THE END OF LIFE DEBATE

SNITTY HALL

Straight Lines?

I read a great line this morning over breakfast:

"It is a puzzling fact that the shortest line between two points is often a dead end."

What could better explain the death wish known as Harm Reduction or the manifestations therein known as Insite, free needles, free crack pipes, free heroin, methadone and alcohol?

In their rush to adopt the addicts way of non-thinking - we call it looking for the Silver Bullet - the good doctors have created a new kind of black hole, right here in our midst.

Not satisfied with the harm done here in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, the good doctors now want the Great Misfire to spread to other Canadian cities.

We are pleased to report that Ottawa and Toronto are resisting this pestilence with strength and good common sense and a clear sense of humanity.

The mantra used consistently by reductionists that their madness is based on evidence and everyone else is some mad, ill-informed ideologue is called public relations and spin.

Those of us who actually know the names and addresses of thousands of clean and sober people in long term recovery base our position on working and living in the front lines.

Have a nifty day.

INTEREST-FREE LOAN?

Re-Open Riverview? Huh?

Is ONE CARD really a Cynical Money Grab?

WHERE HAS ALL THE MONEY GONE?

RECOVERY DAY RECOVERED

A beautiful record of yesterday's wonderful gathering is offered here by Dr. Bill Hay. The piece includes words and many delightful pictures and a video.

Oh My Goodness! Can such loveliness really exist?

bought the LP of this about 50 years ago, have only listened to it about 500,000 billion times...yah, I knda like it

85, AND STILL ROCKING!

DIGGING EXCITEMENT

I just don't get this headline.

BIG BERTHA BEGINS BORING TUNNEL BENEATH SEATTLE

Should there be something compelling or arousing or stimulating about watching a big hole in the ground...get bigger?

OK. Maybe 7 minutes, 12 tops and then it's on to buy those new shoes.

Even the workers are smoking cigarettes and staring blankly like they can barely remember the summer they went swimming with their friends at the lake and that strange thing happened...

I say when newspapers are so desperate for headlines that they make childish fun of legitimate construction projects...well, it's just not the world I grew up in, you know what I'm saying?

O beautiful for spacious skies

Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg are starring in a new movie called “2 Guns.”

All of the advertising for the film shows our two heroes, back to back, firing their ready pistols while dollar bills rain down upon them.

This is no doubt a crucial plot line, but does it also tell us a lot about the actors and the makers of the film?

Washington and Wahlberg are both genuine movies stars, bankable and beloved by their fans. Washington also happens to be a gifted and serious actor who studied for years at ACT in San Francisco. Wahlberg was a rocker, until Penny Marshal of Laverne and Shirley fame spotted him and told him he ought to be in the movies. That’s where he’s been ever since.

My concern is this. 

In the current climate of gun debate in the United States, only weeks after the end of the Zimmerman-Martin trial and in the same decade as several mad mass public murders, how can anyone of conscience peddle this drek, take money for it and call it entertainment. The title says it all. Guns are good. Guns are fun. Guns are the right solution to problems. Did the NRA sponsor this idiocy?

Whatever I may have thought of Washington (considerable) and Wahlberg (not much, lucky dope) before this celluloid poop, I now think a lot less.

Acting – even for big movie stars, often especially for big movie stars – is a precarious business at best. You may live at the top of Mulhullond Drive and you will still wonder where your next pay cheque is coming from.

Nevertheless... do these folks live entirely in a bubble? Do they not read the papers or watch the six o’clock news?

Can they be citizens or men of conscience?

Apparently not.

PUBLIC RELATIONS "SCIENCE" EXPOSED

Friday, July 19, 2013

Little evidence harm reduction reduces harm - VANCOUVER SUN OP-ED

 By David Berner,

Vancouver Sun

July 19, 2013 5:04 AM

 A report by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS on harm reduction programs and Insite released last month is not science; it's public relations.

 Authors Drs. Julio Montaner, Thomas Kerr and Evan Wood have produced nearly two dozen papers on the use of Insite. They boast of good results in connecting addicts to treatment but convincing evidence is lacking.

 The current campaign reports significant reductions in drug overdoses, yet the Government of British Columbia Selected Vital Statistics and Health Status Indicators show that the number of deaths from drug overdose in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has increased each year (with one exception) since the site opened in 2003. In addition, the federal government's Advisory Committee on Drug Injection Sites report only five per cent of drug addicts use the injection site, three per cent were referred for treatment and there was no indication the crime rate has decreased, as well as no indication of a decrease in AIDS and hepatitis C since the injection site was opened.

 Claims of success for Insite made in The Lancet, the British medical journal, in 2011 were challenged in a 15-page, heavily-documented response penned by addictions specialists from Australia, the U.S. and Canada, and by a former VPD officer who worked the DTES for years.

 In A Critical Evaluation of the Effects of Safe Injection Facilities for The Institute on Global Drug Policy, Dr. Garth Davies, SFU associate professor wrote: "The methodological and analytic approaches used in these studies are compromised by an array of deficiencies, including a lack of baseline data, insufficient conceptual and operational clarity, inadequate evaluation criteria, absent statistical controls, dearth of longitudinal designs, and inattention to intrasite variation. None of the impacts attributed to SIFs can be unambiguously verified."

The doctors evaluating Insite are the same people who created Insite and who have been awarded more than $18 million of taxpayers' money for their initiatives in recent years. Dr. Colin Mangham, on our Board of Directors, has been a researcher in this field since 1979.

"The proposal for Insite was written by the same people who are evaluating it - a clear conflict of interest. Any serious evaluation must be independent. All external critiques or reviews of the Insite evaluations, there are four of them - found profound overstatements and evidence of interpretation bias. All of the evidence - on public disorder, overdose deaths, entry into treatment, containment of serum borne viruses, and so on - is weak or non-existent and certainly does not support the claims of success. There is every appearance of the setting of an agenda before Insite ever started, then a pursuit of that agenda, bending or overstating results wherever necessary."

 Our President, Chuck Doucette, asks to see an independent and unbiased cost/benefit analysis.

 "The four pillar approach only works when each pillar is properly funded. Prevention reduces the flow of people into addiction. Treatment reduces the number of addicts including those living in the DTES. Policing keeps a lid on the open drug dealing and the affects of the associated problems on the community. Only after these three pillars are properly funded can we afford to spend money on Harm Reduction initiatives that do not encourage abstinence. Putting HR first is like running up debt on your credit card and never paying more than your minimum payments."

 No one would object to free needles, crack pipe kits, methadone, heroin and places to shoot up if only they were the side show and not the main event, if only they ever led to real health.

Harm reduction and Insite are palliative.

They both spring from a deeply cynical and arrogant world view: You are an addict and you are hopeless. We will keep you "comfortable" while you continue to die.

 This is a curious position considering the millions of men and women who admit they are addicts and choose every day not to pick up their poison. I know many such clean and sober citizens.

 We owe one another a chance at dignity. To offer less is not only costly, it is monstrous.

Super-cala-fraga-listic-expi-ala-docious

BEARS or OIL?

BIG PHARMA + PSYCHIATRY = MORE MENTAL "ILLNESS" IN NORTH AMERICA

THE NEW SHOPPING!

How Beautiful is this? Benjamin Schmid - Korngold Violin Concerto in D

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