This approach focuses on health promotion and prevention of disease, injury, disability, inequality and premature mortality. It also incorporates individual and societal health protection measures through protecting and promoting physical environments and social policy frameworks that maximize individual and community benefits and minimize harms. A public health approach operates within a framework of guiding principles, broad goals and specific objectives and strategies. This approach recognizes that people use substances for anticipated beneficial effects and is attentive to the potential harms of the substances and the unintended effects of control policies. A public health approach seeks to ensure that harms associated with control interventions are not out of proportion to the benefit to harm ratios of the substances themselves.
