Nonmedical use of psychoactive drugs is inevitable in any society that has access to such drugs. Drug policies cannot be based on a utopian belief that nonmedical drug use will be eliminated. Nonmedical drug use will inevitably produce important social and individual harm. 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 them from it. Drug use leads to individual and social harms through many different mechanisms, so a wide range of interventions is needed to address these harms. It is not always necessary to reduce nonmedical drug use in order to reduce harms. The harm reduction perspective thus would be particularly amenable to using research findings. 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.