The Biden administration will prioritise “harm reduction” to address drug abuse while reviewing data to assess marijuana legalisation and safe injection sites, in a break from the longstanding US policy, the White House drug tsar has said.
Dr Rahul Gupta, the first medical doctor to hold the post of director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said in an interview that federal policy is shifting to address the US overdose crisis as a public health emergency rather than primarily a criminal justice problem.
More than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year, a rise of almost 50 per cent in two years, according to provisional data published last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Gupta said it was clear that decades of anti-drug campaigns had not worked.