Enlarge / A name for radical empathy: In her 2021 ebook, Undoing Medicine: The Untold Story of Hurt Discount and the Way forward for Habit, Maia Szalavitz argues for adopting the controversial follow of hurt discount when treating dependancy. (credit score: iStock / Getty Picture)
There’s hardly ever time to jot down about each cool science-y story that comes our method. So this 12 months, we’re as soon as once more operating a particular Twelve Days of Christmas sequence of posts, highlighting one science story that fell by means of the cracks in 2020, every day from December 25 by means of January 5. At the moment: why we must always change the punitive strategy of the “conflict on medication” with a radical new paradigm for treating dependancy.
In 1986, Maia Szalavitz was a heroin addict in New York Metropolis, weighing a scant 80 kilos and taking pictures up as usually as 40 instances a day. She had simply found the heady combination of cocaine and heroin generally known as speedballs, and had no intention of quitting, though HIV was spreading quickly by means of the neighborhood because of the follow of sharing soiled needles. However an opportunity encounter in an East Village residence doubtless saved her life.
A girl visiting from California taught Szalavitz defend herself by operating bleach by means of a shared syringe not less than twice, then rinsing twice with water, in addition to washing the injection level. It was Szalavitz’s first encounter with so-called “hurt discount,” an strategy to treating dependancy that emphasizes methods to attenuate the dangers and destructive penalties related to substance abuse—not simply the chance of dependancy and illness, but in addition social stigma, poverty, and imprisonment. Needle trade applications, for example, provide free clear syringes to addicts, thereby decreasing the unfold of HIV.
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