Harm reduction as an ethical-political project: a study on the conceptions of harm reduction in the scientific literature

Abstract

The objective of this work was to critically analyze the Harm Reduction (HR) conceptions present in the scientific literature in order to think about the possibility of an ethical-political project for HR. The drug-commodity and its consequences are structuring of the capitalist mode of production (CMP), having prohibitionism as a fundamental ideology. HR has historically been taken as a way of dealing with the “issue” of drugs, which considers their consumption as part of human life, with actions primarily aimed at the social, physical, and economic damage caused by use. From this, we analyzed and categorized 50 articles published between 2020 and 2021, based on historical-dialectical materialism and the perspective of totality, identifying four conceptions of HR: abstinentist, instrumental-pragmatic, liberalcitizen, ethicist. In the set of conceptions, the socioeconomic structures and the social dynamics that determine the “issue” of drugs end up being reified or receiving an ethical or epistemic confrontation. We conclude that it is essential to start from the historical accumulation of HR to think about an ethical-political project in exchange with projects and organizations, politicizing the determinations of physical-psychic suffering, the motivations and consequences of drug use, as one of the mediations for confronting and overcoming of bourgeois sociability.