Harm reduction refers to strategies that aim to reduce the harms associated with injecting drug use. The earliest forms of harm reduction promoted abstinence from drug use and put reducing its occurrence at the centre of substance use policy and interventions.
The concept of harm reduction was re-invented in the early 1980s at when healthcare workers started to provide clean syringes to people who inject drugs (PWID) rather than solely trying to achieve abstinence.
Since then, there has been slow but steady progress in support for harm reduction programmes as a component of the response to the HIV epidemic as well as other illicit drug use epidemics, with a wide range of initiatives implemented to date.
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