Recovery Is Not a Methodological Error

Why drug policy keeps managing decline instead of expecting change.

This essay forms part of an ongoing public exchange with Professor Alex Stevens following his recent paper on the fracturing of consensus at the 2024 UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs. My initial response to that paper, which argues that recovery occupies a neglected moral space beyond the harm-reduction versus prohibition binary, can be read here. Professor Stevens’ subsequent reply, defending the policy constellations framework and situating recovery within liberal harm-reduction traditions, can be read here.

What follows is not a recap of those exchanges, but a clarification of where the real disagreement lies, and why it matters beyond this conversation.

---

Alex, thank you for the seriousness of your reply. I recognise the deliberate change in temperature, from our earlier exchanges to something more collegiate, and I am content to meet you there. I am also aware that our previous discussions have sometimes been read as “fractious”, but that is usually what happens when lived consequences collide with systems that prefer to discuss values in the abstract. I am less interested in winning an argument than in refusing to let the deepest disagreements be softened into technical ones.

Because that softening is exactly what is happening here, and it is worth naming it plainly.

What you have done, very skilfully, is attempt a domestication. You have reframed my critique as an internal disagreement within liberal politics and then narrowed the terrain so that the live question becomes whether a “third tribe” appears as a distinct cluster in your sociogram. Once the argument is recast as a matter of analytical parsimony or methodological plausibility, the more unsettling claim I was making about moral blind spots, institutional incentives and ideological capture can be safely set aside. I am not imputing bad faith here. I am describing a familiar pattern in how contested policy fields stabilise themselves: by translating moral challenges into methodological ones until the challenge no longer threatens the settlement.

There are three moves in your reply that do this work, and they matter far beyond our exchange.

The first is your embrace of reflexivity without allowing it to bite. You acknowledge that constellations depend on vantage point, that cartographers draw maps, that different observers would see different skies. But this acknowledgement is immediately neutralised by the claim that the data led you there anyway, that alternative configurations were tried and did not “make sense”. Reflexivity becomes a philosophical courtesy rather than a destabilising insight. Yet your own paper documents how many discretionary choices shape the outcome: what counts as a policy position, which positions are excluded as too common, which countries are dropped, how modularity is tuned, which results are deemed interpretable. None of this is illegitimate. But it does mean the map can only ever show what the instrument is capable of detecting. To acknowledge that and then proceed as if the map still simply reveals the moral universe as it is, rather than as filtered through those choices, is to blunt the force of reflexivity while retaining its language. Even if I accept your constellations exactly as drawn, the question I am raising remains untouched: why recovery, while universally endorsed in language, is consistently avoided as an organising principle in practice.

The second move is the collapse of recovery back into harm reduction by redefining harm reduction in its most morally ambitious form. You suggest that my description of recovery as dignity, responsibility, solidarity, communal bonds and transformation is also your understanding of what harm reduction can be. Philosophically, that may well be true for you, and I do not doubt your sincerity. But this shifts the debate away from what I am actually critiquing. I am not arguing that harm reduction cannot support recovery, and I never have. The repeated attempt to cast my position as “anti harm reduction” serves only to resurrect a false binary in which recovery and harm reduction are treated as opposing moral projects, rather than as practices whose value depends on how they are structured, funded and governed. I am arguing that the dominant institutional form it has taken in many jurisdictions does not require recovery to succeed, and therefore does not build systems that seriously expect it. Systems are judged not by their best intentions but by what they produce at scale. It is perfectly possible to speak the language of agency while constructing services that are organised around survival alone. This is how systems can endlessly fund overdose prevention while leaving residential rehabilitation with long waiting lists, unstable funding and fractured aftercare, and still describe themselves as “balanced”. In recovery terms, this is the difference between the leaflet and the meeting.

Results may vary by instrument

The third move is to reframe the “third moral space” I identified as merely an internal ambivalence within liberalism, a tension between thin libertarianism and thicker, more communitarian traditions. There is truth in that framing, but it also functions to keep recovery safely inside your liberal constellation rather than allowing it to stand as a critique of both dominant camps. The recovery worldview I am describing is not simply liberalism done better. It is a moral grammar with its own centre of gravity, one that insists that people are not finished products, that responsibility is possible, that community is constitutive rather than optional, and that the common good includes moral formation, not merely risk management. You can label that liberal, communitarian, Christian personalist, civic republican, or simply human. The label matters less than the fact that it does not sit comfortably on the autonomy versus obedience axis that structures your explanation of the fracture.

This brings me to the point where I think we are talking past each other.

I am not claiming that recovery is absent as a word. I am claiming it is absent as a governing logic.

You are right to note that recovery appears prominently in your sociogram and is claimed by countries across both constellations. That is precisely the problem. When a concept is universally praised yet structurally unfunded, operationally sidelined and politically instrumentalised, it becomes liturgical. Everyone recites it. Almost no one is accountable to it.

The meaningful question is not whether recovery appears in diplomatic statements. It is what happens when recovery makes demands. Do systems fund long-term, abstinence-oriented pathways with the same seriousness that they fund immediate risk containment? Do they build coherent routes from detox to residential rehabilitation to supported housing, employment and community belonging, or do they construct revolving doors where people are kept alive but left orbiting the same harms indefinitely? Do they measure change in lives, or activity in services? Do they protect mutual aid and recovery communities as civic assets, or treat them as optional extras to be praised rhetorically while real decisions are made elsewhere?

On those measures, recovery is consistently honoured in language and starved in practice. That is why I described it as a missing continent. Not because it never appears on the map, but because the map is drawn at a scale that cannot distinguish aspiration from institutional reality.

I accept that this was not the question your paper set out to answer. My concern is that, in practice, these are precisely the kinds of maps that come to stand in for the territory, and in doing so quietly determine which questions are no longer asked.

You say you would rather build solidarity between those who prioritise recovery and those who focus on harm reduction, while reducing the power of punitive actors. I share your desire to reduce punishment and abuse. But solidarity requires truth, not just goodwill. The obstacle to solidarity is not that recovery advocates are hostile to harm reduction. It is that the prevailing institutional settlement has learned to treat survival as success and transformation as a private, optional matter. That is not a failure of compassion. It is a failure of expectation.

So let me be clear about what I am, and am not, arguing. I am not trying to split the universe into three tribes for analytical novelty. I am trying to stop recovery being used as a rhetorical garnish on systems that no longer seriously expect change. This is not a call to return to a punitive past, but a refusal to accept a managed-decline future dressed up as compassion. Recovery is neither permissive nor punitive. It is the stubborn belief that people can change, and that a decent society builds ladders, not just nets and not just cages.

If your framework wants to test whether this moral space is real, there is a way to do it that goes beyond counting words in speeches. Follow the money. Follow the pathways. Follow what is scaled and what is marginal. Follow what is professionally rewarded and what is treated as reputational risk. That is where the moral universe actually reveals itself.

I appreciate the seriousness with which you have engaged. But I am not willing to allow this disagreement to be tidied away as a technical question about clustering. It is a disagreement about what kind of human being our systems assume exists, and whether they are built to call people upwards or merely to keep them from dying. If we continue to reduce that to maps and methods, we will keep managing decline very politely. I am not interested in managing decline. I am interested in recovery, because sooner or later every serious society must decide whether it still believes people can change, or whether it has quietly decided they cannot.

Perhaps it is no accident that this question lands on Christmas Eve, a night that quietly defies managerial thinking by insisting that real change does not come through systems at all, but through people, patience, and time.

Merry Christmas, and peace to all who are doing the slow, unseen work of helping people change…