Harm reduction has always been a relatively simple option. Relying on things like the supply of sterile injecting equipment, face to face delivery of life saving advice and other practical steps to try to help people stay safe and alive. We have of course along the way had innovations but these have generally been around focused on the equipment given to injectors. But because of technology becoming so easily accessible for people we are now starting to move into new areas of innovation.

Back in June I released the NSP Outcomes Tool This was an attempt to make a simple to use but flexable assesment/review tool that could be used in the relativly short time that most needle transactions happen in. Because of the need to make it so simple it unfortunatly didn't include anything around the use of steroids and other performace/image enhancing drugs (PIEDs).

So now I've designed a companion form to the NSP tool specifically for use with PIED users.

Today I have another guest article from Matt Gleeson, He's previously written for this blog about use of the word Junkie in journalism. This time he's talking about the types of 'architypes' the media use to describe drug users. Matt normally write a great blog called Stonetree Harm Reduction.

At heart I'm a harm reduction kind of person. I've spent the last decade working in needle programmes, running a website that provides injecting advice and presenting sessions at conferences promoting harm reduction. For me this work has always had as one of its goals the idea of helping people who want to stop using drugs achieve this. And for the people who don't want to stop, it's been about helping them stay safer and, if I can, 'nudging' them to the idea of stopping at some time in the future.

So the idea that harm reduction and recovery are somehow opposite ends of drugs work has been something I've always found confusing. To me recovery is harm reduction and harm reduction is something that sits perfectly in recovery – even the original ACMD document statement that kicked off needle programmes in the UK had as one of its stated goals 'increase abstinence'.