Presenter(s): Bryanna Moore
Faculty Mentor(s): Dan Tichenor
Poster 155
Session: Social Sciences & Humanities
The focus of my Honors thesis is on supervised injection sites and the feasibility of harm reduction as a political framework in the United States. Though there has been much research on the success of harm reduction in places outside of the United States, no supervised injection sites currently exist in the U.S. Part of my research will comprise of a comparative analysis of U.S. and Canadian drug policy, including a sociohistorical analysis of shifting cultural values around the issue of healthcare and the eventual establishment of InSite, a supervised injection site in Vancouver, British Columbia. My primary research questions are: Could a facility like InSite operate in the United States? If so, how? If not, why not? What are the obstacles — social, political, economic, legal, or otherwise — that have prevented the successful establishment of a supervised injection site in the United States? My research will make a unique, distinct contribution to the academic discourse surrounding harm reduction because it will center personal narrative and accurately situate the lives of drug users and their communities as those most affected by drug policy. This research approach reflects the principles of the harm reduction movement itself, not focusing solely on abstract policy goals or legal history but instead contextualizing law and policy in relation to lived experiences. I expect to find that drug users themselves, while at the forefront of organizing for drug policy reform and public health approaches to the issue of drug use, are rarely included in conversations with actual law-makers and policy influencers. Little existing research takes a personal narrative approach to drug policy reform. I plan to address that gap by building a body of ethnographic research that can be used in the future to determine resource allocation and shift the sociopolitical conversation about drug use from its current punitive focus to a more humanistic, health-centered approach.