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Published in the Harm Reduction Journal (2024). By: M-J Stowe, Rita Gatonye, Ishwor Maharjan, Seyi Kehinde, Sidarth Arya, Jorge Herrera Valderrábano, Angela McBride, Florian Scheibein, Emmy Kageha Igonya & Danya Fast
🔗 Read the full paper on Harm Reduction Journal →

https://harmreductionjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12954-023-00914-7

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🔍 Context

In the Global South, young people who use drugs (YPWUD) are too often caught at the intersection of racist, classist, and prohibitionist policies. These laws don’t protect — they punish. They criminalize poverty, restrict access to healthcare, and reproduce cycles of violence that target the most vulnerable.

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While the global harm reduction movement has made progress, youth-focused programs remain scarce, especially in low- and middle-income countries. In these settings, public health infrastructures are underfunded, donor agendas are restrictive, and young people’s needs are systematically ignored.

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This commentary, co-authored by Agora’s Jorge Herrera Valderrábano and young leaders from across the Global South, challenges that reality. It gives voice to the people on the frontlines of harm reduction — those who are building safer, more humane responses from the ground up.

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✊ A Youth-Led Call for Change

Authored by young people who use drugs, activists, and researchers, this publication is both a reflection and a call to action. It documents how youth movements across Latin America, Africa, and Asia are creating alternatives through:

• Peer-to-peer information sharing and advocacy

• Overdose monitoring and response

• Drug checking and nightlife education

• Community-led harm reduction interventions

The authors argue that harm reduction must go beyond HIV prevention — encompassing safe consumption spaces, take-home naloxone, drug checking, and youth-led advocacy. These interventions, they emphasize, are acts of resistance in contexts where criminalization and stigma threaten their very existence.

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💡 Key Insights and Recommendations

From the paper’s analysis, several key lessons emerge:

• Youth-driven harm reduction works — when young people are empowered, supported, and funded to design their own responses.

• Structural barriers persist — including restrictive global funding models that silence progressive voices and discourage experimentation.

• The movement needs solidarity — across regions, generations, and sectors, to ensure the sustainability of youth-led initiatives.

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The paper concludes with a global call to action for donors, policymakers, and UN agencies to fund, legitimize, and protect youth harm reduction initiatives — especially in the Global South.

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At Agora, we stand alongside these movements. Through our projects like The Nest: A Harm Reduction Sanctuary and the SDG Synapses Incubator, we advocate for evidence-based, youth-led harm reduction that centers compassion, equity, and public health.

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We are proud to have contributed to this groundbreaking publication — one that documents what we already know through practice:

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“The war on drugs is not just a policy failure. It’s a war on our generation — and we are fighting back with care, science, and solidarity.”

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📢 Join the Movement

Support youth-led harm reduction across the Global South.
Sign our petition to demand the inclusion of young people who use drugs in policymaking spaces.

Donate to sustain our harm reduction education and advocacy efforts.
Together, we can end the war on drugs — and on us.

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