The social movement of harm reduction: Processes, power, and the subject of the drug user

Harm reduction is currently a popular topic in drug research. While there is now a large pool of literature on various aspects of drug-related harm reduction, few studies have closely examined the nature and characteristics of harm reduction as a social movement. This research project outlines the history of a US social movement that has fought for the health and human rights of illicit drug users. What is explored are the social forces involved in the processes of: the establishment of a political voice among a deviant/criminal population; the organization of actors, networks, and resources within a social movement; and the opposition, adoption, and co-optation of harm reduction by dominant institutions of social control. The analysis centers around a Foucaultian notion of power and situates social boundary negotiations within multiple discursive locations. The theoretical perspective used in this project departs from the conventional framework of social movement studies which tends to assume the presence of an identified collective, uniformities of intentions of agents, and consciousness of actors within a movement and throughout the movement's life-span. By differentiating the harm reduction movement into the three overlapping processes of emergence, formalization, and normalization, this project demonstrates how the movement has changed directions, how harm reduction has been re-defined in the course of its development, and how the outcome of this movement has been divorced from the original discourses of drug legalization and drug policy reform.