Trending Globally: Politics And Policy

In February of this year, Providence became the first city in America to approve opening a state-sanctioned overdose prevention center. Sometimes known as safe injection sites, these are facilities where people can bring illegal drugs and consume them under the supervision of trained volunteers and health professionals. It’s one of the boldest experiments in the U.S. of an approach to addressing the drug overdose crisis known as “harm reduction,” which is focused less on forcing people to stop using drugs and instead on helping people use them more safely. It might sound counterintuitive that such an approach could help stem our country’s drug overdose epidemic, which killed over 112,000 Americans in 2023. But as our two guests on this episode explain, overdose prevention centers — along with many other “harm reduction” interventions — work. Studies have shown that they not only help reduce drug-related deaths, they also help people recover from drug addiction more broadly. On this episode, Dan