Drug policies cannot be based on a utopian belief that all drug users will always use drugs safely. Drug policies must be pragmatic. They must be assessed on their actual consequences not on whether they symbolically send the right, the wrong, or mixed messages. Drug users are an integral part of the larger community. Protecting the health of the community as a whole therefore requires protecting the health of drug users, and this requires integrating the drug users within the community rather than attempting to isolate then from it.
Drug use leads to individual and social harms through many different mechanisms.
It is not always necessary to reduce nonmedical drug use in order to reduce harms. Indeed, within this perspective, failure to monitor the outcomes of nonmedical drug use and failure to use research findings would violate the core value of a realistic pragmatism. Within the harm reduction perspective, individual rights are important and their loss is a harm to be avoided. At the same time, government and public health authorities have a definite responsibility for formulating policies to reduce the health and social harm associated with the nonmedical use of psychoactive drugs and civil and criminal laws and stigmatizing drug users as methods for reducing nonmedical drug use. The value of harm reduction policies should be assessed against their actual effects on drug-related harms rather than on their consistency with cultural traditions.