by Paul Wells, Macleans

 

Many of the comments under John Geddes’ astonishing story about the RCMP’s protracted attempts to make up new “facts” about Vancouver’s Insite safe-injection centre suggest readers are having trouble understanding what, precisely, went on here. And the reaction from other news organizations — there’s been none — suggests our colleagues prefer to believe there’s nothing new in the story.

 

And yet Geddes lays it out with crystal clarity. What’s at stake is not a simple matter of opinion about whether injection sites are a good idea. It is (1) an exhaustively-documented attempt by elements in Canada’s national police force to create a bogus “academic” argument against Insite. Then (2) an attempt by senior RCMP officers to reverse course and atone for that burst of academic vandalism. And finally, (3) a decision from the RCMP’s highest echelons — or from someone in government outside the RCMP — to stifle the belated atonement, instead letting the sham record stand. The first part of that story has been told before. The rest is new, and devastating. Let me try to walk you through it. Read more »

By. Jeremiah Vandermeer

 

Seattle Hempfest, the world's largest annual "cannabis re-legalization protestival", is less than a week away, from August 21-22.

 

Organizers say this years' event, which stretches across three Seattle waterfront parks and features live music and speeches from well-known cannabis activists, will focus on "responsible use and harm reduction". Read more »

By Peter McKnight, Vancouver Sun

 

Calls for a Pickton inquiry are typically predicated on the notion that we lack knowledge -specifically, knowledge about the conditions that allowed a man to prey on vulnerable women with impunity. But what if we knew about those conditions for years and, in fact, created them? And what if it was a lack of will, rather than a lack of knowledge, that prevented us from changing those conditions?

 

There's good reason to believe this is the case, since Canada's prostitution laws have been placing street prostitutes in grave danger for a quarter of a century, and we have been well aware of that for many years. But as a brief review of prostitution laws demonstrates, successive governments have failed utterly to do anything to improve the situation.

 

Prostitution has never been illegal in Canada. From the Prohibition era until the 1970s, prostitution was attacked through vagrancy laws, which allowed police to arrest and charge women who were unable to account for their presence on the street.

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By DR. CÉSAR CHELALA, The Epoch Times

 

Russia has one of the world’s most serious epidemics of injecting drug use, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNAIDS. It is estimated that Russia has 2 million injecting drug users (IDUs), 60–70 percent of whom have HIV-related illnesses. In the past decade, the number of HIV-infected people has increased from an estimated 100,000 to over 1 million.

 

Sharing syringes among drug users is the most prevalent cause of HIV transmission in Central Asia and Eastern Europe, where it is responsible for more than 80 percent of all HIV infections.

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