Resisting Saviourism: Reclaiming Harm Reduction from the State

What They Don’t Tell You About Harm Reduction

From charity to solidarity. From service to resistance.

A live abolitionist webinar with Heather Tunold

As we enter the eleventh year of the so-called “public health emergency” in British Columbia alone, more than 20,000 people have been lost to a toxic drug supply and countless others have been criminalized, stigmatized, and left behind by the state.
Harm reduction began as a radical movement: created by and for drug users, rooted in dignity, mutual aid, and refusal to abandon each other in the face of state violence.
But as institutions absorbed it, harm reduction was sanitized and repackaged made palatable, bureaucratic, and compliant with the very systems that produce harm. In this moment of moral panic, punitive policy, and erasure of drug-user expertise, we return to harm reduction’s roots: survival, resistance, and collective care and most importantly we honour and remember that none of this would even exist if not for the Black, Brown, Queer and Disabled people who use drugs who paved the way and continue to be overlooked.

This webinar pulls back the curtain on what they don’t tell you about harm reduction: the history, politics, contradictions, and myths shaping our current moment.

We’ll explore:

• How the drug war created the conditions for this crisis

• Why coercive care and panic about safer supply cause harm

• The difference between performative compassion and structural change

• How carceral logics show up in “helping” systems and social services

• What abolitionist harm reduction looks like in practice

• Moving from charity + saviourism to solidarity + community power

Who this is for

People working in health, community care, organizing, education, or crisis response and anyone who wants to show up differently, with abolitionist, trauma-informed practice and deep respect for drug-user leadership.

This session is a space for unlearning, truth-telling, and re-imagining. You don’t need to come with answers just your own bundle of experiences as well as curiosity, humility, and heart.

Invitation:

Let’s reclaim harm reduction from the ground up!

rooted in autonomy, community, and resistance.

Harm reduction isn’t a service.

It’s a commitment to each other.

A refusal to disappear our neighbours who use drugs .

A practice of liberation.

From charity to solidarity. From service to resistance.