. So they put me on this regiment of opioids that had me silly for about two years.
When I got out, they had me on the same opioids, I didn’t even know I was addicted to Xanax, I was addicted to pills, had no clue until they took me off medication. When they took me off medication, I started having withdrawals and that’s when I knew I couldn’t take … Even to this day I don’t take, the most I take is Tylenol, because to me, I’m afraid that I’m going to get addicted again and given our family’s history, I don’t want to go to anything that’s strong to feel better. But I do think marijuana should be used as a key for fighting addiction, because it’s helped me out, that’s what I do. I don’t take pills, I smoke or eat edibles.