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The Atlantic
The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs (07/30/2026)
“Seattle, like a striking number of other liberal American cities, has embraced a radical form of “harm reduction,” which is more a philosophy about treating addiction than a scientific approach to it.”
No. This is false.
Harm reduction is absolutely an evidence-backed scientific paradigm towards, as the name says, reducing the harms caused by substance use. There is nothing about harm reduction that prevents us from offering programs and treatments geared towards abstinence. It is not an alternative philosophy to abstinence-based policies. It is not the product of some bleeding-heart ruinous empathy from a nanny state, or whatever the terms are now for anything other than the most punitive policy option.
The fact is that not everyone is going to choose abstinence-based treatment, so we should reduce the harms of that choice. People who use clean needles provided by a center instead of dirty needles that have been in a dozen other veins are less likely to develop health issues that require emergency interventions, which are far more expensive and scarce as resources than mass-manufactured supplies.
We have decades of research that show harm reduction interventions prevent overdoses, lower rates of infectious diseases like HIV, and become bridges towards long-term recovery by supporting incremental but lasting change. Some evidence indicates that those who use harm reduction services are five times more likely to enter treatment than those who don’t.
Powell also cites the New York Department of Health’s page to define harm reduction as a “social movement” to “building leadership” among drug users. The more complete sentence he butchers actually reads:
“It is a belief in and respect for the rights of people who use drugs and strategies that include building leadership among people who use drugs and supporting communities in reducing the negative consequences associated with drug use and the harms associated with the context of drug use such as racism, homelessness, violence, and poverty.”
You know who else believes in building leadership among people who use drugs and supporting communities in reducing the negative consequences?
Alcoholics Anonymous.
As well as every other recovery group out there: Crystal Meth Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Recovery Dharma, Refuge Recovery, SMART Recovery, Lifering Secular Recovery, etc. All of these groups very explicitly state their philosophy revolves around peer support rather than professional or institutional mechanisms. Harm reduction interventions lean into the fact that it often takes someone who has experience with substance use to reach others still struggling with it. It works with these networks rather than cracking down and disrupting them.
Powell makes it sound like they’re giving leadership courses to drug dealers to better organize crack houses, like a cartoonish version of Stinger Bell.
“in some rare cases they’ve created dedicated spaces for addicts to shoot up. Meanwhile, police departments struggling with staffing shortages and budget cuts have stopped devoting resources to sweeping users and dealers off the streets or out of parks and playgrounds.”
It’s almost as if creating dedicated spaces for people to use substances under medical supervision reduces the need for law enforcement to sweep them out of other public spaces…
I’ll comment on the rest of this article, but I feel confident in condemning it as poorly researched at worst and bad faith at best, and sensationalist either way.
Also, I for one do not want to live in a society where a government’s agents, rather than trained healthcare professionals, can label someone as having a health condition requiring institutionalization. I would rather pay fewer taxes while affording more freedoms for myself and a higher quality of life for those in active addiction, than pay more taxes to expand a surveillance state into nabbing anyone off the streets and into a box.