Philadelphia Principles -
Radical Harm Reduction and the World We Want
A community that dreams collectively works their way to freedom. This work is brutalized by white supremacy and capitalism which are dependent on exploitation. It is the function of white supremacy and capitalism to stifle the imagination and squash communal connection. By introducing scarcity in the very fabric of our lives, white supremacy and capitalism break bodies and make souls callous. When surviving becomes a battle, dreaming and connecting become untenable.
Dreaming is a practical tool, a revolutionary tool. For millennia, communities have globally engaged in drug use and erotic labor for spiritual, medicinal, and recreational purposes. Communities thrive on relationships. Sex work and drug use can foster connection and cohesiveness as well as meet a community’s unspoken needs.
One unspoken need is dreaming together.
We have named this document the Philadelphia Principles for two reasons. Philadelphia is where most of the authors of this statement currently live, build community, and imagine our politics. Philadelphia is also one of the many epicenters in the United States where the limitations of criminal justice and public health approaches to harm reduction delineate the horizon for radical forms of harm reduction. We dream of radical harm reduction that pushes past short-term fixes and gets to the root of the harms in our communities. Albeit, these harms stretch beyond Philadelphia onto a global scale. It is in orienting us towards that horizon in liberatory practice and solidarity that we propose these nine principles. This document is not the conclusion but a beginning that we hope leads to many possibilities.
The following principles are the result of people dreaming together and speaking a new world into existence. These principles are a homage to a core belief that, at the edge of existence, poor, disabled, and disenfranchised people—often using drugs, trading sex, and without shelter—are simultaneously the first responders and the last line of defense. We are the same people who have created networks of support and direct struggle in order to survive and flourish. For these reasons, radical harm reduction is part of how we turn to ourselves for our own liberation. As we resist systems that attempt to grind us to dust, we dream ourselves into the future.
What does radical harm reduction stand for?
1. Relationships are at the beginning of harm reduction and the first principle lost in its co-optation by the state. Building and defending community is the basis of meaningful safety when community emerges from the collective leadership of colonized, poor, and oppressed people of all ages, genders, and dis/abilities.
2. Wellness centers people’s humanity and not their productivity. Radical harm reduction aims to expand people’s sense of wholeness, connection with each other, joy, and fulfillment. Radical harm reduction does not discount someone’s leadership because they use drugs, sell sex, or otherwise fall off the productive and respectable gradient of white supremacy.
3. Nothing for us without us is the foundation of truly innovative and transformative care. Harm reduction must prioritize the voices and long-term needs of people with direct experience of oppression. Harm reduction reaches people where they are when it combines critical inquiry and a culturally complex understanding of people, their traditions, and the communities they are part of.
What does radical harm reduction fight to change?
4. Decriminalize poverty including the full decriminalization of the sex and drug trades. Criminalization is not what protects us but instead spreads the harm, scarcity, and anxiety that we experience in our lives. Decriminalization must be seen as a framework that dares us to imagine fully autonomous communities without cops, uniformed or otherwise.
5. Resist scarcity and how it distorts abundance into profit. To protect each other, organizing against scarcity must be militant and without compromise. Any funding or service structure that diminishes poor and colonized people's political capacity must be recognized as an extension of white supremacy and capitalism.
6. Fight profiteering that displaces and replaces poor and colonized people for profit. Land grabbing and gentrification are forms of colonization that impose a culture of scarcity and white supremacist notions of order while eradicating the cultures of poor and colonized people.
7. Power to the people, not to the saviors. People who experience social violence hold the potential knowledge and creativity needed to construct effective models of collective care. Radical harm reduction means having skin in the game. This is true for both the dispossessed and for those in solidarity. Without that, community care becomes charity or opportunism.
What does radical harm reduction envision for the world?
8. Reparations and the destruction of white supremacist social structures are, for radical harm reduction, key to wellness for Black communities. Laws designed to criminalize poverty in the United States are rooted in the history of antebellum slavery and anti-Black racism.
9. Land Back makes possible a globally consistent supply of safe air, water, food, shelter, medicine, and drugs. The crises of land grabbing, climate change, and dangers to the supplies of life's necessities, are rooted in the history of colonial theft. Reclaimed stewardship dreams of a symbiotic relationship with the planet.