Harm Reduction as defined on the "About the Harm Reduction Training Institute" web page, is an approach that aims to reduce the negative consequences of drug use through utilizing a full spectrum of strategies from safer drug use to moderation management to abstinence. Oriented toward working with the whole person, harm reduction programs and policies create environments and develop strategies for change that are practical, humane and effective. These programs meet their consumers "where they are at" to help them become more conscious of the harm in their lives and identify options for reducing those harms (About the Harm).

Because harm reduction demands that interventions and policies are designed to serve drug users by reflecting on specific individual and community needs, there is no universal definition or formula for implementing harm reduction. 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. Working with addicts, from a harm reduction perspective, involves accepting that some people simply are not going to give

With American drug treatment and prevention policy rooted in criminal law enforcement and incarceration, most approaches to drug related problems help only a tiny fraction of the people who use illicit drugs. It is recognized that families and communities, especially communities of color, are frequently devastated, not only by addiction, but also by arrest and incarceration, the lack of available drug treatment, infectious disease, poor housing, unemployment, and so forth. Drug related problems continue to baffle communities across the country, leaving them frustrated and hopeless in their inability to respond to the harms they experience. The harm reduction movement grows from the need for a conscientious response to drug use that is less damaging to the fabric of our nation's communities. Harm reduction works to redress the following injustices, among others.

Following the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914, however, the meaning of the word "addicting" underwent a subtle change. The original meaning - a drug to which one becomes enslaved-was lost sight of. Many people assumed that any addict could stop taking an addicting drug if he wanted to and if he tried hard enough. The imprisonment of addicts was based on this confusion; addicts were expected to stop taking heroin for fear of imprisonment, or of repeated reimprisonment. (Brecher 327)

up drugs at this time. Offering them services nonetheless, opens the door to helping these people reduce harm in some way even in an infinitesimal way that wouldn't otherwise occur. Small reductions of harm are better than no reduction. An open door policy can result in a harm reduction snowball effect. Small improvement can pave the path for further reduction of drug use and an improved lifestyle in other ways. This snowball effect can continue, eventually to the point of abstinence.

It is satisfactory to know that this evil habit may be corrected, without great difficulty, if the patient is in earnest; and as the disorders induced by it are mainly functional, that a good degree of health may be restored.... The proper method of correcting the evil is by gradually reducing the cause; a diminution of the dose being made every day, so small as to be quite imperceptible in its effects. Supposing, for example, that a fluid ounce of laudanum [opium in alcohol] is taken daily, the abstraction of a minim [one drop] every day would lead to a cure in somewhat more than a year; and the process might be much more rapid than this.

Drug users are a medically underserved population. Injection drug use is fraught with risk, but many users do not ever see physicians, and those that do keep their drug use a secret. Users often do not have the opportunity or the help they need to get into drug treatment.

Through my reading of articles and such it seems to me that Physicians pretty much have concluded that drugs such as alcohol and heroin produce a phenomenon known as physical dependence. An addicting drug came to mean a drug that produces physical dependence. That is, withdrawal symptoms appear when the drug is abruptly discontinued. Drugs that produce w

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Approximate Word count = 2105
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)