Health professionals who support Vancouver's safe injection site are unethical and immoral, federal Health Minister Tony Clement suggested on Monday.
"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," he scolded in an address to the Canadian Medical Association general council meeting in Montreal.
-Globe and Mail
The knighthood ceremony began Friday morning with speeches and a fanfare before Nils arrived, under escort with the King's Guard Colour Detachment. Nils then reviewed the troops lined up outside the penguin enclosure at the zoo, waddling down the row of uniformed soldiers, occasionally stopping to crane his neck and peer inquisitively at their crisp uniforms before being guided forward by his handler. Nils was then knighted by British Major-General Euan Loudon on behalf of Norway's King Harald V. Gen.
I am the most annoying person to watch the Olympics with. I'm a condescending former elite athlete who loathes the armchair fan. I love sports. I love athletes. I hate fans. I'm especially annoyed by those who believe their dalliances in amateur childhood athletics give them insight into the travails and accomplishments of Olympic athletes.This is the preamble to a Salon piece by Jennifer Sey, who believes her dalliances in amateur childhood athletics give her insight into the travails and accomplishments of Olympic athletes.
You loved Nadia and begged your mom to sign you up for gymnastics classes. You went two days a week until you were in junior high. But then your body developed and boys noticed and hanging out at the mall or trying out for the cheerleading squad seemed a lot more appealing than spending the afternoon in a chalky, musty gym scared out of your wits to do what the coach was demanding.
I was practicing 12 hours a week by the time I was 7, traveling up and down the New Jersey Turnpike each weekend for competitions. I moved away from home when I was 14, trained 40 hours a week while attending high school, endured untold abuses by overenthusiastic coaches who weighed me twice a day to make sure I didn't inadvertently get fat during my seven-hour practice.
And yet, though she won the U.S. Nationals in '86, Sey's greatest accomplishment on the international stage seems to be this:
“Allowing and/or encouraging people to inject heroin into their veins is not harm reduction, it is the opposite. … We believe it is a form of harm addition,” Tony Clement said Tuesday in Mexico City, where he is attending the XVII International AIDS Conference.Yeah, Tony, because all the people using InSite now would be clean and sober otherwise. Look, choadwad, people are going to inject heroin into their veins without any encouragement from anyone, whether you like it or not.
(Clement) also said that the federal government supports various forms of harm reduction for intravenous drug users such as needle exchange, methadone treatment and rehabilitation, but rejected safe injection as illegitimate. “We're not prepared to allow people to die” by condoning their continued drug use, Mr. Clement said.So let me get this straight: giving people needles with which to shoot up is okay, but providing a safe and clean environment in which to do so is out of order? How does that make any sense?
Mr. Clement has never clearly stated why the government supports needle exchange and rehab programs but so sternly opposes the existence of a facility where drug users can actually use the safe needles and be encouraged to enter rehab. The sticking point appears to be that, at Insite, drug users cannot be arrested and prosecuted.Oh I see, Clement and his conservative cronies have no fucking idea what harm, reduction means. See, Tony, the point of a harm-reduction approach to drug use is to treat addiction as a health care issue as opposed to a criminal matter. You can't have it both ways. And what, exactly would be the fucking point of a safe injection site where the clientèle gets arrested for using its services? That's stupidity that beggars belief.
