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You don't often win a clear-cut unequivocal victory
in the battle against AIDS,
but that's the basis for this commentary.
In the second major legal decision in a row,
the British Columbia Court of Appeals
found that the Insight Program in downtown Vancouver,
a safe injection site for drug users,
could stay open.
The federal government of Canada
have tried to close it down once.
They lost.
Tried again, they lost.
They'll probably go to the Supreme Court of Canada.
They will lose again.
This is not a complicated business.
In the best tradition of harm reduction programs,
Insight was located
in the most battered, decaying part
of the east side of downtown Vancouver,
inhabited by drug users and the homeless
and the impoverished
and struggling aboriginal peoples,
for the purpose of providing a safe injecting drug facility
with clean needles,
under the supervision of nurses,
and in every sense,
preventing *** transmission and hepatitis C.
What could make more sense?
But this is a particular Canadian government
that has never understood the value
of public health programs.
All they know,
frothing at the edges of their twisted, gnarled,
punitive, ideological little mouth,
is that every drug user is a criminal
and belongs in jail.
You sometimes have to wonder:
Who needs therapeutic health most:
the addict or the government?
I'm Stephen Lewis.
**Captions by Project readOn**