Bush Endorses Harm Reduction Group…Sort Of

President Bush did a photo-op today in which he delivered used coats at the headquarters of Pathways to Housing and praised the organization’s efforts to help the homeless. Of course, there’s nothing surprising about the President doing charitable appearances during the Christmas season. What’s interesting is that Pathways to Housing offers a quite unique and forward-thinking approach to the problem of homelessness:

Founded in 1992, Pathways to Housing, a not-for-profit organization, works with individuals who have been turned away from other programs because of active substance use/abuse, refusal to participate in psychiatric treatment, histories of violence or incarceration, or other behavioral problems.
…
Pathways to Housing separates housing from treatment. It treats homelessness by providing people with individual apartments, and then treats mental illness by intensive and individualized programs that seek out and actively work with clients as long as they need, in order to address their emotional, psychiatric, medical, and human needs, on a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week basis.

This is basically a harm reduction approach to homelessness, in that active drug users receive services (including an apartment) in order to stabilize their situation and connect them to opportunities for treatment and health care. It’s a fantastic program that is achieving remarkable success, which is exactly why I’m surprised to see the President associate himself with it.

Bush’s White House has vehemently pushed an abstinence-first approach to drug treatment, even going so far as to oppose overdose prevention kits on the theory that overdosing would teach users a lesson. Pathways to Housing’s approach to drug addiction is just the complete opposite of everything Bush’s drug policy has stood for. Thus today’s appearance illustrates once again the gaping disparity between what actually works and what his priorities have been for the last 8 years.