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Dr. Alex Wodak AM is a physician, now retired, who was from 1982 to 2012 the Director of the Alcohol and Drug Service at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney, Australia. Together with colleagues, he helped to establish Australia’s first needle syringe program (1986) and first medically supervised injecting facility (1999) when both were pre-legal. He also helped establish the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre (1987), the Australian Society of HIV Medicine and the NSW Users AIDS Association. Dr. Wodak is the President of the Australian Drug Law Reform Foundation.
The often-misunderstood term “harm reduction” means simply that the paramount policy or clinical objective is reducing the harms from psychoactive drug use. In the conventional drug policy that has prevailed globally for decades, the reduction or elimination of drug consumption was considered the principal policy aim, while the harms caused by drug use or drug policies were usually an afterthought.
