Excerpt from Coming to Harm Reduction Kicking & Screaming, 2nd Edition:

Stories of Radically Loving People Who Use Drugs. 

 

A LITTLE HISTORY (OF AN OFTEN-OVERLOOKED PART)

OF THE HARM REDUCTION MOVEMENT

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Harm Reduction & Families​

 

Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten. …David Ogden Stiers

 

Treat people as if they are what they can be and you help them become

who they’re capable of being. …Johann von Goethe

 

Hanging out with a friend, twenty-six-year-old Danny, a white, suburban male, took a pill. One pill. One pill that contained a highly concentrated, unregulated drug used to prolong a narcotic’s effect. A few hours later he was dead. For Danny’s mother, Louise, the loss has been immeasurable. Some days she can’t shower. Others she can’t get out of bed, the absence of her son leaving her “raw.”

 

“It’s been a nightmare,” she says. “The cops said that they can’t really do anything about it. There are so many homicides in Baltimore [where this happened]. They said unless there’s an actual stabbing or gunshots … wounds to the body … [t]hey just don’t have the manpower.” Before adding, “I guess if you want to kill somebody, Baltimore City’s the place to do it.”

 

Danny, a young man who was just getting his life back together, liked to have fun, he’d still enjoy a drink or two, and this fateful night he’d thought he could keep the party going by popping a benzodiazepine. Unlike the anti-anxiety meds prescribed by a licensed physician or psychiatrist, Danny got his Xanax off the street. He split the pill with a friend, John. John lived. Danny did not.

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