Seth Leibsohn: Health Professionals Harm Reduction Is Really Enabling

Tuesday, September 2, 2025

Tom Wolfe once postulated there are times it seems we go back to the Year Zero—where we unlearn everything we have learned about life, health, civilization. For years now, major cities and so-called health professionals have been doing under the euphemism of “harm reduction” what actually should be called “enabling” when it comes to illegal drug use and addiction. 

A recent New York Times article lamented that some cities are rethinking these efforts, precisely because they woke up to what they were doing, they won’t use the word, but it was enabling.  For too long, too many major cities thought the best way to help drug addicts, particularly homeless, was to give them paraphernalia to make their drug use easier and theoretically safer: clean needles for heroin injection, fentanyl test strips to make sure their cocaine didn’t have fentanyl in it.  Their measurement of success?  How many people took these instruments of destruction, never how many went into treatment.

The serious would call this enabling, not helping.  Thank goodness it’s being rethought.

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