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- Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer
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Marlene, a 46-year old native woman, sat in my office last week, slumped on her chair, blinking away her tears. I’d just shared the news that her most recent blood test confirmed she had “seroconverted” to HIV, become infected with the AIDS virus. Although an injection drug user, Marlene had always been careful to use […]
- Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer
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The U.S.-style law-and-order drug policies that the Conservative cabinet appears poised to embrace are doomed to fail in this country, as they have everywhere. What’s worse, they make impossible the rational and humane treatment of hard-core drug addiction. It is not feasible to rehabilitate large numbers of substance-dependent people in the context of the so-called […]
- Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer
- 1
Canada’s Health Minister urgently needs an education in harm reduction. Announcing his intention to shut down Insite, the supervised injection facility serving drug addicts in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Tony Clement told the House of Commons health committee that “supervised injection is not medicine; it does not heal the person addicted to drugs.” Mr. Clement got […]
- Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer
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A Statistics Canada study on job stress, reported last week in the journal Canadian Social Trends, ought to rivet the attention of Canadian economic and political leaders.Work-related stress takes a high toll on the emotional well-being of millions of employees, undermines the health of many and incurs a forbidding financial penalty. Stress-induced absences have been […]
- Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer
- 62
Autism is increasing at an alarming rate, according to Autism Society Canada, and may have doubled in the past decade. About 105,000 Canadians have an autistic or other developmental disorder, and 3,000 new cases were diagnosed in Canada in 2002. Statistics from school boards in Saskatchewan, British Columbia and Quebec show an average increase in […]
- Stephanie Hollington-Sawyer
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Now that the winds of acrimony blowing from Ottawa have abated, we can reflect upon the differing emotional displays of our political leaders. They have much to teach us about how dysfunctional anger may afflict our personal lives. We saw, on the one hand, the quietly poisonous anger of Stephen Harper. Even before Belinda Stronach’s […]