Thank you.
Madam Chair, I have another question of the minister. He has removed harm reduction from the four pillars and now there are three pillars of drug policy nationally.
The question I would like to ask the minister is this. Does he disagree fundamentally with the concept of harm reduction, which is a hallowed public health principle not only in substance abuse but in any public health pillars dealing with public health problems? Harm reduction simply means you reduce the death, mortality, and morbidity in patients while you are getting them to treatment and to where you can help them. You decrease the amount.
Madam Chair, I want to say that as a physician I have had patients who were addicted, who have told me when I tried to help them that they didn't care. All their friends had died before the age of 30. They were going to die, so they didn't really care.
What harm reduction does...and what Insite has done is it has given these people hope that they need not die, hope that they need not get a deadly illness, and that has given them the ability to seek help, to seek detox, and to seek treatment, as you have clearly seen in the results. This is a group who would never have done that before.
The minister has therefore focused on prevention. One of the things we see from Health Canada is that the minister, through Health Canada, has put out a series of advertisements with regard to prevention. Madam Chair, I want to suggest that in fact in the United States that is exactly what is being done. The National Institute on Drug Abuse in the United States has evaluated the national media campaign in the U.S., which is extremely similar to the one in Canada, and it has said it is not effective.
So I would like the minister to tell us why he is embarking on an ineffective course of action. May I have a short answer from the minister, please?