In many urban centres including Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, there is a high rate of HIV infection among users of illicit drugs. However, HIV-infected drug users often do not present to the medical system and complete the process necessary to start HAART. Given the known benefits of HAART, new strategies are required to increase rates of HAART initiation in this group. Contingency management (CM) is a strategy to affect behaviour by providing a reward (e.g. money) to reinforce the desired behaviour. CM has been used with success in other areas of medicine (e.g. smoking cessation, weight loss) and in the drug using population, but has not been established as a means to improve HAART uptake.