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

We consider the following principles central to harm reduction practice:
  • Accept, for better and for worse, that licit and illicit drug use is part of our world and choose to work to minimize its harmful effects rather than simply ignore or condemn them.
  • Understand drug use as a complex, multi-faceted phenomenon that encompasses a continuum of behaviors from severe abuse to total abstinence, and acknowledge that some ways of using drugs are clearly safer than others.
  • Establish quality of individual and community life and well-being–not necessarily cessation of all drug use–as the criteria for successful interventions and policies.
  • Call 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.
  • Ensure 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.
  • Affirm drugs users themselves as the primary agents of reducing the harms of their drug use, and seek to empower users to share information and support each other in strategies which meet their actual conditions of use.
  • Recognize 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.
  • Do not attempt to minimize or ignore the real and tragic harm and danger associated with licit and illicit drug use.