Our current Prime Minister will probably be remembered in history not as the Prime Minister who brought sanity to our Parliamentary system but, the Prime Minister who legalized marijuana in Canada for Canadians. This after a Commission of Inquiry (1972) into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, right?
Got him lots of votes and put Canada on the slippery slope to what has now become the opioid crisis. He was, for several years of his administration, almost as high in the political polls as his supporters were high on marijuana which, if one listens to the Loonie Left, does not lead to increased drug use!
Do you think the Commission got it right?
From the CBC Morning Brief comes the following quote:
“More Canadians are using stimulants such as cocaine, new federal data suggests, and experts warn the trend is contributing to a high percentage of drug-related deaths”.
In one year, 2016, there were 2861 opioid-related deaths in Canada, which is equivalent to eight people dying each day, according to sources and that is just one year!
According to Injury Epidemiology in an on-line article tracking fatal firearm deaths in Canada from 2016 – 2020: “Over the 5-year period, we identified 4005 deaths…”
More people in one year than were shot in five died by opioid overdose. Yet the villain in Canada remains the firearm in the hands of legal owners in the minds of the politicians.
There seems little chance that our current crop of political pundits can stop the bleeding and the surge in drug related deaths as we go forward singing the praises of Prime Minister Trudeau’s Sunny Ways approach to running the country.
According to the National Library of Medicine web site, quoting an article from Health Promotion Chronic Disease Prevention Canada, dated June, 2018:
“In Ontario, over the past five years, opioid- related ED visits increased by almost 50%. More specifically, ED visits for heroin rose fourfold to 5.7 per 100 000 population and more than doubled for synthetic opioid poisonings (including fentanyl), reaching 5.5 per 100 000 population in 2016/17. Rates have increased by 65% among males and 30% among females. The increases were greatest in the younger age groups (25 to 44 years), where rates almost doubled, reaching 57 per 100 000 population in 2016/17. Again, these increases mostly occurred over the past three years”.
When viewed in context, considering the recent court ruling on assault style rifles and the Government’s Order In Counsel, there seems to be a disconnect here between the virtue signalling anti-firearms side of the table and the reality of the national health crisis involving opioids.
So, my question is, where is the public outrage with respect to the number of deaths from the opioid crisis? Canadians have clearly raised legitimate concerns about the number of shootings in many urban areas of the country.
However, there seems to be a deafening silence when it comes to the tragedy that is the opioid overdose crisis in this country by the very people that should be most concerned; our politicians.
We need to read the results of a new national inquiry, not the results in the National Enquirer!