OUR CITY FATHERS AND MOTHERS HAVE MORAL DUTY TO HELP SAVE OUR CHILDREN

Editor, The News:

After watching and listening to the cascade of denial from our city fathers
and mothers in regard to trying to decide what to do with the problem of
needle exchange programs and where to put rehab centers and detox centers
for the citizens of their fair community, it seems that it got down to
either deciding, whether to defer or refer, and what either word meant in
regard to making a decision on the people that they neither want to see or
hear from.

It seems our city fathers want the problem to go away, but they would
rather wait for other levels of government to pay for it.

They intend to outwait the other levels of government before they are
prepared to deal with it themselves. Hospital funding with provincial help
started with the Socred government. With that in mind, it should only take
our children to either grow up or die before this problem may get solved.
The facilities are already set up at Miracle Valley and the Salvation Army
wants to help.

Furthermore, our children are offered drugs from a very well-trained
marketing organization with minimal training cost and high profit streams -
and our children do not believe that they could die. Conversely, our city
leaders have never inhaled, so they wish not to believe it could happen to
them or their children.

Our police are tied down with budget restraints and are restricted to
handling a minimal amount of criminal activity. Budgets bind our police on
how effective they want to be. Our hospitals cannot or are not allowed to
fill beds with more government restraints, and we now are prepared to build
bigger hospitals with more beds we cannot staff.

We would rather create a facade, than deal with the management of our
resources. We are prepared to save money on the welfare of our health to
pay our provincial MLAs and federal MPs up to 42 per cent more money.

In addition, our Abbotsford hospital is being reviewed on how they handle
duo-diagnosis patients. At present there is no plan. Why are people being
refused medical attention and refused entrance into our hospitals? Why do
we need a organization like the College of Physicians and the Canadian
Medical Protection Agency to protect the doctors from themselves?

Both were created by doctors for doctors and are monitored by doctors. They
do have a site on the Internet.

As a matter of fact, I have a letter dated January of this year and it
states the following: "The College is not in a position to tell individual
physicians how to practice and what to prescribe to their patients. The
College has neither the will nor the authority to do that and such
decisions are rightly left to the individual physician in consultation with
the patient."

It also states in the letter "that the College Council is not a public
forum where individual citizens can present their point of view."

My question would be: Who is looking after the patient's rights? Some
patients can't speak for themselves.

With the increase of anti-depressants being prescribed to 24 per cent for
our population, we have made our community more dependent on legal drugs.
Our medical system transfers one addiction to another. Our citizens are
dealing with depression and anxieties and grief and have the same
attributes as the people on the street.

Call the drug by whatever name you want - it creates the same effect.
Despondency and dependency. There is a bomb ticking in our community and it
is no different than any other community.

If our city fathers are waiting for the bomb to go off instead of defusing
it, they may have more on their hands than a few addicts, and that is from
either side of the fence.

It is an attitude that we, the general public, are dealing with. Our
government is afraid of taking charge. People are dying out there and they
are our children.

We the people of Abbotsford have the right to take back our city from the
drug dealers that are hurting our children. I told one doctor that he was
no different than the drug dealers on the street.

He tried to explain to me that there was a difference. Addiction is addiction.

John Constible

Abbotsford