Harm reduction is a set of practical strategies that reduce negative consequences of drug use, incorporating a spectrum of strategies from safer use, to managed use to abstinence. Harm reduction strategies meet drug users "where they're at", addressing conditions of use along with the use itself.

Because Harm Reduction demands that interventions and policies designed to serve drug users reflect specifc individual and community needs, there is no universal definition of, or formula for implementing harm reduction.


Information featured on this page may be sourced, in part, from the Harm Reduction Coalition website, which you can visit via the link featured in our links page.

Harm Reduction principles are outlined below: -

• Accepts that, for better and for worse, licit and illicit drug use is a part of our world, and chooses to minimise its harmful effects rather than to ignore or condemn them.
  
• Understands that drug use is a complex and multi-faceted phenomenon that encompases a continuum of behaviours, ranging from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways if using drugs are clearly safer than others.
  
• Calls for the non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm.
  
• Ensures that drug users and those with a history of drug use routinely have a real voice in the creation of programmess and policies designed to serve them.
  
• Affirms drugs users themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use, and seeks to empower users to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.
  
• Recognises that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people's vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with drug-related harm.
  
• Does not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with licit and illicit drug use.