“We cannot continue to try to kill people to ‘save’ them,” author Maia Szalavitz told the audience in a crowded BorgWarner Community Room Saturday at Tompkins County Public Library.

Szalavitz was speaking on her book, “Undoing Drugs: How Harm Reduction is Changing the Future of Drugs and Addiction,” which traces the origins of the harm reduction movement to the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and efforts to get clean needles to drug users to fight the spread of the disease.

Szalavitz recounted how she first learned of the connection between shared needles and HIV transmission during a chance encounter while getting shooting up with a friend. She remembered how angry she was when she found out that potentially life-saving information was being held out of the public view.

“They were concerned, the politicians said, that making injectors safer would ‘send the wrong message’ in the drug war,” Szalavitz said. She added a memory about a methadone clinic where she was being treated, that stopped her from hanging a poster about using bleach to sterilize needles. “That [the poster] would encourage people to use. As if you can encourage people who are addicted to use more drugs than they are already using. It does not really work that way.”

Szalavitz said it was encounters like that one which drove her to begin her own mission to share information, starting first with graffiti in bathroom stalls, before joining more organized needle exchange and awareness campaigns and ultimately becoming a journalist.

She also examined the different outcomes from approaches in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, where communities that clamped down on needle exchanges and availability saw spikes in HIV infections, while those that prioritized stopping HIV spread over stopping drug use saw not only fewer people infected, but also better health outcomes overall.

The presentation also dove into the origins of U.S. drug policy, and how harm reduction’s evidence-based approach threatens the drug war. Szalavitz referenced a 1914 New York Times Op-Ed titled, “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ are a New Southern Menace.”

“As you can see from this article,” Szalavitz told the audience as the newspaper clipping showed on a screen, “Racism is basically the fundamental reason for our current drug policy. It wasn’t the case that they sat down and said, ‘Okay, cocaine is more dangerous than alcohol, tobacco is safer than marijuana,’ and that’s how we got the drug laws, because those things are not true. We got our drug laws via a series of racist and anti-immigrant panics.”

During the 45-minute presentation, Szalavitz also told the audience that there is no evidence that tough drug laws and confrontational treatment are effective, and that the availability of opioid overdose reversal drug naloxone (sold under the brand name NARCAN) is not associated with increases in teen drug use.

“Teenagers are not like, ‘Oh, I’m worried about dying from heroin. Oh, now naloxone exists, I will like, go and try it!’ That is just not the way it works,” Szalavitz said.

The topic of naloxone came up again during the question-and-answer session for the event, when someone asked Szalavitz how parents can explain the free NARCAN vending machine inside TCPL to their children when they walk past it.

Szalavitz explained that the machine, and harm reduction, are about helping people survive, and there is nothing on the machine telling people to do drugs.

“It’s not about saying, ‘well we think this behavior is good, we think this behavior is bad,’” Szalavitz said. “[It’s about saying] we know this behavior exists and we would prefer that our children don’t do it [use opioids]. But if my children did it, hell yeah, I want the NARCAN there.”

Szalavitz also pointed to data showing a spike in overdose deaths that has followed U.S. efforts to limit supplies to opioids to combat the nationwide epidemic. She said that has turned many people to dangerous illegal drugs which often contain fentanyl because a lethal dose of the powerful narcotic can be kept in a package the size of a penny, which makes it easier to hide.

“We really need to stop harming pain patients in the name of fighting addiction. It does not help addiction, it does not help pain,” Szalavitz said. “Unlike supply side approaches, harm reduction recognizes that people use drugs for reasons and that cutting off access doesn’t treat the underlying pain.”

Szalavitz appearance was part of the Library’s Information Saves Lives Project , which is funded by a grant from the Tompkins County Opioid Task Force as well as an anonymous $10,000 donation to the Tompkins County Public Library Foundation.

Sasha Raffloer, a TCPL Library Assistant and Information Saves Lives Project Manager, praised the Tompkins County Opioid Task Force grant that made the machine and Saturday’s event possible.

“I’m so grateful that Tompkins County Public Library can be a place where harm reduction is part of our work,” Raffloer told the audience. “That we can offer our community free NARCAN, NARCAN training, information on how to help and information where to get help.”

In addition to the free NARCAN vending machine inside the Library, the Information Saves Lives Project also has recurring hands-on programs for the community. All are free and open to the public;

• Meditation and Mindfulness sessions with Anna Salamone of FireFly Farm Retreat are held on the first Tuesday of every month at 5:00 p.m. The next session will be Tuesday, May 6.
• NARCAN training sessions with the REACH Project are held on the first Thursday of every month at 4:00 p.m. The next training will be held Thursday, May 1.

You can learn more about the Information Saves Lives program and find local opioid and addiction resources at https://www.tcpl.org/information-saves-lives-patron-faqs.

Special thanks to Canopy by Hilton Ithaca Downtown for providing accommodations for Szalavitz’s visit.

Watch Szalavitz entire speaking event on the TCPL YouTube page.