Harm Reduction

Harm reduction coveres many areas from drug use, condom use, discrimination, to nutrition and beyond, by educating ourselves and others we may lead full lives.

If your using - know your drugs, how to use them, how to clean your equipment and more. There are hundreds or resourses... Here are a few of our favorites.

DanceSafe- North America	Geared towards 'rave' dance club participants. Information fact sheets to download. There poster was recently shown at a museum. Fun to check out. They also offer adulterant testing kits you can use at home to test your drugs.
TRIP - Toronto Raver Information Project
RaveSafe - International	RaveSafe believes that each individual has the right to accurate and honest information about drugs and their effects, so that we can make informed decisions about our lives and health. Being ravers ourselves, we realise that it is important to know what the substances available are, how they affect our bodies and state of mind.
Needle Exchange Torotno	These programs try to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases by providing clean needles for injection drug users and by promoting safer drug use practices.
Links on our site	Please add your own local organizations which provide non-judgemental services.

Sex-work harm reduction

* Rekart ML.

British Columbia Centre for Disease Control, University of British Columbia, Vancouver V5Z 4R4, BC, Canada. michael.rekart@bccdc.ca

Sex work is an extremely dangerous profession. The use of harm-reduction principles can help to safeguard sex workers' lives in the same way that drug users have benefited from drug-use harm reduction. Sex workers are exposed to serious harms: drug use, disease, violence, discrimination, debt, criminalisation, and exploitation (child prostitution, trafficking for sex work, and exploitation of migrants). Successful and promising harm-reduction strategies are available: education, empowerment, prevention, care, occupational health and safety, decriminalisation of sex workers, and human-rights-based approaches. Successful interventions include peer education, training in condom-negotiating skills, safety tips for street-based sex workers, male and female condoms, the prevention-care synergy, occupational health and safety guidelines for brothels, self-help organisations, and community-based child protection networks. Straightforward and achievable steps are available to improve the day-to-day lives of sex workers while they continue to work. Conceptualising and debating sex-work harm reduction as a new paradigm can hasten this process.

PMID: 16360791 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Other interesting articles may be found by typing Sex Work Harm Reduction in a search engine. I found some here.