Ryan White Committee Rejects City Attempts to Undermine Harm Reduction

Posted by Housing Works Julie Turkewitz, April 18, 2011 at 3:20pm

Community members spoke out—and Planning Council members listened

It was a satisfying victory yesterday for drug users and providers of harm reduction services in New York City.

More than 50 people packed a meeting of the Ryan White Planning Council Executive Committee to challenge a misguided NYC Department of Health and Mental Services proposal concerning services for drug users. That proposal would have required harm reduction providers to add an abstinence-focused treatment option to their services in order to receive a piece of $12 million in HIV prevention funds.

The executive committee, acknowledging the concerns of the community members present, decided to toss the proposal back to the city’s Integration of Care committee, whose members are obligated to reassess it.

Whereas NYC’s harm reduction programs have been lauded for their success in helping the hardest-to-reach individuals access care and housing, the DOH’s abstinence-focused model, known as the Community Reinforcement Approach, has not been proven effective in serving several populations, including older people of color and users of crack cocaine and heroin. The Community Reinforcement Approach was developed for alcohol users and tested mostly on white men. Under the DOH’s proposed rules, providers would have had to offer Community Reinforcement as a treatment option, although it would not have replaced harm reduction programs.

“If you do this [implement CRA], we are going to create huge barriers to get people into medical care, which is the opposite of the purpose of the Ryan White legislation,” said Robert Cordero, executive director at CitiWide Harm Reduction. Staff and clients from CitiWide, as well as Housing Works, the Lower East Side Harm Reduction Center, and Vocal-NY attended the meeting to show their support for dumping the new DOH contract language.

At the meeting, the DOH’s Dr. Fabienne Laraque insisted that the proposed model could be successful for a broad population and that it would serve as an option, not a replacement, for harm reduction services.

The full Planning Council will have to approve any final changes to the contract language in the coming months. Housing Works urges harm reduction users and their allies to attend next week’s Planning Council meeting to ensure that members understand the importance of rethinking the guidelines for the proposal.

“We’ll have the same or more attendance at the Planning Council meeting next Thursday so we can really really let that body know that this whole process needs to be redone,” said Derrick Chandler, a former harm reduction program participant and New York Issues Organizer at Housing Works.