UNDOING DRUGS.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob

After the concept of "harm reduction" spread from European pioneers to American activists in the 1980s and '90s, journalist Maia Szalavitz notes in her new history of the movement, it "terrified drug warriors." With good reason: "If the drug war was to be judged on its capacity to reduce harm, rather than on the number of arrests and drug seizures, it would almost certainly have to be declared lost."

As a rejoinder to "Just Say No" and "zero tolerance," harm reduction is readily understandable, intuitively appealing, and ultimately devastating to the prohibitionist cause. It refocuses attention from drugs to drug-related harm, distinguishes between the damage done by drug use and the damage done by drug laws, and requires weighing the costs of those laws along with their purported benefits. As Szalavitz shows in Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, that's a powerful combination.

Harm reduction opens the door to relatively modest but previously unthinkable programs such as needle exchange, heroin maintenance, and...