The controversies surrounding “filming” rooms are just the latest example of the complexity of implementing, in France, a so-called health policy of “risk reduction”in parallel with the security response to illicit drug use. A look back at the key stages of this public health strategy that aims, rather than withdrawal, at preventing and reducing the risks and effects of drug use.
The “AIDS years”, a founding moment
When we ask addicts, activists, and doctors about the founding act of risk reduction, they point to a key date: 1987. That year, when the AIDS epidemic was exploding, first affecting the homosexual community and drug users, the then Minister of Health, Michèle Barzach, a doctor by training in a right-wing government, fought hard against her counterparts in the interior and Justice, a decree that authorizes, de facto, the sale of syringes. A way to fight against the exchange of materials between drug addicts, recognized as one of the vectors of contamination.
Therefore, it is no longer necessary to prove your identity to obtain syringes at a pharmacy. A small revolution: after decades dominated by “dogma of abstinence” and the“therapeutic prescription” do ” get up “ For the drug addict, the emergence of the “AIDS years” shakes the situation. With this new logic supported by users and associations: it is about reducing the risks related to drug consumption (overdose, infections, social, psychological damage, etc.), stopping being the only objective in the strict sense.
As a result of the Barzach Decree, syringe exchange programs are being developed. Before another important step, in 1995: the marketing authorization of heroin substitution treatments, methadone and Subutex. “A milestone has been reached with these prescriptions to users, in the name of health risks considered more important”explains academic Yann Bisiou, specialist in drug law. This did not happen without problems. “Harm reduction advocates were then seen as betraying attention. Among the doctors we spoke of “white coat traffickers”, the team in which I worked exploded”, recalls the addict Jean-Pierre Couteron, who ten years later participated in the creation of another important system: consultations for young consumers.
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