Harm Reduction News: The Harm Reduction Community

In this issue of Harm Reduction News, we focus on the variety of ways in which people in Europe and Central Asia have adopted the harm reduction movement as their own. Most started out opposed to it. Others just didn’t know anything about it. And some are still deciding. You will read articles by a Moldovan prison doctor who miraculously made a success of this strange, new practice; a Polish doctor transformed by experience from advocating abstinence to advocating for drug user health care; and a mother who was drawn into harm reduction by the desire to help her HIV infected drug using daughter. Two Russian politicians show the spectrum of merely accepting to fully advocating harm reduction.Youths in Central Asia describe why kids start using drugs in the first place and Dr. Robert Newman talks about his long career fighting for greater availability of methadone substitution therapy. One article details how drug users in Geneva can now go to a safe injection room – a model of sensible HIV prevention – while another talks about how drug user selfhelp groups and harm reduction projects can work together. Finally, we have a report from Slovenia, where over 800 people from the movement converged for the annual International Harm Reduction Conference, held for the first time in Eastern Europe. Each of these stories describes from individual experience the inclusive path that harm reduction has taken for the last 20 years. The dedication and hard-won victories of our authors are proof that we can both succeed and remain true to our most important principles.

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