Disrupting and Maintaining Prohibition: Institutional and Grassroots Harm Reduction Practices in Ottawa

Harm reduction is often proposed to be a unique response from prohibition. Where prohibition restricts and punishes most activities related to drugs, the term "harm reduction" is used to denote a number of provisions (e.g. equipment for using, a place to use). In this dissertation I trouble this distinction. I argue that the relationship between harm reduction and prohibition is more dynamic. Rather than operating in separate silos, harm reduction is actively constructed by, while also shaping and influencing, prohibition. For this research I conducted participant observations at two harm reduction services in Ottawa, Canada. The first service is operated by a community health centre, and the second is provided by a grassroots community organization. Engaging in the provision of harm reduction at these two sites demonstrated that practices of harm reduction and prohibition shape and influence each other. In particular I found that harm reduction and prohibition are connected through their legality, including the formal and quotidian ways that our actions are guided by and produced as legal. I use a multi-pronged critical legal studies framework to draw out these various ways that law is produced and experienced. In specific I demonstrate that the relationship between harm reduction and prohibition is a product of: grassroots efforts to disrupt prohibition and legal and political efforts to maintain it; spatial and temporal relations; and exclusionary strategies of control. Examining the relationship between harm reduction and prohibition provides insight into the potential for and barriers to efforts that could address the harms people who use drugs experience on a day-to-day basis, including the threat of criminalization and fatal overdose.