Canada’s historic vote in June to legalise cannabis is yet another nail in the coffin of the so-called War on Drugs, conceived in the 1970s by then US-president Richard Nixon, writes Natalie Sharples.
“So called” because it was deliberately conceived to obscure what it really was: not a war on substances at all, but on Black people and the anti-war left.
About 200 nurses and midwives rallied outside NSW Parliament House on September 18 to demand formal nurse-to-patient ratios in all hospitals.
The aged care sector should be publicly run, adequately funded and with a high standard of living, says the Victorian Socialists. The current problem is not market failure. The problem is the market itself.
After decades of successfully avoiding responsibility for the consequences of its glyphosate herbicide, Monsanto has been ordered to pay US$39 million to cancer sufferer Dewayne Johnson by a San Francisco court, writes Alan Broughton.
Monsanto was also fined $250 million. This is the first of about 8000 such cases pending in the United States. Shareholders in Bayer, the huge German chemical company that purchased Monsanto in June for $60 billion, lost 10 billion euros as a consequence.
Today, Tarshiha is promoted on AirBnB as Ma’alot-Tarshiha in the Galilee region of Israel and, depending on your budget, you can book somewhere chic and stylish to take in the stunning views or a more humble, village style experience. Seventy years ago though, Tarshiha was a village in Palestine.
Sources have informed Green Left Weekly that the new CEO of Barwon Health in Victoria is on the warpath and the target appears to be patient services.
Barwon Health incorporates University Hospital Geelong, Geelong’s only public hospital and the only tertiary-level hospital outside of Metropolitan Melbourne. The hospital’s catchment area extends from Werribee to the South Australian border, encompassing more than 350,000 Victorians and up to 500,000 for certain specialised treatments.
Chanting “Fund the gap or we’ll be back,” more than 200 health workers protested outside Victorian health minister Martin Foley’s office on August 16 to demand the Labor state government restore funding to community mental health services. Services have been severely affected by the state government’s decision to cut $75 million from mental health funding.
From your morning coffee to your afternoon alcoholic drink with friends, drugs play a significant role in society. However, the war against drugs that has plagued society has resulted in a differentiation between the legal drugs we consume and the drugs that are criminalised by the government.
According to 2016 government data, 8.5 million people — 43% of Australians — have used recreational drugs and illegally obtained pharmaceuticals for recreational or self-medication uses.
The premise seems simple and hard to argue with: establish an online database for medical records, controlled by the patients themselves, to improve access to crucial information for healthcare providers.
“REJECTING ROOM”, screamed the front page of the Herald Sun on July 6, in a very clever pun on North Richmond’s safe injecting room that had opened a few days earlier.
“Addicts snub injecting facility” and “Nothing changed in heroin hotspot” sat above the main cover slogan to emphasise the point about ungrateful “druggies”.
Labor Opposition leader Bill Shorten delivered his budget reply speech on May 10, promising to deliver a “bigger, better and fairer tax cut for 10 million working Australians”.
The recent pill testing trial at the Groovin’ the Moo music festival, demonstrated why pill testing is an effective harm minimisation activity but also why we need to end drug prohibition in Australia and to effectively regulate the quality and supply of drugs here.