Harm reduction policies in Argentina: A critical view

Abstract

The concept of ‘harm’ underpinning current drug harm reduction policies is most often limited to viral infections and other health consequences for drug users. This paper analyses harm reduction policies in Argentina, with the purpose of challenging and extending this narrow conception of harm to encompass all harms inflicted on drug users, in a context of criminalization of drug use and poverty. Faced with a steep rise in poverty, rapid changes in drug use practices, the quality and prices of drugs, and patterns of morbidity and mortality, Argentina has implemented harm reduction policies specifically for drug users who mostly live in the Greater Buenos Aires impoverished areas. These changes, as well as the Latin American tradition of social and health policies that focus on the collective, subjective, and political-economic aspects of harm, highlight some tensions between the individualistic, public health model structured in the North and its application in Argentina.

Keywords:

• Harm reduction
• Argentina
• drug policies
• Latin America
• HIV/AIDS

Notes

1. Linked to the default on its foreign debt, the force of economic crisis and decline is shown in the statistics. In 1974, only 4.7% of the population in the Buenos Aires Area was living under the poverty line, while by 2002, 54.3% of the population in the same area was poor (INDEC 2003).

2. This phenomenon, specific to the poorest, youngest, drug users contrasts with experience prior to the crisis of 2001 and/or of users living in less vulnerable conditions. For example, a study of low middle class residents, living with HIV and/or hepatitis C, of Buenos Aires, showed that IDUs, who acquired HIV in the early 1990s, claimed to have stopped injecting and being ‘out of control’ because the HIV diagnosis scared them, causing them to decide to ‘take charge’ of their lives, the illness and their treatment; eventually, they were all receiving Highly active antiretroviral therapy, (Pecheny et al. 2002). These former IDUs, even in adversity, managed to normalize their lives with a chronic illness, control their drug use, and rebuild social networks.