[Info-vax] HP stopping VMS paper documentation ?

[Jose Baars]

On Dec 19, 1:16 am, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam... at vaxination.ca> wrote:
> FrankS wrote:
> > However, there are studies that show insulin-dependent diabetes
> > patients can and do go into remission and can terminate their insulin
> > injections.
>
> Prescription reewalls exist to prevent abuses. If your doctor
> overcharges for a simple check to ensure you still need the same dosage
> of insulin, that is another problem.
>
> With regards to free needle programme for drug users, the current
> government in Canada (a Bush Jr afficionado) tried to kill such a
> programme in Vancouver at the supreme court and all of the evidence
> showed that this programmed was beneficial and ended up saving money for
> the government.
>
> You need to realise that such programmes don't just hand out needles for
> free. There are councilors who monitor drug users, provide council and
> gently nudge them to check in to a drug rehab programme, and more
> importantly, will spot drug overdoses and call ambulance before it is
> too late to save the person from a deadly drug overdose.
>
> So those programmes are made to appear to drug users as free needles
> with no questions asked on how they got their drugs, but behind the
> scenes, they are quite sophisticated.

Well... it's the clever choice between repression
(police, jails, zero tolerance) and help (needle
programs, welfare etc). Repression, although
usually more popular because it's appealing to
the moral views of a large part of the people,
and as such used by ambitious politicians,
tends to be a factor 5 to 100 more
expensive, and often increases the problem over time.

Structural help (as opposed to charity, usually
one-off showcase events intended to make the fund
raiser look good) sometimes even solves the problem.

In this case, putting all these drug addicts in prison
would cost the society about 100 times as much,
not counting the cost of the crimes of their
colleagues just released or not yet caught.
As JF said, many of these addicts are eased
into all kinds of programs to help them become
'normal' citizens again, and a lot of them actually
succeed.