Harm reduction and alternative development in the Golden Triangle

The authors of this Digest are anthropologists from Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. At the invitation of the German aid agency GTZ, they have been monitoring opium use and the impact of drug rehabilitation in Muang Sing Laos over the past 3 years. Their role is to provide analyses of how development projects alter the social make-up of their target communities and contribute to ways in which substance use/abuse is understood, practiced and controlled or reconfigured. In their consideration of development projects they take the perspective that harm reduction can and should include pre-emptive concern with factors that promote damaging drug use in the first place and furthermore, that these factors are at times the products of the distinct drug reduction strategies themselves.