This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 26, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It's time for us to admit that COVID is going to be with us going forward.

So says Cato's Jeff Singer in a new

Pandemics and Policy Paper at the Cato Institute. Singer argues that the

strategy for dealing with COVID should shift to harm reduction rather than

lockdowns and other heavy-handed mandates. The paper is available now.

The actual term harm reduction was created by a group of people who were dealing with

people with substance use disorders in Liverpool, England in the 1980s.

They became convinced that efforts to have quote unquote drug for your society were completely unrealistic and so

rather than just try to get people to stop using drugs they said let's do what we can

to make people continue to use drugs use it safer and they actually

coined the phrase harm reduction and that involved you know things like syringe exchange programs and that kind of thing.

But when you think about it in a modern developed society like the US,

much of what health care practitioners do every day is practice harm reduction.

And that's why when you suggest harm reduction for substance use disorder to them, they usually get it immediately and find with it.

Which for example, when I have a patient who's overweight doesn't get enough exercise and

has now developed high blood pressure and borderline

diabetes and has high cholesterol and I know that if I ever get this person to just

change the diet and get on an exercise regimen. We don't need any

medication. We can get this person under control, but if he continues on this

track, he's going to give himself a heart attack or something like that or a stroke.

...