HARM REDUCTION: An In-Depth Guide

“Harm reduction programming and harm reduction research share two critical values: identifying what is pragmatically effective and respecting the human rights of persons who use drugs.”

Harm reduction in the USA: the research perspective and an archive to David Purchase
1) Defining Harm Reduction, What is Harm Reduction?

Behaviors that carry risk exist. Harm reduction works to reduce the social, physical, and legal harms of a behavior, like drug use. Additionally, harm reduction fights the harm caused by dangerous policies and laws governing a behavior. Harm reduction is cost-effective, evidence-based, and lifesaving.

Harm reduction programs support people without judgement, coercion, discrimination, or requiring that someone stops using drugs to get support. People who use drugs are agents of change and leaders of the movement. Harm reduction is grounded in justice and human rights.

A common misconception about harm reduction is that it is in opposition to abstinence. This is false. Harm reduction meets people where they are at and serves each person with specific tools to help them reach their own goals. If an individual’s goal is to abstain from drug use, harm reduction programs provide that person with services and supports for that goal.

It is important to differentiate between a person’s own goal of abstinence and abstinence as a requirement to access services, even services unrelated to substance use like housing or healthcare. Harm reduction recognizes abstinence is not the only positive path forward and mandating abstinence for everyone harms people who use drugs.

“[Harm reduction] accepts, for better or 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.”

Principles of Harm Reduction, National Harm Reduction Coalition

Decades of quantitative and qualitative research have proven that harm reduction is the evidence-based, most effective way to reduce overdoses, harmful drug use, and save lives. The following is a snapshot of some of the many peer-reviewed studies supporting harm reduction practices, broken into sections by practice.

Naloxone (brand name “Narcan”) is a life-saving medication used to reverse an opioid overdose. Overdose education and community-based naloxone distribution significantly reduce overdoses and overdose deaths [1][2]. Focusing demand-based distribution on people who use drugs leads to the best outcomes, averting an estimated mean of 25.3% of overdoses annually [3]. Due to increased naloxone access, from 2020 to 2022, layperson administration of naloxone to reverse an overdose increased by 43%, with laypersons administering naloxone on average 5 minutes before EMS arrival in 59% of overdoses [4].

Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT) is the use of medications like methadone and buprenorphine, in combination with counseling and other therapies, to help treat people who use drugs. MAT prevents withdrawals, cravings, and helps stabilize people who are trying to stop or change their use [5]. MAT significantly reduces the risk of overdose death [6], reduces opioid use, and crime [7].

Safer Use Supplies are sterile equipment like syringes, pipes, water, tourniquets, test strips [8], straws, and mouthpieces. When people need to share and reuse equipment, it puts people at risk of HIV or Hepatitis transmission, overdoses, injuries like cuts and burns [9], and respiratory sickness like tuberculosis [10]. The legality of these supplies varies by state and county. It is critically important supply distribution is accompanied by safer use guides for different equipment and substances.

Syringe Service Programs [11] are community-based programs providing free access to sterile injection supplies, syringe disposal, HIV testing, linkage to care or treatment, and other prevention services. Syringe Service Programs reduce HIV and Hepatitis C by 50% [12][13][14][15], and are participants are significantly more likely [16] to stop or change their drug use [17]. Syringe Service Programs do not increase crime [18] [19]and have been found in some studies to decrease crime [20].

Drug Checking, sometimes called “Drug Testing”, allows people who use drugs to make informed choices [21], identify trends, reduce harmful substance use [22], and prevent overdoses [23]. Different programs analyze drug samples at home, on outreach, or in a site-based lab with supplies like fentanyl test strips [24] or FTIR spectrometers [25] to identify the substance, additives, or impurities.

Safer Consumption Sites reduce the risks of drug use by offering sterile, medically supervised places for people to use their own drugs. At these sites, people who use drugs are monitored for overdoses, get first aid, access safer use supplies, and receive additional resources like case management, treatment connection, and help with housing and basic needs. Safer Consumption Sites save lives [26]–worldwide at Safer Consumption Sites there has never been a reported fatal overdose [27].

Safer Consumption Sites do not increase crime [28] or drug use [29] and reduce syringe litter [30]. They may also be called “Overdose Prevention Centers” or “Safe Recovery Sites”. Learn more here.

Safer Supply Services offer prescribed medications as a safer alternative [31] to drugs bought on the street to people who already use drugs. Programs like heroin buyer’s clubs and Drug User Liberation Front [32] have shown the effective and life-saving power of these programs. Safer supply services help prevent overdoses and reduce legal involvement in the lives of people who use drugs [33].

Legal Recognition and Safer Supply of Drugs

“Decades of punitive, ‘war on drugs’ strategies had failed to prevent an increasing range and quantity of substances from being produced and consumed.”

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, August 2023 [34]

Punitive measures and the harsh criminalization of drugs in the attempt to address substance use and overdose deaths have failed. While US overdose deaths decreased in 2024 for the first time since 2020 this year, 100,000 people still die of a drug overdose a year. From 2022-2023, despite opioid overdose deaths reducing by 3%, psychostimulant overdoses increased by 2% and cocaine overdoses increased by 5% [35].

Starting in the 1970s, the US Government’s policies of the “War on Drugs” worsened punishments for the use, sale, or possession of drugs through prohibition, increased policing, incarceration, militarization, and policy. Since 1971, an estimated $1 trillion dollars have been spent by the federal government on “War on Drugs” policies, and tens of millions have been arrested. Aggressive approaches to addressing drug use—such as imprisoning drug offenders—have no effect on rates of drug use [36][37].

Instead, harsh criminalization has driven rapid changes in the drug supply and dangerous, unpredictable spikes in potency. “The Iron Law of Prohibition” is a theory demonstrating that as illegality and law enforcement increase, so does drug potency [38]. For example, crackdowns on fentanyl have led to the rise in fentanyl analogs, xylazine, and medetomidine in the drug supply [39][40]. The rapid spread of these adulterants leads to overdose spikes, with public health professionals struggling to keep up [41].

Beller, S. (2018). Infographic: The “Iron Law of Prohibition.” Filter Magazine. Filter. Retrieved from https://filtermag.org/infographic-the-iron-law-of-prohibition/.

Additionally, intense curtailing of necessary opioid prescription has left many people suffering with life-altering pain [42]. Disabled people and people living with chronic pain have an increasingly difficult time accessing medically necessary drugs. Numerous efforts targeting the legal prescription of opioids persist, for example, the Drug Enforcement Administration mandated cutbacks in the pharmaceutical production of opioids, leading to a 53% decrease from 2016 to 2020 [43]. State prescription drug monitoring efforts have “were not associated with reductions in drug overdose mortality rates and may be related to increased mortality from illicit drugs and other, unspecified drugs. [44]” The narrative that the opioid crisis is an issue between doctors and patients is decades old, and no longer representative of our current crisis.


Harm reduction as a practice isn’t just for substance use—though substance use is often the focus.

Sex work

Sex work [45] is the exchange of sexual services or performance for compensation. Sex work is a broad label referring to things like stripping, escort services, “full-service” sex work, porn, and more. Sex work is widely criminalized, stigmatized, and vilified; sex work is also heavily conflated with human trafficking or non-consensual exploitation.

“The decision to earn income through sex work is made along a spectrum of options, regardless of a person’s age. Some people’s spectrums are more limited than others and youth, like others, confront numerous systemic factors or personal circumstances including poverty, homelessness, drug use and mental health…there is a difference between youth who exercise agency to earn income through sex work and the commercial sexual exploitation of youth.”

LANGUAGE MATTERS, Global Network of Sex Work Projects

Policies aimed at combatting sex trafficking often result in both sex workers and trafficking victims being harassed, arrested, and deported [46] [47]. Asymmetrical criminalization or “end demand” models are a major barrier for the safety of anyone engaging in sex work or a survivor of sex trafficking [48]. It’s been shown to increase physical and sexual violence against people engaging in sex work, primarily because it drives negotiations to be rushed and secretive. No country has ever shown an “end demand” model reduces adult trafficking.

The criminalization of sex work prevents people from reporting assault, receiving health services, and reduces autonomy [49]. Harm reduction for sex work should always be sex worker led, and center around justice and destigmatization [50].

Harm reduction for sex workers includes [51][52][53][54]:

• Safer sex materials [55] and education

• Work in community, with a buddy, or a safety pod

• Work indoors, when possible, as high visibility increases risk

• Wear shoes you can run in, and avoid loose clothes or jewelry

• If you are going to use drugs, use your own drugs

• Stick to your prices and your limits

“Bad date” lists are reporting options for sex workers to anonymously submit the description of a client who was violent, dangerous, or didn’t pay [56]. Due to heavy criminalization, sex workers can no longer post these online as a personal safety issue, which is why it’s important third parties provide them as a service for sex workers. It is also important for people to have access to “Know Your Rights” trainings.

Gambling

For people experiencing problematic gambling or gambling-related harms, harm reduction strategies can differ for land-based gambling and online gambling. Programs like GameSense in Massachusetts are casino-based harm reduction programs providing money and gambling literacy education, as well as installing tools that allow players to set personal limits and notifies them when they have reached their own set limit [57]. Voluntary self-exclusion lists allow people to add themselves to a “ban” list and be prevented from entering a casino for anywhere between 6 months and a lifetime [58].

Online gambling and sports betting are getting more and more popular and increase many of the potential harms of gambling. Mobile apps and social media sites are utilizing targeted ads and data tracking to increase advertising toward people who are experiencing gambling-related harms [59]. Online gambling also increases availability, provides cash incentives to encourage gambling, increases intensity, and often lacks age verification. Harm reduction strategies include individually set cash-limits with pop-ups and reminders of those limits, destigmatizing public health messaging, and making it easier for people to close accounts [60].

On a broader level, policies need to be in place to shift the blame of “problem gambling” from the consumer onto the companies and regulators [61].


Check out our Resource Directory: Youth-Centered Harm Reduction Resources – StreetWorks Outreach Collaborative | Minneapolis St. Paul

Book recommendations:

Book cover for "Shira Hassan. Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction, forewords by adrienne maree brown & tourmaline, afterword by Rosario Dawson"
Book cover for "Undoing Drugs: The Untold Story of Harm Reduction and the Future of Addiction, by Maia Szalavitz author of New York Times Bestseller 'Unbroken Brain'"
Interview with Dr. Nabarun Dasgupta, PhD, MPH (contains explicit language)

References


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[30] Ibid 20

[31] Canadian Drug Policy Coalition. (2023, June). Imagine safer supply: Envisioning an Ideal Safe Supply Program, from available substances to the staff and setting. https://drugpolicy.ca/imagine-safer-supply-envisioning-an-ideal-safe-supply-program/.

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[33] Ryan McNeil, Taylor Fleming, Samara Mayer, Allison Barker, Manal Mansoor, Alex Betsos, Tamar Austin, Sylvia Parusel, Andrew Ivsins, and Jade Boyd, 2022: Implementation of Safe Supply Alternatives During Intersecting COVID-19 and Overdose Health Emergencies in British Columbia, Canada, 2021 American Journal of Public Health 112, S151_S158, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306692

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[45] Carol Leigh, “Inventing Sex Work” in Whores and Other Feminists, New York: Routledge Press), 1997

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[57] Brown, K. (2023, November 8). Tackling problem gambling from inside the casino. Harvard Public Health Magazine. https://harvardpublichealth.org/policy-practice/using-harm-reduction-to-curb-problem-gambling/

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