Conservatives still spurning science, say addiction and AIDS researchers

Vancouver AIDS and addictions researchers Evan Wood, Julio Montaner and Thomas Kerr have fired off yet another angry missive about the Conservative government's conflation of ideology with evidence when it comes to drug policy.

In the March issue of The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the three authors, who all work at Vancouver's safe-injection site, take federal Health Minister Tony Clement to task for giving equal weight in his study on the merits of harm reduction to biased lobbyists as he does to evidence-based scientific research. (Subscription to The Lancet is required to access the article.)

Wood, Montaner and Kerr wrote about the same subject in an op/ed piece for the National Review of Medicine last September that accompanied an article I wrote on harm reduction, addiction treatment and the new federal anti-drug strategy that was released in the fall.

For my article, I spoke to Dr Keith Martin, a Liberal Member of Parliament in British Columbia, who pointed me to a very telling essay Prime Minister Stephen Harper wrote before he became leader of the Conservative Party:

Stephen Harper's attitude about how society should treat drug addicts was outlined in a 2003 essay he wrote about the Left called "Rediscovering the Right Agenda," published in Report magazine:

"This descent into nihilism... leads to silliness such as moral neutrality on the use of marijuana or harder drugs mixed with its random moral crusades on tobacco. It explains the lack of moral censure on personal foibles of all kinds, extenuating even criminal behaviour with moral outrage at bourgeois society, which is then tangentially blamed for deviant behaviour."

Dr Martin says Mr Harper's position on substance abuse was the reason he opted not to join the newly formed Conservative Party, though he had been a member of the Canadian Alliance. "I suspect they see [substance abuse] as some kind of personal weakness — that people have a choice," says Dr Martin.

The new article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases features a very apt Isaac Asimov quote:

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.

- Isaac Asimov

That does an effective job of summing up the current situation on addiction medicine policy in Canada, it seems.


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