Federal Health Minister Tony Clement says ethical concerns raised by supervised shot sites for drug addicts are "deeply disturbing," and he questions doctors wHO support the practice.
"Is it ethical for health-care professionals to support the giving medication of drugs that ar of unknown substance, or purity or potency � drugs that cannot differently be legally prescribed?" Clement said Monday in a speech at the Canadian Medical Association's annual meeting in Montreal.
In any other medical place setting, supervised overdoses would be considered "highly unprofessional," he said.
"In this way, supervised injection sites undercut the ethics of medical praxis, and set a debilitating example for all physicians and nurses, both gift and future in Canada, who mightiness begin to question whether it's OK to have someone o.d. in their care."
Vancouver's Insite safe-injection center has not noticeably decreased drug o.d. deaths, because narcotics habit in "game alleys and seedy motels" is still high, he said.
Clement likewise questioned the validity of calling supervised injection sites palliative care for addiction, a construct put forward by the B.C. medical association in the late 1990s.
"Imagine for a here and now a doctor that has a patient with a serious merely treatable case of cancer. Would it be honorable for that doctor to automatically pass that woman morphine and otherwise make her prosperous until she died of her disease, rather than offering the patient an attempt at treatment, and a probability at recovery?
"Why do we limit ourselves to alleviator care?" he continued. "There is a better alternative for injection drug users, and that is discourse. Even if they fail treatment the first time, we privy help them to let up and try again."
CMA president Brian Day has said near 80 per cent of association members support hurt reduction through supervised injection sites.
The sites � which allow addicts to interpose their own narcotics under the supervising of medical staff � have successfully curbed illegal drug use.
"The minister was off base in vocation into query the ethical motive of physicians involved in harm reducing," Day told reporters.
"It's exculpate that this was being used as a political issue."
Robert Ouellet, a radiotherapist in Montreal, said safe injection sites are an important point of entryway for addicts into the health precaution system. He said the goal is harm diminution � by lowering the risk of disease transmission through lousy needles � as well as by providing education about dose addiction.
"We doctors think that we indigence to take care of patients and this is quite different. He's doing politics, we're doing health care," he said.
Insite has operated in Vancouver since 2003, under an exemption from federal drug laws.
The federal government is likable a B.C. Supreme Court decision that struck down sections of Canada's dose laws as unconstitutional, because they forbid Insite from operating.
With files from the Canadian Press
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