OTTAWA TO RAMP UP ANTI-DRUG MESSAGE

Statement Signed By 130 Doctors, Scientists Rakes Government For
Stance On Injection Site

VANCOUVER -- Federal Health Minister Tony Clement delivered a tough
anti-drug message to doctors yesterday, saying young people need
straight talk about the dangers of illicit drugs, including marijuana.

"The messages young people have received during the past several years
have been confusing and conflicting to say the least," Clement told
the annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association in Vancouver.

"We are very concerned about the damage and pain that drugs cause
families and we intend to reverse the trend toward vague, ambiguous
messaging that has characterized Canadian attitudes in the recent
past," Clement said.

The government plans a campaign emphasizing the dangers of all illicit
drugs in any quantity, he said. "We will discourage young people from
thinking there are safe amounts or safe drugs," he said, later telling
doctors that the marijuana available today isn't the same as what they
might have smoked experimentally during their youth.

Clement skirted questions about the future of Vancouver's supervised
injection site, saying recent research has cast doubts on earlier
studies that found the site has reduced needle sharing and public drug
use while encouraging addicts to seek treatment.

Ottawa will weigh all the evidence before making a decision prior to
Dec. 31, when the Health Canada exemption that allows the Insite
facility to operate expires, he added.

Later yesterday, a Toronto research scientist issued a statement,
signed by 130 prominent doctors and scientists, suggesting the
government is more concerned about ideology than science in its
approach to Insite.

"The health of a nation is placed in peril if our leaders ignore
crucial research findings simply because they run contrary to a rigid
policy agenda driven by ideology or fixed beliefs," Stephen Hwang, an
associate professor at the University of Toronto's medicine
department, says in the statement, which is being published in the
medical journal Open Medicine.

Adrian Dix, the provincial NDP health critic, also blasted the
minister, accusing him of distorting the evidence regarding Insite.
"The evidence is in -- the safe injection site is working," he told
reporters.

"The federal minister of health should be showing leadership and
instead he's got some sort of message box from the National Citizens
Coalition."

(The coalition is a right-leaning organization that lobbies for free
enterprise and small government. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a
former president.)

The CMA had little to say about the issue yesterday. Asked about the
future of Insite, out-going president Colin McMillan said only that
his association strongly supports a harm-reduction program that
includes prevention, treatment and rehabilitation.

B.C. Health Minister George Abbott promised in June to urge the
federal government to approve three supervised drug-injection sites in
Victoria as a research project, but Clement said nothing about that
yesterday.

Clement said Ottawa is also stepping up its fight against tobacco,
aiming to reduce the percentage of smokers to 12 per cent by 2011 from
19 per cent. For those aged 15 to 17, the government hopes to see the
rate drop to nine per cent from 15.