Substance abuse professionals’ attitudes regarding harm reduction versus traditional interventions for injecting drug users

Abstract

Investigations of attitudes regarding harm reduction have usually assessed the acceptance of specific interventions, but investigators have rarely compared the ratings of harm reduction interventions to the ratings of traditional interventions or tested whether the perceived value of harm reduction interventions varies as a function of client characteristics. Therefore, using a vignette describing an injecting drug user, we tested whether clinical administrators of substance abuse treatment agencies and licensed chemical dependency counselors rated the beneficence (on a 7-point scale from “Extremely Harmful” to “Extremely Beneficial”) of injection-related harm reduction interventions (e.g., cleaning needles with bleach, muscling, non-injecting routes of administration) differently from the beneficence of traditional treatment interventions (e.g., self-help group, individual and group counseling), and whether client gender and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) status impacted such ratings. In Study One, a set of traditional interventions was rated as more beneficial than a set of harm reduction interventions. Study Two showed that a subset of harm reduction interventions designed to prevent transmission of blood-borne diseases was seen as more beneficial than a subset designed to prevent overdose fatalities. Clinical administrators rated harm reduction as more beneficial for HIV-negative clients than for those whose HIV status was described as unknown (Study One), but there was no impact of HIV status on perceived beneficence of harm reduction among licensed chemical dependency counselors (Study Two). Gender of the vignette client did not influence the beneficence ratings in either sample.