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‘H
arm reduction is consistently having to re-fight battles that
we’ve won in the past,’ says Harm Reduction International
(HRI) executive director Rick Lines. ‘Because in many ways it
can seem counter-intuitive to the dominant zero- tolerance,
abstinence-based narrative.’ This means those working in
harm reduction having to explain ‘again and again’ to
politicians, policy makers and the public about where it fits in ‘a continuum of
comprehensive health services’, he says.
And he’s been arguing these points for a long time, having become involved in
harm reduction through prisoners’ rights work. An activist in the late ’80s and
early ’90s, in 1993 he took a job in what remains the only community-based HIV
project in Canada working exclusively in prisons.
‘I was one of the first staff they hired when they got funding,’ he says. ‘I had no
background in HIV, but I knew prisons and I was comfortable working with people
in prison. I started doing HIV counselling, and obviously when you’re working with
people in prison who are HIV positive you’re inevitably working with drug users.
So I became, by extension, an advocate for HIV and harm reduction services in
prisons – it was really my interest in prisoners’ rights that brought me into the
HIV field, and pretty quickly thereafter into harm reduction.’
One of his specialisms over the years has been prison needle and syringe
programmes. Is he surprised by how controversial an issue that remains? ‘I am,’
he says. ‘I haven’t done specific work on prison needle exchange for a while but
it’s a bit disappointing coming back to it seven or eight years since I did my last
major piece of research and not a lot has changed. When I talk about it I always
begin by saying that prison needle exchange is not a new thing. A lot of countries
that have prison needle exchange – which is a small number of countries – have
had these programmes operating for a decade, so it’s not a new response or an
untried response.’
At the same time it’s not a response that’s been picked up by many other
countries, however, and even within countries that do have programmes there’s ‘not
necessarily a growth in the number of prisons doing it’, he points out. ‘For most
countries it’s only in a handful of prisons – there are very few countries where it’s a
generalised programme across the entire system. But it is surprising to me the
degree to which, even ten years later, the same arguments against it continue to be
recycled again and again, even though they’ve been shown to be false.’
These are services for a population that is ‘doubly, or triply or quadruply
stigmatised’, he stresses. ‘Not just people who inject drugs, but people who are
criminalised, who are incarcerated, often people who are living with HIV, people of
22 |
drinkanddrugsnews
| July 2013
Profile |
Rick Lines
www.drinkanddrugsnews.com
HRI executive director Rick Lines
has been making the case for a
human rights-based approach
to vulnerable populations for
more than two decades. He
talks to
David Gilliver
about
getting the harm reduction
message across
Lines of
CO