HUD is right about recovery, wrong about fentanyl test strips

In Washington’s current accounting, a glass crack pipe and a fentanyl test strip fall under the same heading: drug paraphernalia. Only the glass pipe deserves the label. The other is a dollar’s worth of paper that tells a drug user the truth about what he is about to take. Published research from me and my coauthors shows that information saves lives.

This month the Department of Housing and Urban Development rolled out a $4.04 billion overhaul of the Continuum of Care program, the federal government’s largest homelessness assistance effort. The new funding notice ends the era of “housing first, questions never” and redirects money toward treatment, transitional housing and recovery. It also bars funding for programs that facilitate illicit drug use or distribute paraphernalia.

As a policy economist, I think the Department of Housing and Urban Development is largely right. Taxpayers spent two decades and billions of dollars on the theory that handing someone an apartment, no strings attached, would fix a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness. Homelessness rose to record levels anyway. Tying dollars to performance and putting recovery first is overdue.

But in redrawing the line between what it will and won’t fund, Washington is about to erase a more important distinction: between tools that facilitate drug use and tools that provide information. Fentanyl test strips sit squarely in the second category, and they are getting swept out with the first.

Skepticism toward “harm reduction”........

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