Ben Biamont

I started getting into harm reduction around the age of 16. When I first began my college career, like a lot of people, I had no clue what I wanted to pursue. Then somehow, I figured out you could take a plethora of multifaceted classes about drugs and drug users’ health. While working though school I continued to promote harm reduction around drug use with friends and acquaintances. Toward the end of my academic career, I was presented the opportunity to volunteer with Outside In’s intravenous drug users’ health program (a local non-profit in Portland, Oregon). This would soon turn into an internship and shortly after that, my first post college job. I would spend about 2 years at Outside In as staff, where I would continue to learn at an exponential rate (more than what any college classroom could teach me) and it’s here that my passion for drugs and individuals who use them would deeply intensify. Towards the beginning of 2020 a role in the local county health department’s harm reduction program would open and I was encouraged to apply. I worked in that program for nearly 3 years before getting the opportunity to fill this role with ADAI. It was incredibly hard to leave my role in the county, having to say goodbye to participants I spent nearly every day with for the past 3 years was not something I thought I’d do for a very long time. However, this job and working within a drug checking program is something I had dreamt of since I was that young harm reductionist at the age of 16, and while honestly, I never thought I’d get the opportunity to do something like this when I saw the job posting it seemed just silly not to try.