What is Harm Reduction?
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 specific individual and community needs, there is no universal definition of or formula for implementing harm reduction. However, HRC considers the following principles central to harm reduction practice.
Embracing Chaos and Ambivalence
For many, chaos (including substance use) is the norm… it is a primary means of survival. Giving up a mechanism of survival without a fight is maladaptive.. so ambivalence or "not caring" becomes a survival skill. Entering into any "helping" organization means risking an attack on survival skills, such as chaos and ambivalence. True outreach attempts to make a connection with an individual’s environment rather than expecting them to come to you just because you want to help. Rather than creating programs (and entire organizations!) that are structured in a way that is convenient for the people who work there, programs and organizations need to be convenient for the people who access services there.
Harm Reduction...
- Accepts, for better and for worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and chooses to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
- Understands drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledges that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.
- Establishes quality of individual and community life and well-being--not necessarily cessation of all drug use--as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
- 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 programs 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.
- Recognizes 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.
What if we shifted our focus and applied harm reduction principles to everyone we work with? We could...
- Accept, for better or worse, that chaos is a part of our world and choose to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
- Understand the chaos of human life as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon.
- Establish quality of individual and community life and well-being – not necessarily minimizing or eliminating chaos – as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
- Call for the non-judgemental, non-coercive provision of services and resources to people who access our services and the communities in which they live in order to assist them in reducing “reality-related” harm.
- Ensure that people who access our services routinely have a real voice in the creation of programs and policies designed to serve them.
- Affirm people who access our services as the primary agents of reducing the potential harms of the chaos of human life, and seek to empower people who access services to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of living.
- Recognize that the realities of poverty, class, racism, social isolation, past trauma, sex and gender-based discrimination and other social inequalities affect both people’s vulnerability to and capacity for effectively dealing with the chaos of human life.
