This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

CoolZone Media.

Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff, your weekly reminder that whenever there's bad things happening, there's people preventing the worst of it and trying to make things better and often succeeding.

I'm your host to Markert Kiljoy, and every single week we talk about the cool people in history

who did cool stuff.

It's in the title of the podcast.

It's totally obvious.

Everyone can tell what a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is about.

And this is part two of what's probably a four-parter, but we'll find out about the development

of harm reduction, the development of people who started directly meeting the needs

of drug users and people facing addiction and how people confronted

and have been somewhat successful at confronting the overdose crisis and a bunch of other

crises, a bunch of interrelated crises.

And in part one that you've already listened to, I hope.

We talked about the Skinner Cage and how people keep studying captive animals and

thinking that that provides useful information and how our entire modern society is based on

nonsense from that era of bad science, like the Alpha Wolf concept or the demon drug myth of addiction.

And so what we're going to talk about now are some people who looked at the work being done by

researchers up on the hill overlooking the city of Vancouver and said, that makes sense.

That makes a lot of sense to me that actually addiction has a lot to do with poverty and social

conditions. So we're going to talk about those people.

The first harm reduction program, not under the name harm reduction, that name comes later, in Vancouver, in the downtown east side, started in a way that pretty much every good thing that has ever happened starts.

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