This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, April 13th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Harm reduction encompasses far more than just opioids.

Physicians practice it all the time.

Many lifestyle choices that many of us don't want to give up

contribute to disease that we also don't want. Harm reduction is the process of mitigating

the costs of those choices. But with opioids it's often federal and state law

that stand in the way of harm reduction. Cato's Jeff Singer discusses how

physicians think about it. One of the people who spoke at your recent Harm Reduction Conference was Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, the former

governor of Pennsylvania, and you note in an article recently that he has come around in a way on the notion of harm reduction with respect to drug overdoses that the United States is dealing with in a or should say a significant

issue that the United States is dealing with right now. How do doctors look at harm reduction in a very general way?

Well, it's interesting when I speak with my colleagues about the harm reduction approach to dealing with the drug abuse problem,

most of them immediately get it, even if they hadn't heard about the concept, if it's not their area of expertise when I explain it to them, they immediately are on board because when you think about it in modern medicine in a developed

country like the United States, much of what we do every day is practice harm reduction. Back in the early part of the 20th century,

most people were concerned about dying from infectious diseases

days before antibiotics or trauma related to job-related trauma, but in the modern developed

countries like the US and most of the Western countries, we pretty much eradicated the terrible infectious diseases, sanitation

is better.

Technology has made it so that it's much less likely to get a job-related injury.

So now a lot of what we doctors do every day

in our practice of medicine is, in effect, harm reduction.

So for example, you get a person who's overweight and eats poorly and as a result of their poor eating habits they have high cholesterol and high blood pressure and of course this puts them at risk for all sorts of problems like heart

...