Addiction used to be much more of a taboo subject, and we are still a long journey away from de-stigmatising this disease. Many negative connotations that surround addiction include the belief that an addict is at fault for their addiction or that they have a flawed character when really this is a complex disorder, these stereotypes place blame on the addict and they may feel too much shame to ever seek help – addiction claims many lives every year and the effects are felt by hundreds of people who care for someone who has fallen victim to this illness. Harm reduction is imperative to aid recovery.

 

Firstly, what is harm reduction? Harm reduction involves any measures put in place to minimise the damage done by drugs, alcohol or other risky behaviours. For example; providing clean needles for users or the use of the medication naloxone which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. Your initial reaction on learning about harm reduction (if you did not know what it was before) might be to question whether this encourages drug or alcohol use or not, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) actually found that ‘People who utilize syringe exchange programs are five times more likely to quit using drugs than people who do not use needle exchange programs’.

 

In fact, harm reduction can be one of the first steps in recovery as it accepts that some people are not yet ready to quit or are unable to, whether this is from a lack of funds to be able to enter a treatment programme or from other circumstances, and it is non-judgemental in its approach as treating an addict with humanity and dignity is vital to reducing the guilt that is perpetuated onto an individual from society and from themselves as to even come out of the denial stage of addiction is incredibly challenging.

 

To those of you who may be reading this and have an addict who has played a large part in your life, one of the hardest things to overcome is the resentment for how they may have treated you. How it seems they have chosen their substance of choice over you or their other loved ones and how many times you have to rescue them from situations of their own making, or simply the bitterness we feel towards this new person who seems to have replaced the one you grew to know and love. Addicts and their loved ones are on two sides of an incredibly complicated coin, with the disease itself a large unbreakable wall between them – at least, this is how I have seen it. 

 

Before harm reduction and potential recovery can be put in place, we must learn to feel empathy towards the addict in our lives; how it must feel to be in a loop of suffering and disappointment every time they lie to, or steal from, or hurt someone who cares about them. This does not mean we enable them or excuse their responsibility for their behaviour, it just means we start to end the painful cycle of hatred which only hurts us, when we learn to put our boundaries in place we can know what it is like to experience moments of peace, whether the addict is ready to receive help or not.