'COTTAGER CLEMENT' NOT TALKING LIKE NATIONAL HEALTH MINISTER

Re: Protest over injection site closure targets MP, Huntsville
Forester, May 28.

I must have got it wrong. I thought cottager Clement was the minister
of health as well as the guy who keeps filling my mailbox. I'm
confused because of his reason for wanting to close the Vancouver
needle exchange. Cottager (Clement's) scientific and health-based
reason: "There is not a lot of sympathy for it in my riding."

So that's how he runs the health system of the entire country?
Whether there's sympathy for a policy in his Parry Sound-Muskoka
riding? Bit of a worry.

But at least the BC Supreme Court used a slightly more appropriate
gauge to debunk and deny the cottager and his fellow Conservatives.
The judge used his very own brains. Imagine. In his ruling, Justice
Ian Pitfield granted Insite, North America's only supervised
safe-injection facility, an exemption from federal drug laws until
June 30, 2009.

Pitfield said drug addiction is an illness and that the services
Insite provides -- reducing risk of overdose and infection and
providing access to counselling that may lead to rehabilitation and
abstinence -- are considered health care.

I hope the cottager will use more than the alleged sympathy -- or
lack of it -- of his riding to guide him the next time a topic a
national significance needs some heavy brainwork.

John Scully, Dwight