I think this idea of separating treatment from harm reduction is a bit odd. As a physician, I can tell you that western medicine is entirely about harm reduction. We do not cure hypertension. We do not cure diabetes. We do not cure depression. We do not cure heart failure. We simply treat them and reduce the harm that people have from their diseases.
This goes back all the way to St. Thomas More, who's sort of the father of modern medicine in many ways. That's what we've been doing. We haven't been doing curative work. We've been doing harm reduction work. There's effective WHO endorsed treatment for addictions. We have guidelines that don't have anything to do with the manufacture of drugs.
The use of effective, cheap, generic medication that could save thousands of lives as part of a treatment program that even family doctors could prescribe with a little bit of training is not rolling out the way it should in this country. We have more restrictions on physicians in prescribing these medications than we have in prescribing the pain medications.
I think we can do a lot more, even within the existing framework. When we talk about harm reduction, why are we making this false dichotomy? We reduce harm by wearing hockey pads and helmets when we play hockey. We reduce harm when we use unleaded gasoline instead of gasoline. We do this because we believe there are certain things that just have to happen in society. We want the benefits of the drugs, but we reduce the harms from them. That's where the innovation comes from.