HARM REDUCTION PRINCIPLES

Harm reduction is evidence based practical strategies and ideas aimed at reducing negative consequences associated with drug use. Harm Reduction is also a movement for social justice built on a belief in, and respect for, the rights of people who use drugs. Harm reduction incorporates a spectrum of strategies that includes safer use, managed use, abstinence, meeting people who use drugs “where they’re at,” and addressing conditions of use along with the use itself.

We consider the following principles central to harm reduction practice:

• Acceptance, for better or worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world.
• The choice to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
• Provision of choices for people who use substances for how they minimize harms.
• Refusal to glorify either abstinence or substance use.
• Non-judgmental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who use drugs, and to the communities in which they live, in order to assist them in reducing attendant harm.
• Committment that people who use drugs (PWUD), and those with a history of drug use, routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.
• Affirmation of people who use drugs as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use, and the empowerment of PWUD to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.
• Recognition 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.
• Refusal to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger that can be associated with illicit drug use.
• Understanding of drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviours from severe use to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.

Kindness Matters!