In 2018, a middle-aged man arrived on my patient panel. I will call him Jon. He was being treated in our clinic for hepatitis C but did not yet have his own family physician. When I met with Jon for our first visit, he told me the story of how he had contracted, years prior, while incarcerated, this chronic viral infection of the liver. Supplies for tattoos and drug use were contraband at the time, so he and other inmates had shared needles and syringes.

By the mid-1990s, studies were advancing our understanding of harm reduction. Based on growing scientific evidence, Canada began to implement programs that were known then as needle exchanges and have since evolved into low-barrier, wrap-around services.

Many today think of harm reduction as being about drug use only — supervised consump

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