The Wisdom of Whores

The New York Times has cottoned on to the unpredictable glories of Indonesia. But they’ve got it just that little bit wrong. Here’s what they have to say about US President Obama’s childhood minder:

“His nanny was an openly gay man who, in keeping with Indonesia’s relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality, carried on an affair with a local butcher, longtime residents said. The nanny later joined a group of transvestites called Fantastic Dolls, who, like the many transvestites who remain fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape, entertained people by dancing and playing volleyball.”

If Obama’s nanny was playing volleyball on teams like those that now take on the cops behind the Melia hotel, he was not an openly gay man, she was a waria, or transgender. As you can see from the photo above, waria live as women — they even do the whole beauty pageant thing. She probably didn’t carry on an affair with a butcher — it’s more likely she was “married” to him. Indonesia’s attitude to homosexuality in the late sixties was not relaxed, it was unbelieving. Waria, on the other hand, are just a part of society; in some provinces, though not Jakarta, Waria is an accepted gender on the all-important national ID cards. Finally, transvestites don’t hang around the streets singing. They hang around the streets cruising for people who will pay them for sex.

Still, nice to see the Times ticking the “exotic diveristy” box as best it can.

My parents were among the 200,000 people who gathered in Washington DC at the weekend in the Rally to Restore Sanity. Best banner of the march? This gets my vote:

Thanks to AW for supporting the cause.

Can you protect your nation from HIV by testing immigrants for the virus? Even the United States now thinks that’s a daft idea; it finally dropped its HIV testing requirements for immigrants earlier this year. Now South Korea has followed suit, sort of. The country will drop HIV testing for some, though it has announced different rules for teachers and entertainment industry workers.

Should the International Union of Sex Workers start girding their loins to fight for equal rights for hookers? No. Seoul has decided that people applying for entertainment industry visas do not need to be tested for HIV. People wanting to teach English do. An official of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology explained the decision thus: “Education is considered a very intimate relationship. According to an unofficial survey by the Prime Minister’s Office, the majority of parents wanted solid evidence of their children’s teachers’ HIV status.”

The implication — that English teachers from Wisconsin are more intimate with their clients that hookers from Vladivostock are with theirs — is clearly absurd, and the Korean authorities are squirming a bit about the silliness. But it reminds me of a piece of ancient history in the HIV industry’s cooking up of Stigma Soup.

Many years ago, we were trying to come up with ways of measuring HIV-related stigma in international surveys. We suggested three questions: Should HIV infected nurses be allowed to treat patients in hospital? Should HIV infected teachers be allowed to teach? Would you buy cooked food from someone with HIV? To everyone’s surprise, a lot of respondents in African surveys replied no, no, yes. So was HIV stigmatised, yes or no? A bit of qualitative work shed more light. HIV-infected nurses shouldn’t be allowed to treat patients because they had compromised immune systems and it was better for them not to be around sick people. Not all that stigmatising, then. Food sellers? What? Everyone knows you can’t pass on HIV in a pot of stew! No stigma there, either. But teachers, what about teachers? Well they’re always having affairs with the pupils; we don’t want our daughters to get anywhere near a positive teacher. It strikes me that’s stigmatising of teachers, though not necessarily of HIV.

While we’re on the subject of HIV and immigration, I do think it remains the great untouched subject of the UK HIV epidemic. A first glance at figures provided by the soon-to-be late and very much lamented Health Protection Agency shows us a great wave of heterosexual infections in the UK.

If you take away the infections that are diagnosed in people who were born in a sub-Saharan or Caribbean country with high HIV prevalence, the picture looks very different indeed:

The difference is assumed to be the infections that are “imported”. In fact, there may well be quite a bit of transmission within communties of African-born people in the UK. But there’s virtually no effective targeted prevention programmes for that group, because we’re all so scared of two things. [Note comment on this point] Firstly, the Daily Mail getting hold of the issue and beating up support for a “test the immigrants” campaign. Secondly, the idea that targeted prevention would be stigmatising. Imagine, it might engender a backlash from all those Pentacostal Churches in East London. And then we’d be in the same situation that so many African countries are in: community leaders choosing to deny a problem rather than help their people by dealing with it.

While I try to find time to do justice to the looming decriminalisation of sex work in Canada, I offer this wonderful correction to a blog post about the hideous HIV rates among gay men in the states.

Apparently, I’m not the only gay man trapped in a straight woman’s body.

Thanks to RH for the tip.

Though I don’t have a musical bone in my body, I’ve been thinking recently about how to code statistical data about people into melodies. Now I find that there’s a whole industry out there of people who are turning DNA into music. If you know anything about your own DNA, you can plug your genes into a programme a play yourself. So maybe I do have music in my bones after all.

One of the people who has been working on this is a young composer in the States, Alexandra Pajak. She’s been busy setting the HIV genome to music. Here’s what she says about her project, courtesy of Bertalan Meskó at ScienceRoll

Sounds of HIV is a musical translation of the genetic code of HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Every segment of the virus is assigned music pitches that correspond to the segment’s scientific properties. In this way, the sounds reflect the true nature of the virus. When listening from beginning to end, the listener hears the entire genome of HIV.

In English, the nucleotides Adenine, Cytosine, Uracil/Thymine, and Guanine are abbreviated with the letters A, C, T, and G. Since A, C, and G are also musical pitches in the Western melodic scale, these pitches were assigned to the matching nucleotides. To form two perfect fifths (C-G and D-A), “D” was arbitrarily assigned to musically represent Uracil. I assigned the pitches of the A minor scale to the amino acids based on their level of attraction to water.

Question: would HIV sound different in a setting like Bali, which uses the seven-tone pelog scale?

Illustration by Wendy Stephenson

Salaam kepada pembaca di tannah air kita. Kalau seandenya ada di Jakarta hari Minggu ini (Tanggal 3 Oktober), ayo ikut skrining khusus film baru Madame X, di Senayan XXI, Jam 9.30 (blerch!). Di minta 250,000 rupiah; dana akan digunakan untuk mendamping kawan2 waria yang perlu di rawat HIV. Satu di antara setiap tiga waria penjajah seks di Jakarta sudah perlu bantuan; untungnya ada kelompok waria seperti Yayasan Sirkandi Sejati yang kerja secara rajin untuk membantu komunitas tersendiri. They need your help, so please support them. Apalagi, dari trailer, kelihatannya Madame X adalah film yang norak habiiiiiiiiiiiiis, berarti tentu saja lucu dan berhasil. It should be fun!

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this wonderful pastiche of science writing. For a slightly more “scientific” view, there’s a paper in PLoS Med investigating whether trained science journalists are worth their salaries. Question: is Martin Robbins’ piece all the training we need?

It’s taken two whole years, but US CDC has finally published data from the 2008 round of HIV and behavioural surveillance in gay men in 21 cities. Nearly one in five gay men is infected; in some cities (notably Baltimore) it is twice as high, at 38%.

Reacting to the report, CDC’s HIV prevention director Kevin Fenton said:

For gay community leaders, it is critical that together we engage and make HIV education, prevention, and testing of the highest priority. We must ensure that HIV is not a rite of passage for young MSM. We can rekindle a sense of urgency and action in the gay community to again embrace the work needed to drive down new infections. Now is the time to act.

But no-where in his lengthy blog post about the results does Dr Fenton say WHY HIV prevention is urgent, WHY young people should interrupt their sexual enjoyment by scrabbling for a piece of latex. He, like me, is part of a dinosaur generation that just assumes that everyone knows that HIV is a Bad Thing. Can the same be said of a generation that became sexually active after ARVs transformed HIV from a death sentence to an expensive annoyance, at least in the eyes of people who are not yet living with the boring round of blood tests, drug failures, to-tell-or-not-to-tell seductions that HIV infection brings? And we’re certainly seeing lots of infection in those groups: among teenagers not old enough to drink in most US states (18 and 19 year-olds) seven percent are already positive and because drugs are now keeping people alive, rates rise almost steadily with age.

Sadly, in the two years since the data were collected, CDC hasn’t yet managed to publish any results from the behavioural part of the survey, except to tell us a bit about testing. It’s not pretty. In Seattle and San Francisco, fewer than one in five gay men who tested positive for HIV in the 2008 survey said he didn’t know he was infected — the lowest proportion in the country. In Baltimore, close to three out of four who were actually positive said they thought they were negative or didn’t know their status (73%). That was UP from 62 percent three years earlier; the rate was 70% or more in another three cities.

For uninfected guys who think serosorting is a good way to stay uninfected, that should give pause for thought. You’re uninfected. You’re only going to bareback with someone else who is uninfected. You’re responsible enough to actually ASK about your partner’s status. Of those who tell you they’re negative and really believe it (because they’ve tested negative), one in 11 (9%) is infected with HIV. That might make you a bit more responsible. Now ask when his last negative test was. If he tells you it was less than a year ago, you should be OK, right? Not really. Among those who say they last tested negative within the last year, 7% (one in 14) was infected with HIV. People infected in the last year are more likely to have a lot of virus in their blood and semen than people infected longer ago. So in fact, that 7% may be among the most dangerous people to be having unprotected sex with (though of course people who were tested longer ago may also have been infected just recently).

Gay men who are also black, like Dr. Fenton, are especially likely to be infected (28% prevalence, vs 16% in white men), and especially likely not to know that they are (59% of black guys living with HIV didn’t know it, versus 26% of white guys). [I should note that these data come from men approached at gay venues such as bars, saunas, gyms etc. -- places where people go to cruise. They therefore are likely to represent the higher end of the risk spectrum, though they may exclude some high-risk people who confine their cruising to the web.]

I don’t think that simply encouraging more testing will be enough to stop new infections. As we’ve seen, plenty of people who have recently tested negative go on doing risky things (otherwise they wouldn’t now be positive). And certainly not all of those new infections are the product of sex with people who believe they themselves are negative, although it is probably a disproportionately high percentage.

We’ll know more if/when we see the analysis of the behavioural data. But for now it seems mightily as though we have failed to explain to young, gay men WHY they should make a huge effort to avoid HIV infection in a post-AIDS world. In public health terms there are lots of reasons, notably cost and the danger of resistance. But at the individual level it’s frankly harder to make a case, especially when we’re simultaneously rightly concerned with “normalising” HIV so as to avoid stigma for those who are infected. “HIV’s just another virus: Don’t get it!”, is a mixed message that is not working so well. Until we make individuals believe that “HIV Sucks; Don’t get it!” it will probably hover somewhere between rite of passage and status quo. And it may be time to acknowledge that unless you’re a public heath nerd, or pay taxes somewhere where the state pays for treatment, that may not be such a bad thing.

Note: in an earlier version of this post I had included an image which I had randomly taken off Google images. The people in the image were not named, and I didn’t seek their permission to use it. One of them has contacted me to request removal of the image. I apologise without reservation for having used it. [But I still want one of those T-shirts.]

In the last few days, Canadian and American courts have ruled on gay rights. Somewhat unusually, activists are happy with the Yanks and cross with their northern neighbours. Even more unusually, I’m happy with both.

The Canadian ruling is the more complex, because it has given us the right decision for the wrong reasons. A judge has said the nation’s blood transfusion service can refuse gifts of blood from men who have had sex with other men. The right reason for this decision is that it is a cost-effective way of reducing the likelihood that sexually transmitted viruses, in particular HIV, make it in to the blood supply. The reason given (which I think sets a bad precedent) is that the blood transfusion service is not bound by legislation intended to reduce discrimination against people who choose anything other than vanilla sex, because it is not a government agency.

Of course that’s nonsense. You shouldn’t be allowed to discriminate against people on the basis of who they choose to have sex with in the private sector, in NGOs, in schools or anywhere else, unless they are choosing to have sex with someone who doesn’t or can’t consent. But I don’t believe that asking gay men not to give blood is discriminatory. None of us has a right to put out body fluids into a pool from which the public will draw, and the judge, Catherine Aitken, agreed, saying: “Put simply, blood donation is a gift. A gift is freely offered, but also must be freely received, or freely declined….There is no requirement under the law for CBS, or any other blood provider, to accept the gift of blood from anyone.”

I do agree that the exclusion criteria are a little draconian. “A man who has had sex with another man even once since 1977 is not allowed to donate blood in Canada or the United States,” says the blood service. In terms of HIV, what we’re most worried about are brand new infections — people who have lots of virus in their blood but haven’t yet got enough antibodies to HIV to show up on the screening tests that blood banks use. Those are the ones more likely to lead to the “tainted blood scandals” (blerch) that got the voters so exercised about blood safety in the first place. Blood donated by people who’ve been infected for longer will get picked up in the normal screening process so it’s not quite such a drama if they give blood. In most countries, it make it more expensive for the taxpayers who foot the bill, because blood is pooled into batches for testing, and any reactive test, including false positives, mean the whole batch gets thrown out. (Canada tests individual units so that’s less of a problem).

Activists whine say that refusing to accept blood from gay men tars them with the brush of “AIDS victim” and reinforces stigma. “Not everyone who is gay has AIDS”, declared Kyle Freeman when he brought the case against the blood service that precipitated the ruling. Well of course not. Not everyone who is gay has HIV, either. But in Canada, a gay man is around 20 times more likely to be infected than a heterosexual (pdf) (51% of HIV infections are concentrated in the roughly 4% of sexually active adults who are gay men). If gay guys think that fact is stigmatising, they might want to reinvigorate HIV prevention efforts in their community. Screening men who have sex with men out of the pool of blood donors is not discrimination, it is common sense. (As an aside, I find it interesting that no-one seems to be whining complaining about the rights of drug injectors being violated because the blood service won’t accept their blood. Surely their rights are being violated in exactly the same way, even though they are actually less likely to be infected with HIV than gay men in some Canadian cities).

Meanwhile, across the border, American courts continue to chip away at the great edifice of true discrimination against people who choose their sex partners according to their own taste, rather than that of the Sex Police in groups like the Traditional Values Coalition. Hot on the heels of a ruling that repealed a ban on gay marriage in California, another California judge, Virginia Philips, has ruled that the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule that makes it impossible for openly gay people to serve in the military is unconstitutional. This is very good news indeed; let’s hope the mid-term elections don’t scare the administration and the Senate into prolonging the agony for gay men and women who want to invest their lives waging war on behalf of the citizens of the US.

Thanks to Sarah Chown for nudging me to write about this.

Because I run a course to help mid-career scientists get their papers published in peer-reviewed journals, I’m always on the look-out for really good papers, and for really bad ones. I also keep my eyes open for bad science reporting. It’s depressingly easy to find the latter, but it just got easier.

Tom Scott has produced a series of handy-dandy stickers to put on newspaper articles. Here are a couple of my favourites, but you can see the whole set here, and even print out your own set.

What I’d like Tom to get on to next is a set of stickers to help me quickly find the crap research in peer reviewed journals. He could start with “Warning: This paper was reviewed by someone who has applied for a job with the first author” and “Warning: Reprints of this article ordered by Big Pharma will account for 18 percent of the journal’s income this month”.

Thanks to CB for bringing Tom to my attention.

The New York Times is a bit of a supertanker; it takes a while to get going on a subject. So by the time they run a drum-rolling front page story about some world-changing trend, you can be pretty sure that the trend is close to becoming the new status quo.

I’m hoping that’s true of today’s front-pager on data sharing in health research. The story hypes the idea of data sharing as a brand new one. In truth, public and philanthropic funders of health research have been working for a while to develop a common approach to promote data sharing. They’re due to publish a “Joint Statement of Purpose” on efforts to promote data sharing very soon; if they back the rhetoric up with the people and money needed to do some of the tedious work that will make shared data sets valuable and easy to use, the New York Times story could look very dated, very soon. But it’s a big if. Many scientists are still very resistant to sharing, for reasons that are quite nicely described in this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. At least one of the major philanthropic funders of health research keeps asking for proof that more minds working on large, combined data sets will yield results faster than if everyone sits in their own labs, each collecting fragments of similar data and analysing it separately. That’s like software companies questioning whether open source code development is more efficient than proprietary code development. Oh, wait a minute…

The really interesting thing about the Alzheimer’s example described in the Times is that private companies are in the mix, too. Ultimately, academics funded by taxpayers and charities will share their data because their paymasters tell them to. If those same paymasters also do something to remove the disincentives to share data that come from using publication in peer reviewed journals as the only yardstick of success for scientists, it will happen even faster. But the GSKs and Pfizers of this world don’t think peer reviewed papers are the be all and end all, and they are certainly not signing on to any Joint Statement of Purpose on data sharing. (Our invitation to them to be part of the discussions were met with a resounding silence.) If Big Pharma has decided that data sharing is the way to go, then it’s more than a new trend, it’s the new orthodoxy.

Illustration by Fernando Vicente

This week, the Great and the Good of the AIDS industry gather in Vienna for the biennial AIDS circus. With delicious irony, the conference, held right next to the barracks of the UN’s Drug Warriors, will focus in part on getting more countries to do the one thing that really works in HIV prevention — providing clean needles to drug injectors.

That means that there will be a lot of talk about the evidence base. There’s always a lot of talk at these conferences, and although I escaped Vienna just before the start of the conference (to see the inimitable Grace Jones play Lovebox), I’m as much of a windbag as anyone. While pontificating in the BMJ video (below) about the evidence base for harm reduction, I think there’s a more important point to be made to the small coterie of scientists who wash around in the larger tide of 20,000 AIDS junkies, Poz Professionals, singing orphans, dancing hookers, jostling NGO workers, bewildered journalists and UN PR-wallahs that floods these conferences.

The point, made at greater length in an essay in the Lancet (pdf), is that we can’t look at scientific evidence in isolation. [The collage at the top of this post comes from the essay. For works of both anatomical and philosophical beauty, do browse Fernando Vicente's illustrations]. Yes, there’s lots of scientific evidence that harm reduction saves lives. But there’s a huge body of political evidence, too. And that evidence suggests that politicians do what voters want, or, at very best/worst, what politicians think they can get away with. For many politicians in many countries for many years, that has meant not spending voters’ money on helping people take drugs more safely.

As long as that is true, the scientific evidence will continue to be secondary. No matter how many well-spoken epidemiologists do their bit on YouTube.

Or, for that matter, how many nice people stand at the entrance to festivals such as Lovebox handing out orange wristbands that read “Nice People Take Drugs”. As I wandered in with my happy band of blue-tongued smurfs, I reflected that if ever there was a case of preaching to the converted…
But I also take issue with the statement, which has a UNICEF lobbyist ring to it. “Most people at risk for HIV are young” does NOT translate into “Most young people are at risk for HIV”. Nice people take drugs, certainly. But are we to believe that most people who take drugs are nice? Maybe yes, maybe no; since a majority of young people in the UK take drugs, it rather depends on your view of human nature.

Still, the folks at Release who run the campaign have come up with some fun ideas. I especially like the “Politicians Drug Confessions” playing cards.

You can buy them here.

When we throw around the term “Rent Boy”, we usually mean a young man whose impeccable abs and other finery are for hire. A very privileged few of us mean a young man with impeccable abs who pays the rent. But we’ve been outdone by the Catholic hierarchy, which has combined the two but inverted the equation.

Catholic priest Rev. Kevin J. Gray, who used to preach abstinence, celibacy, humility and heterosexual norms in Connecticut (just up the road from where my mother sings in her church choir), has been done for stealing US$ 1.3 million from the Church and blowing it on expensive hotels and male escorts, according to the Associated Press. But he did more than just pay for an occasional admiring squint at their abs. He paid their rent.

My own rent boy’s reaction: “Where do I sign up?”

Meena Saraswathi Seshu was a well-to-do Indian do-gooder who was determined to save India’s sex slaves from their evil traffickers. To her immense credit, illustrated in this nice profile in The Lancet, (pdf here), she changed her mind when she learned the facts. Not so the US Congressman who tried to bully her organisation SANGRAM out of existence.

SANGRAM has long worked constructively with sex workers, to the fury of Congressman Mark Souder who stomped on USAID until they shut down funding for SANGRAM. In a letter to USAID as bombastic, self-righteous and threatening as any I have seen, Souder pontificated about the Bush administration’s record in promoting family values and women’s rights.

“There is a tragic irony in the fact that this administration seeks to elevate women in the United States to some of the most important positions in the country…; yet, USAID has funded groups outside the United States that promote the ultimate degradation of women.”

Souder might know something about the degradation of women. Six weeks ago he resigned as congressman after 15 years, admitting to having an affair with a staffer. He started off on script, apologising for the pain he had caused his supporters. But then, with breathtaking arrogance, he stuck up for his own hypocrisy, saying “The ideas we advocate are still just and right.” I’m sure his wife agrees.

Here’s the pompous windbag being fake-interviewed by his girlfriend about the importance of abstinence-only education programmes.

Of course abstinence-only programmes are only meant to work until people get married. Since both Mark Souder and his squeeze Tracy Jackson are married, they hardly count as failures of morality-based sex ed, do they?

(Thanks to Paddy Woodburn for pointing out the Seshu profile and setting me off wondering whatever happened to that windbag Souder…)

I have a confession. Behind all the sex and drugs talk, I’m just a giant data nerd. I believe that health research data collected with taxpayers’ money should be used to improve lives, not just to improve the career of a couple of scientists who got the research grant. And we’d improve lives faster if we played nicely together in the sandbox and allowed more brains to analyse the data we spend so much time collecting.

I’ve been working behind the scenes to try and help this happen, and have written about it in The Lancet, (pdf) and the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, (pdf) (which ran quite a fun Round Table on the subject), with responses here, here,here, and here.

Now, I’m thrilled to say, the issue has been taken up by much bigger guns. An editorial in The Lancet declared the sharing of public health data “necessary, and now”. (pdf) The editorial refers to a meeting I was at in Washington earlier this month at which some of the biggest funders of public health research agreed in principle to work together to increase access to the data they pay for. We’re talking cleaned, coded, individual level data — raw ingredients which researchers with different perspectives and points of view can cook up into new solutions for health problems. There are lots of details to thrash out, but an agreement to start thrashing is a HUGE step forward.

It helped enormously that we had people in the room who have shown that data collected in household based studies can be shared without the sky falling. Osman Sankoh from the INDEPTH network showed off iSHARE , an initiative of researchers in India, Thailand and PNG which has since been joined by several African research sites. iSHARE provides on-line access to good quality demographic surveillance data that can be compared across sites. UNICEF puts its MICS household survey data online, so does DHS. Perhaps the most unexpected (and greatly welcomed) new member of the Data Liberation movement is the World Bank. The Bank has been an object of derision for years because it demands data of countries and then locks the data away in a database funded with public money. Even the governments that contributed the information, and the ones that paid for the database, used to have to pay to get anything out again. Then, in April: Boom! the World Bank threw its database open to the world.That set an important precedent; the age of free data is at hand, and no amount of whining by academics whose promotions depend on hiding information until they’ve got around to publishing papers about it will keep the new age at bay.

I have several loyal readers whose comments regularly make me laugh: this, for example. And I almost never refuse a comment unless it’s trying to sell a cure for AIDS or the commentator is too much of a pussy to give an e-mail address.

But this one, from a fount of indignation calling Himself “Derrail”, deserves its own post. The grammar alone will make you laugh. And the unwitting insights:

YOUR A FUNGUS AN EPIDEMIC AND OUTBREAKING SHOW OFF

Mental illness is an odd thing, isn’t it? By turns worrying: (YOUR A PRIME EXAMPLE OF WHY WOMEN SHOULD NEVER BE FREE TO ROAM AND SPEAK OUT IN THE PUBLIC ARENA) and amusing (YOUR FATHER FOR WHATEVER REASON REFUSED TO CHERISH YOU OR ELSE YOUR A MARX’S).

The toxic whole, sent in response to a post about sex worker legislation in Illinois, is after the jump. Prizes for the best response.
Read the rest of this post…

I’ve been taken to task for posting TED talks from the UK’s new Fearless Leader, and neglecting to post my own. Here it is, if you have 18 minutes to spare.

If you’ve only got four minutes, I would also thoroughly recommend spending it with comedian Julia Sweeney, as she has the “sex talk” with her daughter.

After I heard David Cameron promise to make policy that went with the grain of human nature, I suggested that Britain’s sex workers should vote Tory. I wasn’t joking, though I haven’t had that much luck convincing friends in the business. Now, though, George McCoy has given us a proper analysis of candidates’ position on sex work. Put in your post code for an at-a-glance view of who has voted which way, and who is promising what for (and against) people who sell sex.

As I said in my TED talk, we can use our votes to stop politicians doing stupid things that spread HIV. And violence against sex workers, for that matter.

It looks as though the effort to throw more sex workers and clients in jail in Illinois will fail, at least in this legislative session.

What better way to celebrate than by coming to a party in Chicago on Saturday night. Wear your best gold thong, and be ready for 90′s hip-hop up the wazoo.

It’s above the cafe at 230 W. Chicago Ave, starting at 8 pm on Saturday May 1st. More info here.

I’ve decided Canada is bipolar. In the couple of days that I was there this week, one province bottled and pulled the plug on a solid programme to educate school kids about sex and relationships that it had announced just days earlier. The government took contraception off the agenda at the G8, then said ok to talk of pills and coils, but no to abortion. And though drug injection in prison continues apace, and government agencies and others say prison prevention programmes work, there are still no clean needles behind bars.

Is any of this a big surprise? Not really. But it is very much at odds with Canada’s self-image as a sensible, compassionate nation, and what boy-scout-in-chief Prime Minister Stephen Harper promises the world. I made this point on CBC’s morning radio show in Edmonton on Tuesday. My interviewer, Ron Wilson, seemed genuinely perplexed that Canadian politicians might make decisions that are not always in the bests interests of drug injectors. Listen to the podcast here.

I was so surprised by his surprise that I went back and looked at what Harper says about evidence-based policy. Here it is:

“Leaders agreed to the following principles…[we will] Base our actions on the best available science and evidence-based decision-making.”

He was talking specifically about flu in that context, so perhaps he believes that flu is different from other viruses. Perhaps scientific evidence doesn’t apply to HIV, or indeed to other sexually-transmitted disorders such as unwanted pregnancy. But to me, it’s all evidence of policy schizophrenia.

More good reporting on needles in jails from my favourite Canadian paper, Xtra.