At War With Reality

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In a recent speech to the Canadian Medical Association, Health Minister Rona Ambrose told her audience:

“At the end of the day, for policymakers like me, it’s the medical science and data-based evidence that must guide our decisions on health sector regulation and allocation of resources.”

It was a remarkable statement. In October, she announced that her government would no longer allow doctors to prescribe medical heroin because:

There is no evidence at this point that heroin … giving heroin to heroin addicts … is any way an effective treatment … As I said, there is no evidence that this is an effective, safe treatment … no clinical evidence … There is no clear evidence to suggest that this a safe treatment and it’s not a good idea for Health Canada to be supporting giving heroin to heroin addicts when there’s no scientific evidence that this is a safe treatment …

But Michael Spratt writes:

Actually, there’s copious evidence supporting the use of medical-grade opiates to treat addiction. The European Monitoring Centre for Drug and Drug Addiction released a 176-page study on the use of doctor-supervised medicinal heroin. Here’s what the study found:

Over the past 15 years, six RCTs have been conducted involving more than 1,500 patients, and they provide strong evidence, both individually and collectively, in support of the efficacy of treatment with fully supervised self-administered injectable heroin, when compared with oral MMT, for long-term refractory heroin-dependent individuals. These have been conducted in six countries: Switzerland (Perneger et al., 1998); the Netherlands (van den Brink et al., 2003); Spain (March et al., 2006); Germany (Haasen et al., 2007), Canada (Oviedo-Joekes et al., 2009) and England (Strang et al., 2010).

For Harperians, when facts get in the way of ideology, facts lose. This is particularly true at the Ministry of Justice:

In May the federal government cut Justice’s research budget by $1.2 million. According to an internal government report, the Justice Department’s research budget was slashed just as an internal report for the deputy minister was warning its findings “may run contrary to government direction” and have “at times left the impression that research is undermining government decisions” and is not “aligned with government or departmental priorities.”

And, so, the they continue their war on reality. And, when reality gets in the way, they create their own.