For I was Hungry and You Fed Me

Buried beneath all of the election news yesterday was the British medical journal The Lancet's publication of findings on Vancouver's Insite safe injection site's success. Drug overdose deaths in one of Canada's most troubled neighborhoods have been reduced by more than a third by a single program.

For anyone who has worked in this field or who has experienced the pain of addiction, this is simply phenomenal. And yet the Harper government has been unstinting in its efforts to close this program. It is apparently better that addicts die than that they not conform to a Tory/Christian fundamentalist ideal.

As the Globe & Mail notes this morning, the opposition is once again disturbingly silent on this. This is scarcely surprising for the hopelessly opportunistic liberals. But I have always been shocked by NDP's seeming belief that by the worst sort of pandering, they might make inroads into the Conservative base. Hence the capacity to overlook corporate tax cuts, gifts to banks and now attempts to undercut a program to serve some of our most vulnerable fellows.

We can do better than this.