Society

A Letter to Canada’s Minister of Disease?

Dear Rona Ambrose, As a member of the federal government, you are currently titled Canada’s Health Minister. I question the accuracy of that nomenclature. You have recently taken it upon yourself to void a decision by Health Canada, the public agency granted the task of supervising health practices in this country.

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A Celebrity Death, Addiction, and the Media

It is always big news when a celebrity is stricken dead by a substance overdose. What never makes the news is why such tragedies surrounding addiction happen. The roster of drug- and alcohol-related show-business deaths is ever expanding: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, Kurt Cobain; in the recent past, Heath Ledger, Michael

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The Naomi Project – It’s No Fix, But It’s The Best We Can Do For Addicts

The official U.S. response to the free heroin trial about to begin in Vancouver is predictably negative. A spokesman for John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, calls it “an inhumane medical experiment.” “I would bet any amount of money the U.S. has exerted extreme pressure on Canada to

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You Can’t Care For Your Spouse Unless You Look After Yourself

During my years in family practice, I often noticed that the death or illness of a person, especially among the elderly, was rapidly followed by the illness or even death of the spouse. Such “coincidences,” noted by many physicians, have now been documented by a large-scale medical study. The report, published in the New England

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The Trouble With Our DNA Rat Race

Researchers have deciphered the full DNA makeup of a single human being, a remarkable achievement which has, unfortunately, driven the crescendo of misplaced genomic enthusiasm to new heights. “This human’s life, decoded” was the front page headline in the Globe two days ago. Predictions of individualized gene-based therapies for a host of diseases are again

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Our Strange Indifference To Aboriginal Addiction

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

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Stop Treating Drug Users As Criminals

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

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To Help Or At Least Do No Harm

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

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