Harm reduction policies and criminalization in Argentina: A critical view

MARÍA E. EPELE; MARIO MARTÍN PECHENY

Global Public Health Journal

Taylor & Francis

Año: 2007 vol. 2 p. 342 - 358

1744-1692

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 analyzes 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.