With much of the modern day drug treatment and prevention policies deeply rooted in criminal law enforcement and incarceration, most approaches to drug-related problems assist only a tiny proportion of the people who use illicit drugs. Families and communities are frequently devastated not only by addiction, but also by arrest and incarceration.

Drug related problems continue to perplex and frustrate communities across the UK, leaving them feeling hopeless in their inability to respond to the harms that they experience.

The Harm Reduction movement grows from the need for a conscientious response to drug use that is less damaging to the fabric of our diverse communities.


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: -

• While personal difficulty in maintaining housing, family, employment and health may be worsened by chronic drug abuse, the problems are equally worsened by policies that create obstacles to housing, family, employment and health care for drug users.
  
• Most therapeutic services for drug users, including drug treatment, are designed to serve the priorities of providers instead of the needs of consumers. Drug education and prevention campaigns are largely ineffective, attempting to scare people away from using drugs instead of equipping them with accurate information about drugs and drug use, including their adverse and harmful effects.
  
• A struggle exists between law enforcement and medical providers to define drug users as either criminals or medical patients, with communities and families left out of the debate and unable to define users as community and family members. Effective community planning for drug-treatment and post-incarceration support for drug users have no priority in the allocation of drug intervention funding.
  
• The HIV epidemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and continues to rage on. Swift public policy changes and the implementation of critical services could have prevented and untold numberof deaths and HIV infections among injecting drug users, their sexual partners, and children.