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Harm Reduction

• Meets drug and alcohol users "where they are at" to help them reduce any harm associated with their substance use.
• Accepts for better or worse that legal and illegal drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimise it's harmful effects, rather than ignoring them or condemning them.
• Understands substance use as a complex phenomenon that includes a range of behaviours from severe abuse to total abstinence.
• Recognises that some ways of using are clearly safer than others.
• Establishes quality of individual and community life and well being (not the stopping of drug use) as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
• Recognises that the realities of poverty, racism, social isolation, past trauma, education, sex based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people's vulnerability to and capacity for dealing with drug related harm.
• Does not attempt to ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with legal and illegal drug use.
• Tries not to bring morality into work.
• Aims to give people more choices.

Ref: Russell Newcombe. Adapted by Rowan Miller 2005

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