Alberta Doctors Make Me Gag

It's the Hippocratic Oath not the Hypocritical Oath. The majority of Alberta doctors are absolute hypocrites. They won't even consider medical marijuana but Alberta has the highest level of opioid prescription in Canada.

They claim to fear the unknown dangers of marijuana while eagerly giving out increasingly powerful forms of synthetic opium with their known addiction and common fatal overdoses. When inhaled properly (edibles are changed by the liver and are a different animal) a marijuana overdose produces a deep sleep followed by a period of fatigue. You have to smoke bales of the stuff all at once to die. And most who use it don't become addicted and adjusted to it so that increasingly powerful forms are required. The normal side effects are distraction, hunger, and a tendency to babble a bit.

Alberta doctors really fear being labeled as drug dealers when they already are opium pushers on a major scale. Of course, because you can't patent the plant or charge thousands of dollars per dose, marijuana producers can't "educate" doctors over expensive dinners or at luxurious vacation "conferences".

If they could, Alberta doctors would be hawking it. You can bet on it.

You disgust me.

First, do no harm. Do not use addictive painkillers long term or long enough to cause addiction  and then cut them off. Stop working to worsen the damage of the War on Drugs. Try acting like medics and you may recall how to be physicians.

Compassionate drugs help the patient hold on and stand up, if possible. They don't destroy the patient's humanity. It's the same for those who prescribe them.

Update: For those who have trouble getting medicine in Alberta, these links may help.
Calgary Medical Marijuana Doctors
http://www.cannapply.ca/

Only compassion defeats dehumanization.

From CBC's The 180.

Sunday October 16, 2016

Opinion: media coverage is making the opioid crisis worse

Bags of fentanyl mixed with caffeine, seized by Calgary police. (CBC)

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It's hard to read about opioids like fentanyl these days, and not get a sense of disaster.
In Ontario, the Minister of Health recently said Canada is facing a "public health crisis" and in April, officials in B.C. declared a public health emergency after a spike in fentanyl related deaths. In that province, nearly 500 people have died of fentanyl overdoses between January and August.

While Dan Werb concedes public health officials are dealing with a serious problem, he argues the media needs to do better when they cover opioids.

Werb, the Director of the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy, says the reality of drug use and addiction doesn't match up with the impression the public can get when reading media coverage. 

He argues journalists often fail to provide context around fentanyl — and it's context he argues is important not only to increase public understanding but to help shape policy.

The role of the media here is to provide the context — not only report on what the situation is now, but to provide some context.  -Dan Werb

Dan Werb, director of Toronto's International Centre for Science in Drug Policy. (provided by Dan Werb)

"The reality is that one of the key drivers of the opioid crisis was the over-prescribing of pharmaceutical drugs like Oxycontin. That in turn lead to high levels of opioid dependence, addiction, and overdose," he says. 

Werb says, in response, the media perpetuated the notion that Oxycontin was the problem, the government reacted, Oxycontin was pulled from the market, and the supply was throttled. 

But drug markets are complicated, according to Werb, and the notion that a supply line can be simply cut off without something else emerging to take its place is naive.

When we closed the tap, and when we restricted the supply of Oxycontin and Percocet, we saw was an expansion of use of these other drugs that are much more dangerous like street fentanyl and carfentanil.  - Dan Werb

In Werb's view, the most important angle on drug use and addiction in Canada is not an investigation of which drug is being consumed, but identifying the motivation behind substance use disorders in the first place.