Archive for the tag "Harm Reduction"

Oh Canada! Insite stays, but for how long? (19/01/10)

Great news from Vancouver: the city’s safe injecting facility, Insite, is allowed to continue saving lives. For now. It’s the second time that Insite has won a case brought by the right-wing rottweilers of prime minister Stephen Harper. This victory was in the Supreme Court of British Columbia. But Harper may decide to put more [...]

Heroin on prescription: for some, the facts are never enough (18/09/09)

It’s not just because I was in Vancouver last week that I have heroin on the brain. Less than a month after a Canadian team found that prescribing heroin to addicts works where other treatments have failed, scientists in the UK reported the same thing. That stacks more evidence in favour of heroin prescription on [...]

Whose war is it, anyway? (10/03/09)

The Colombian President says we’ve lost the war on drugs. So does his predecesor. And his Mexican counterpart. Not to mention Harvard economists. Oh, and the editors of The Economist. Is it conceivable that the United Nations and the US government, that have for so long dug their heels into the mud of prohibition as [...]

Want help quitting your job? It’s a deal (03/09/08)

Earn good money but hate your job? The UK charity Switch can help you out. As long as you’re a drug dealer.
Switch is a coalition of community groups based in the Western city of Bristol. The Guardian reports that the group was finding that a lot of dealers wanted out, but felt trapped because there [...]

Largely in New York: new HIV is young, black and gay (01/09/08)

New York likes to think of itself as ahead of the rest of the US on many fronts. It certainly is on the HIV front.
In most of the world, we’ve got precious little idea how many people get infected with HIV each year. Generally, we report HIV prevalence — the number of people who have [...]

UNDRUGS, moving in the right direction? (07/07/08)

Is HIV really about culture and migration and labour? You’d think so if you looked at the mandates of the 10 United Nations organisations that make up UNAIDS. I’ve always thought we only need two organisations involved: UNSEX and UNDRUGS. The first doesn’t exist, and the second (officially know and the United Nations Office on [...]

Canadian government calls in the executioner (30/05/08)

I ended my last post on an optimistic note. I should have known better. Canada’s health minister is sharpening the guillotine, and hopes to chop down North America’s only supervised injecting site despite a court ruling that the execution would be unconstitutional.
“In my opinion, supervised injection is not medicine; it does not heal the [...]

Stay of execution for Canada’s life saving injection room (29/05/08)

Drug Warriors have been gloating about the imminent closure of North America’s only supervised injecting site for drug addicts. (”The injection site is expected to close next month,” reported one conservative group. “Congratulations to members who have worked so hard to keep the pressure on the powers to be to close down this madly insane [...]

Can Canada save its safe injecting experiment from the politicians’ axe? (03/05/08)

Vancouver is the only city in North America that provides a safe place for addicts to shoot up in. The local government thinks it’s a good idea. The national government doesn’t. So they’re sticking their oar in to undermine the project, according to local researchers.
“Scientists accuse Tories of ‘despicable’ interference”, yells a headline in the [...]

Canada could inject sense into Ukraine’s HIV response (18/04/08)

A Canadian group has just been holding a pow-wow on HIV prevention in Ukraine. The