The medicine of the twenty-first century has been changing at an unprecedented scale and opening to new perspectives. One of them is the development of the harm reduction strategy, which is a set of public health policies aiming at reducing the negative social consequences associated with risky or dangerous activities and behaviour. The idea of harm reduction, understood as the minimisation of the negative influence of a harmful agent on an individual by replacing it with another agent with a lower health risk originated from the positively rated and effective way of controlling opioid addiction dating back to the sixties of the twentieth century. Since the nineties, harm reduction has been considered to be one of the most important directions in the contemporary addiction therapy. Currently, it covers all aspects of everyday life which are of key importance from the public health point of view, and, consequently, that of the whole family and an individual.