Image: ACT UP at the New York City Pride March in 1989 (T. L. Litt)

Are we victims of our own success?

Harm reduction began in the 1980s as a peer-based movement to prevent the spread of HIV. Community needle exchange programs were initially criminalized, and it was only through the persistence and direct action of people who use drugs that they gradually became accepted. Today’s publicly funded “syringe service programs” owe their existence to the early efforts of IV drug users to keep themselves safe during the AIDS epidemic (many of whom served jail time for their activism). Similarly, drug checking began in the late 90s as a peer-based movement of ravers and MDMA users who sought to protect themselves from counterfeit ecstasy tablets that had begun killing people a few years earlier. State and corporate drug checking programs today can again trace their beginnings to the initial collective efforts of people who use drugs to protect their own health and safety.