This text brings together established and emerging scholars (including graduate students) from multiple disciplines (primarily law and social sciences), frontline organizations working in the area of harm reduction, and persons with lived experience of substance use and harm reduction.
As a result, the chapters are written from a range of different disciplines, and share best practices from the harm reduction responses to different substances from Canada and elsewhere in the world. Developing a shared understanding of harm reduction, and in turn a deeper appreciation of how harm reduction can be approached in different ways serves to create a stronger foundation for effective policies and laws.
The focus of the book is on three substances: opioids, tobacco and cannabis. Harm reduction has been a high-profile element of the legal/policy response to all three, but has manifested in very different ways. For opioids, the “opioid crisis” has highlighted issues such as providing access to safe consumption sites and tools such as naloxone. For cannabis, the legalization and regulation of a formerly illegal product subject to criminal sanction offers a powerful harm reduction case study of the merits and pitfalls of Canada’s pioneering approach.
Harm reduction is also at the centre of a key debate in the area of tobacco: how to address new technologies, such as e-cigarettes, that offer smokers a less harmful alternative, but may also create new issues such as how to address health concerns arising from the uptake by young people without discouraging their harm reduction potential.

Vanessa Gruben is an associate professor and a member of the Centre for Health Law, Policy and Ethics at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Common Law, where she teaches health law and family law. Her research focuses on the legal and ethical aspects of assisted reproduction, including the constitutionality of Canada’s Assisted Human Reproduction Act, the legal relationship between egg donors and their physicians, the constitutionality of anonymous sperm and egg donation, access to reproductive technologies, and the existing gaps in provincial law for families created through third-party reproduction. Gruben’s work is funded by the Social Science and Humanities and Research Council, Canadian Blood Services, and the Foundation for Legal Research. She is a co-editor of the fifth edition of Canadian Health Law and Policy (LexisNexis Canada, 2017).

 

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Martha Jackman, Professor, Faculty of Law, French Common Law Program, University of Ottawa and Co-Director (Academic) of the SSHRC-CURA Research Project “Reconceiving Human Rights Practice,” online: www.socialrightscura.ca.

 

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Joao Velloso is a PhD candidate and part-time Professor at the Department of Criminology of the University of Ottawa (Canada). He is specialized in sociolegal studies and conflict resolution in comparative perspectives, combining approaches from Legal Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology of Law. His research deals with Administrative Law-based forms of punishment and their relationships with Criminal Law. Recent articles include: “Beyond criminocentric dogmatism: Mapping institutional forms of punishment in contemporary societies,” Punishment and Society (2013, 2); and «Au-delà de la criminalisation: L’immigration et les enjeux pour la criminologie », Criminologie (2013, 1).

 

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Professor, Faculty of Law, University of British Columbia and Research Partner in the SSHRC-CURA Project, “Reconceiving Human Rights Practice,” online: www.socialrightscura.ca.

 

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