The numbers are now frighteningly familiar: Last year more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses, bringing the total death toll to more than 1 million since the invention of OxyContin in 1996. By 2030 another million people are projected to die. Americans are more likely to die of an accidental drug overdose—especially when it involves fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than heroin and surreptitiously laced into other drugs—than in a car accident.
But cars would kill 15,000 more people a year were it not for seatbelts. Seatbelts, helmet laws, and air bags are harm reduction strategies. They reduce the negative consequences of risky behavior.
For decades, drug policy experts have recommended that we embrace the seatbelts of drug use: overdose-reversing medicine like naloxone, kits that make it easy to test drugs for fentanyl, and clean needles that reduce the spread of deadly diseases associated with intravenous drug use, like HIV and hepatitis C. Joe Biden is the first president to embrace harm reduction as an essential part of the nation’s drug policy. As part of the American Rescue Plan, he put $30 million to “support community-based overdose prevention programs, syringe services programs, and other harm reduction services.” In May the Department of Health and Human Services promised $1.5 billion for state and local initiatives, including harm reduction, to combat addiction.
Research shows that these strategies do help people survive. A 2018 study of national harm reduction policies found that opioid deaths dropped by 14 percent in states that made naloxone (also known by its brand name, Narcan) easier to get. A Seattle study of people who used injection drugs
