Tony Clement Rides Again

On Monday our federal health minister, the one with no medical training, the very same one that went on TV and claimed that he actually believes enforcement is a form of harm reduction, took it upon himself to lecture the annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association on what he contends is the ethical contradiction of supervised injection sites for drug user.

"I find the ethical considerations of supervised injections to be profoundly disturbing" Clement said, adding "the supervised injection site undercuts the ethic of medical practice and sets a debilitating example for all physicians and nurses, both present and future, in Canada, who might begin to question whether it's all right to allow someone to overdose under their care".

R-U SHIT'N Me Tony?

This guy has the audacity to walk into the annual meeting of the CMA, an organisation of doctors who are almost 80% in favour of supervised drug injection, and tell them straight-faced that by supporting this form of harm-reduction they are essentially hypocrites when it come to Primum non nocere. Remember, this is the same guy that slashed mental-healthcare during his gig as Ontario's Minister of Health and Long-Term Care, literally... LITERALLY putting thousands of mental-health patients on the streets during the Harris years.

It takes a special kind of Dogma to ignore the piles of evidence in favour of a Four-Pillar approach to Drug-Policy. Prevention, Treatment, Enforcement, Harm Reduction. Clement would have us believe that we only need the first three. Given the inadequate funding and long wait-lists for drug-treatment, his actions would lead us to believe he thinks we can make due with just two of these pillars; Prevention and Enforcement... 1971, picture Nixon blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.

Today I found out that for the second time in as many weeks, someone I've known had died from an overdose... not to mention the other few I didn't know who died in that same time due to overdoses and and injection-related infections. It's been a bad month for injection drug users and the people who know them. When I come home from work and read Tony Clement's latest attempt to play politics with people's lives, it gives me the overwhelming urge to turn my palm upwards and accelerate it towards my forehead.

The main arguments against the Harm Reduction approach to illicit drug-use seems to be that it is enabling... The reality is that someone with an addiction will find a way to obtain drugs get those drugs into their body regardless of the laws and risks. You can't incarcerate a drug-user clean, you can't go back in time and prevent a drug-user from becoming addicted in the first place, and Drug Treatment has a 0% success rate for people who have died of disease, infection, overdose or violence. Prevention, Enforcement and Treatment all have their place, but Harm Reduction aims to take care of the people the other approaches don't reach. Besides the proven ability of programs like Insite to reduce overdose deaths, Harm Reduction programs such as needle distribution and outreach serve to slow the spread of viruses such as HIV and Hep C amongst drug-users, reduce infections caused by dirty equipment and serve as a first point of contact with the health-care system for drug users. Other benefits that are harder to quantify include empowering drug-users to combat some of the stigmas they face in society that drive many of them underground where the risks of violence increase.

But Tony doesn't want to talk about all that...

Make no mistake, the conservative agenda cost lives. It seems like whenever a Conservative government is elected, It's the most vulnerable people in the community who pay the steepest price. We saw it here in Ontario under Mike Harris and Ernie Eaves, now were seeing the same across Canada under Harper-n-friends...

• CBC: Clement Questions MDs who Favour Safe Injection Sites
• Montreal Gazette: 'Disturbing'
• CBC: Tories Plan Get-tough National Drug Stratagy

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Mike.
"Debout les damnés de l'Université."
-=There is no Cabal, Long live the Cabal=-
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