Speed Limits - Harm Reduction for People Who Use Stimulants
Speed Limits - Harm Reduction for People Who Use Stimulants
Mainline (2020)Rafaela Rigoni , Joost Breeksema , Sara Woods
Speed Limits - Harm Reduction for People Who Use Stimulants
Harm reduction as a concept, being defined as “policies, programmes and practices that aim primarily to reduce the adverse health, social and economic consequences of the use of legal and illegal psychoactive drugs without necessarily reducing drugconsumption” (Harm Reduction International, 2018),has gained significantly in importance worldwide since the United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on the World Drug Problem in April 2016. However, the concept of harm reduction is still widely understood as a strategy addressing injection drug use and the harms and risks associated with this route of administration. Harm reduction services for people who use stimulants (PWUS) are less common despite the constant rise in the prevalence of stimulant use at a global scale. These worrisome developments require urgent responses by governments, civil society and international organizations - including in the field of harm reduction. In the light of the recent developments in global patterns of drug use, GPDPD has commissioned Mainline with a comparative study on existing evidence and case studies on harm reduction for stimulants, a still under-researched area of global drug policy for which there is a major international demand.
