Advocates maintain push for harm reduction expansion in Massachusetts

Ella Adams

While a substance use disorder bill sits unmoving in the Legislature, experts and advocates continue to band together to push for increased harm reduction efforts that could further decrease opioid overdose deaths with or without Beacon Hill’s help.

On Tuesday morning, the Massachusetts Health Policy Forum and RIZE Massachusetts hosted an event looking at the state’s harm reduction services, trends in opioid overdose death data, and a report suggesting new steps to decrease those mortality rates.

The report, completed by researchers from the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, lays out 10 recommendations for the state to minimize harm based on overdose death data gathered between 2022 and 2023. While Massachusetts saw overdose deaths fall by about 10 percent in that period, decreases weren’t uniform along racial, ethnic and geographic lines. Recent changes also continue to influence overdose deaths, including shifts in drug supply, the concentration and presence of fentanyl in drugs, and communities deploying harm reduction resources.

It’s not often that “you get a diverse group of people who are standing shoulder-to-shoulder on an issue,” Julie Burns, president and CEO of RIZE Massachusetts, told MASSterList. Tuesday’s event heard from an array of stakeholders including clinicians, lawmakers, business leaders and people with lived experience with substance use.

Recommendations span from improving access to safe use supplies and authorizing community drug checking to piloting overdose prevention centers and expanding access to medication for opioid use disorder — all on a statewide scale. The report also matches those specific policy recommendations with larger-scale rethinks, like adjusting legal and police response to overdose and reaching younger Bay Staters with harm reduction-focused educational curricula.

The countdown is on. Burns said the report’s recommendations provide “a clear path forward” — one that advocates will maintain regardless of whether lawmakers choose to act on substance use disorder legislation this session. Should they not, Burns said the field already has its work cut out for it.

“We need to keep educating lawmakers and other stakeholders,” Burns said. “The data is there: harm reduction saves lives.”