Maia Szalavitz: “The work you’re doing before you get out of the chaos still counts.”
When Maia Szalavitz began injecting cocaine and heroin in the 1980s, she didn’t know she was at risk for HIV. Media coverage of the epidemic focused mainly on gay men — and it was only by luck that she met someone who taught her how to disinfect her needles before she used them. That was her first experience of harm reduction: a way of addressing drug use that shifts the emphasis away from abstinence and toward reducing risks faced by people who are not ready or able to quit. Szalavitz is convinced it not only saved her from AIDS, but helped move her into recovery.
For thirty subsequent years Szalavitz has worked as a journalist writing about neuroscience, addiction, and drug policy. In her 2017 book Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, a New York Times bestseller, she argued that addiction is a developmental disorder. “If you have come to believe that you yourself or an addicted loved one, by nature of having addiction, has a defective or selfish personality,” Szalavitz wrote, “you have been misled.” Drugs alone are not the cause of addiction, she insists. Addiction is also a product of our culture, our genes, and our early traumatic experiences, among other factors.
And that is why harsh policies and programs that enforce drug abstinence — from rehabs that shame and humiliate patients to incarceration, which punishes and stigmatizes predominantly Black and people of
