Part one

Despite having been put on the ‘back burner’ in policy terms, harm reduction is still very much on practitioners’ minds. At the National Substance Misuse 2018 conference in September, this was brought into sharp focus as colleagues discussed how to reduce the disproportionate burden of substance use on vulnerable homeless populations and prevent drug-related deaths.

This two-part series on harm reduction begins with the ‘top 5’ hot topics in the Effectiveness Bank. Read these essays and think about where you stand on the issue. Does harm reduction align with your own philosophy on substance use? And if ‘yes’, should harm reduction be the primary goal, a second-best outcome when recovery is for the moment unattainable, or valid only as an engagement strategy and platform for recovery?

Part two

In part two we turn to some of the key studies validating or questioning harm reduction approaches. These are gathered together in row 1 of the Drug Treatment Matrix – our portal to the most important research on harm reduction and treatment, which you can find in the first entry below. Then we pick out some of those studies dealing with the major harm reduction modalities relied on in Britain and internationally.