In Memoriam: Remembering the People Who Built Harm Reduction

“We carry your names on our tongues as we stand united against those who oppress us.” – Jess Tilley

Harm reduction has never been the story of institutions alone. It was built by people who used drugs, people living with HIV and AIDS, outreach workers, organizers, nurses, social workers, researchers, activists and friends who refused to accept that preventable suffering and death were inevitable.

Many did this work before it was funded, before it was legal and long before anyone thought to call it evidence based public health.

This page remembers some of the people who built that movement, carried it forward and changed what was possible.

Dan Bigg

Mark Kinzly

Louise Beale Vincent

Edith Springer

John Szyler

Dave Purchase

Peter Moinichen

Christopher Abert

Dean Allen LeMire

There is no single founder of modern harm reduction.

Its history was built through overlapping communities, relationships and acts of resistance.

Syringe access grew from folding tables, backpacks, vans, car trunks and underground exchanges. Community naloxone grew because people decided that the ability to reverse an overdose should not belong exclusively to medical professionals. Drug user organizing grew from the radical proposition that people who use drugs should have power over the policies, systems and programs affecting their lives.

Tacoma mattered. Chicago mattered. New York mattered. Seattle mattered. Philadelphia mattered.

So did Connecticut, North Carolina, Indiana, New Hampshire and countless communities whose names rarely appear in histories of public health.

The movement was never created in one place.

It was created everywhere people decided that keeping one another alive mattered more than waiting for permission.

Nico Adriaans

Chris Alba

Carol Becker

Alan Berkman

Karen Bigg

Jim Britton

Michael R. Carden

George Clark

Gary Campbell Comer

Frances “Francie” Ceraulo Comer

Keith Cylar

Much of what is now accepted as public health began without public health’s permission.

People distributed sterile syringes when doing so could get them arrested. They taught safer drug use when abstinence was often the only officially acceptable message. They put naloxone into the hands of people who used opioids before governments created statewide distribution programs. They organized drug checking, wound care, outreach and peer support before those practices acquired professional titles, grant funding or billing codes.

The sequence matters.

People experiencing the harms identified what was killing their communities. They improvised ways to protect one another. They sometimes broke unjust laws to do it. They generated evidence in the most fundamental way possible.

They kept people alive.

Only later did institutions adopt many of those practices and begin calling them public health.

Angela Daigle

Ron Daniels

Vincent P. Dole

Kevin Donovan

Aubri Esters

David “Long Hair Dave” Fawver

Miriam Field

Greg Fresz

Miss Major Griffin Gracy

John “Gootie” Gutenson

Jon Paul Hammond

Not every movement leader had an executive title.

Some changed harm reduction by teaching the person standing beside them.

Some built organizations. Others built people.

Mentorship carried knowledge from one city to another, from one generation to the next and from one drug using community to another.

Someone learned how to reverse an overdose and taught ten more people.

Someone figured out how to operate an underground syringe exchange and showed another community how to do it.

Someone challenged a colleague’s assumptions about people who use drugs and changed the way that person practiced for the rest of their career.

Movements are built through relationships as much as institutions.

Much of that history cannot be found in annual reports or academic journals. It lives in the memories of the people who were there.

Jesse Harvey

Trey Helten

Stephan Kamenicky

Shelda Kastor

Chereece Keewatin

Matty Love

G. Alan Marlatt

Peter H. “Pete” Morse Jr.

Dave Murray

Robert G. Newman

Russell Newcombe

Harm reduction has also never existed apart from the other struggles for human dignity surrounding it.

Its history runs through the AIDS movement, racial justice, LGBTQ liberation, sex worker organizing, housing advocacy, prison reform, medical autonomy and resistance to the War on Drugs.

Some of the people remembered here may never have described themselves primarily as harm reductionists.

That does not make their contributions peripheral.

People drove syringe exchange vans while fighting for trans liberation. AIDS activists risked arrest distributing sterile equipment. Housing advocates demanded that people who used drugs be treated as human beings entitled to shelter and stability. Drug user organizers demanded a seat at tables where decisions about their lives had historically been made without them. Physicians and researchers challenged systems that treated people receiving methadone as morally suspect rather than deserving of medical care.

The boundaries between these movements were never as neat as institutions later made them appear.

Marie Nyswander

Bud Osborn

Sheila O'Shea

Allan Parry

Dennis Peron

Beny J. Primm

Bob Quinn

Mary Jane “Brownie Mary” Rathbun

Yolanda Serrano

Michael Siever

Rod Sorge

There is another reason this history is difficult to reconstruct.

Too many people doing this work died young.

People were lost to overdose, HIV and AIDS, hepatitis, violence, poverty and the accumulated consequences of criminalization.

Many did not live long enough to become executive directors, write memoirs, receive lifetime achievement awards or donate their papers to university archives.

The historical record therefore carries a cruel bias.

It tends to remember the people who lived long enough to leave one.

Some names survive because an organization preserved their story. Others survive because somebody who loved them still remembers what they did, who they helped, what they taught and what changed because they were there.

Both are history.

Dylan Stanley

Arnold S. Trebach

John Turvey

Nelly Velasco

John K. Watters

Brian Weil

Antonio Williams

Imani Woods

Thelma Louise Wright

Paul Yabor

Kevin Zeese

Norman E. Zinberg

This list will never be complete.

That is not a failure of this project. It reflects the nature of the movement itself.

Some people built national organizations. Some changed laws or policy. Some developed ideas that transformed how the world understood drug use. Some created programs that still exist decades later.

Others carried boxes.

They drove vans.

They staffed folding tables.

They handed someone a sterile syringe.

They taught somebody how to use naloxone.

They reversed an overdose.

They cleaned a wound.

They sat beside someone who had been abandoned by nearly everyone else.

They told another human being that their life was worth protecting.

Not all of them left archives.

Not all of them received awards.

Not all of them became famous.

Their work mattered anyway.

This page is an effort to preserve that history while the people who lived it are still here to tell it.

We invite members of the harm reduction community to help us remember the colleagues, teachers, organizers, troublemakers, pioneers and friends whose names belong here.

Because the history of harm reduction is not simply the history of programs, organizations or policies.

It is the history of people who kept other people alive.