"Harm reduction" is a good term if you're trying to get often-fickle public funding to help people who suffer from acute, negative impacts from taking drugs. People who suffer from overdose due to adulterated drugs or disease spread by dirty needles are definitely experiencing harm and need those harms to be reduced.

But Dr. Hart is right: drug use is a lot more complex than just harm reduction. One of the things that the professional drug people in our network sometimes talk about is the the positive counterpart to many "harm reduction" practices is that they maximize the benefits people get from using drugs.

A lot of social media platforms will kick you off if you say anything about benefit optimization being the result of many of the things we study and teach (a Facebook Ads expert recommended we use the word Safety in the name of our org for this reason), so in the name of not getting our accounts deleted, we've opted to be verrrrry careful about the language we use and made peace with this sub-optimal compromise.