The genesis of risk reduction: an antidote to symbolic cannibalism
Author:
Òscar Parés Franquero.
Book:
De riesgos y placeres: manual para entender las drogas
Year:
2013
About the study
This study, as stated by its author, “aims to capture in a few pages, and in a programmatic way, what could be a more comprehensive and academically justified approach to a genesis and teleology of risk reduction.”
Over the last twenty years, the harm reduction strategy has transformed how society and its members relate to drug use, beginning with an underground, uncomfortable and revealing discourse, and ending with the recognition of its effectiveness by the highest European institutions.
Most of the public money spent on information and prevention translates into a pharmacological disinformation campaign to justify the war on drugs, without answering the questions posed to users.
Excerpt
“At a macro level, scientific evidence reveals that the lists that classify the different illicit substances according to their dangerousness, in the united conventions, are not based on medical or scientific criteria but purely political. At a micro level, despite the fact that the rates of consumption of illicit substances are considerable, involving millions of people, it is an odyssey for research teams to find funding and support to enable them to carry out drug studies.
[…]
Risk reduction is an appendix of prohibitionism, it is indebted to it. With other substances, drugs or institutionalized risk activities we do not say or do risk reduction, what we have is a culture, a knowledge and an integrated transmission that does not need special categories or theories of risk, per se. Risk reduction by asking the why of risks has traced a path that ends up folding in on itself. […] The greatest risk facing risk reduction is prohibitionism itself, all risks derived or conceptualized from it have an added brutal bias. […] Harm reduction is a further symptom of prohibitionism, a reverberation of dissonance. The teleology of risk reduction is to exorcise prohibitionism and thus to consider itself self-extinguished.”
Photo by Brook Anderson on Unsplash.
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Tags:
adverse effects
, risk reduction
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, harm reduction
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, scientific research
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