The Politics of Harm Reduction: A Comparative Analysis of Needle Exchange Policy Development in Canada and the United Kingdom

• In Event: International Perspectives on Criminal Justice Policies

Abstract

Needle exchange facilities are places where people who use drugs can go to exchange used needles for clean ones in order to prevent themselves from acquiring deadly infections like HIV. Although there are over two thousand needle exchange facilities currently operating across the United Kingdom today, Canada is home to less than two hundred needle exchange programs. Although the population of Canada is roughly one half of that of the UK, it is unlikely that this factor, alone, explains the enormous discrepancy in the number of needle exchange facilities found in each country. Drawing on government records, policy documents, newspaper articles, and secondary literature, this paper seeks to better understand how and why needle exchange policy has
developed as differently as it has in both countries between the years 1985 and 2015. Utilising social constructionism and political sociology as analytical frameworks, this paper concludes that, despite the fact that injection drug use has been socially constructed as a serious public health problem in both countries, divergent political structures found in each site help to explain cross-national variations in drug policy development.

Author

• Steven James Hayle, University of Toronto