Collegiate recovery programs were built for one specific group: students who identify as being in recovery and want support maintaining changes they’ve already made to their relationship with substances. For most of their history, that meant abstinence, often through frameworks like 12-step programs. That definition is now being tested.

Ahmed Hosni, Assistant Director of the Student Wellness Center at Ohio State University and Director of Recovery at the Higher Education Center for Alcohol and Drug Misuse Prevention and Recovery, argues the field is shifting to include students on a path toward healthier substance use without full abstinence. He frames this as part of a broader pattern, since campuses often move ahead of wider social change, leaving staff to work out who these programs are actually meant to serve.

Shared Identity Is the Whole Mechanism

Hosni’s central point is about mechanism, not ideology. Collegiate recovery programs function as affinity groups, communities built around a shared identity that meet regularly for support and connection. Their effectiveness rests on that shared identity. Students benefit because they recognise themselves in the other people in the room.

That raises a practical question before any policy one: do students following different pathways, abstinence-based and harm reduction-based, actually see themselves as sharing the same recovery identity? Hosni argues this has to be answered first, because folding both groups into one program without checking whether they experience a common identity risks helping neither.

Referral, Not Redesign

Rather than restructuring existing collegiate recovery programs to serve everyone under one roof, Hosni suggests a different model: treat programs serving harm reduction pathways as a separate, parallel resource, alongside the abstinence-focused CRP, not folded inside it. He notes that harm reduction services have existed on college campuses for decades already, quietly, outside the collegiate recovery program structure. His argument is that campuses should link these as a continuum, so a student without a settled recovery identity yet can explore their own substance use, get support wherever that exploration leads, and end up in the CRP later if abstinence turns out to be what they need.

He compares this to how staff already refer students facing challenges outside their scope to other trusted campus resources. Extending that same logic to recovery identity, he argues, may serve students better than trying to build one program flexible enough for everyone.

Programs Already Mixing Pathways

Hosni acknowledges some collegiate recovery programs have already moved to serve students across both abstinence and harm reduction pathways under one structure. Where that’s happening, he says the design has to stay intentional and individualised rather than defaulting to a one-size approach, and he calls for more research comparing recovery identity and support needs across these different pathways as the field keeps evolving.

Source: Campus Drug Prevention