The Professional Counselor | Volume 14, Issue 1 57 can engage in an abolitionist praxis that is rooted in trauma-informed practice by screening and assessing for the prevalence and impact of police violence as a potentially traumatic stressor that relates to the use of substances (Green, 2022; Green & Evans, 2021). Given the importance of divesting from carceral systems and logic in abolitionist praxis, counselors need to engage in an ongoing and iterative process of reflection and change in attitudes and practices that reinforce the criminalization of substance use and practices that treat it as the moral failure of the individual. This can be achieved through screening and assessment for substance use and police violence that counteracts experiences of shame and guilt that may be fostered from interactions with police and the criminal legal system (Clark et al., 2014). Moreover, abolitionist praxis in counseling with clients who experience police violence due to anti-drug policing requires a strength- and healing-oriented approach as an act of radical resistance to the pathologizing and moralizing norm of carceral approaches (Cook et al., 2014; Moh & Sperandio, 2022). In practice, this may entail an intentional focus on a client’s progress in collaboratively defined goals and support in actualizing accountability for harm caused from substance use. Similarly, this would require a commitment to approaching clients who use substances with care and compassion, rather than criminalizing, shaming, or infantilizing the individual’s responses to trauma and violence they have endured prior to, during, or after their substance use. Lastly, abolitionist praxis in the context of substance use treatment may require counselors to provide opportunities for clients to have input regarding their needs in treatment by prioritizing individualized treatment over a standardized “one size fits all” approach to counseling. Thus, rather than prescribing a course of treatment or implementing treatment prescribed by a referring carceral system, abolitionist praxis would leverage collaboration to allow clients to have a voice in determining what they need to cope and heal from their use of substances and any traumatic experiences that precede and result from substance use. Cultural Competence and Advocacy Abolitionist praxis requires efforts to repair histories of structural violence (Cullors, 2019); thus, substance use counselors pursuing abolition must develop a critical understanding of the sociopolitical history of anti-drug policing toward those who use substances. This article provided a snapshot of this history as a starting point; however, counselors can delve further into learning about the intersection of anti-drug policing and race, gender, sexuality, disability, and socioeconomic status to develop more robust competence in addressing the scope of anti-drug policing. Counselors should critically reflect upon this historical knowledge to confront and actively dismantle any internalized biases they may have about substance use clients that are perpetuated by carceral systems. Counselors should specifically become aware of how the criminal legal system may perpetuate racial prejudice, particularly anti-Black racism, and how these attitudes affect the counselor’s conceptualization of their clients to avoid pathologizing or blaming the client for the structural violence they endure through anti-drug policing. To that end, counselors should actively incorporate practices that are not only trauma-informed, but also culturally responsive (SAMHSA, 2014). Abolitionist praxis aimed at repairing historical structural violence through anti-drug policing would broadly include efforts toward the decriminalization of substance use. In addition to decriminalization efforts, counselors engaged in an abolitionist praxis might advocate with legal professionals and lawmakers for the retroactive and automatic expungement of drug-related criminal record charges for substance use clients (Adinoff & Reiman, 2019). These efforts would ensure that those with histories of substance use disorder are able to experience transformation that such records and their associated stigma may hinder. Given that abolition calls for counselors to address and promote healing from issues that underlie substance use, counselors seeking to engage in abolitionist praxis should advocate for funds that are currently and formerly used toward
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU5MTM1