I agree with the Oct. 20 letter by John Trainor decrying the expenditure of our tax money on compensation for Omar Khadr and safe injection sites, while much higher priorities remain unfunded, such as the examples he noted of epi-pens and prostate cancer screening.
It is grossly unfair that self-inflicted problems, such as substance abuse, receive funding, while the more pressing needs of the general population are neglected. The next time you have to wait months for an urgent medical test, or wonder why prescription drugs are not covered by Medicare, think about the millions spent on caring for those who have consciously chosen a life that will make them forever dependent on the largesse of the taxpayers. And yet they are the ones who garner the most sympathy or at least the most attention - their problems are ceaselessly being discussed by all levels of government each of which provides funding. As well, numerous non-governmental welfare agencies are constantly pleading for more support.
Money is simply a way of setting priorities. Is helping addicts truly more important than anything else for which we could use that money? I don’t think so.
We could instead spend that money on a multitude of other truly worthy causes. For example, for low-income housing or on research on cures for cancer or childhood diseases. Yet instead, we have chosen to spend it to keep addicts in a lifestyle they have chosen so they can continue to be a burden on the welfare system, require the use of even more resources to police their behaviour and fail to contribute to society.
The use of the term disease to describe addictions, including alcoholism, has become common place, as if to imply that these things just happen and are out of the control of the addict.
Yes, there are many factors that can provide a path to addiction, and I would not for a moment place 100 per cent of the blame on the shoulders of the addict. Yet, use of an addictive substance is ultimately and always an individual choice.
And lest anyone jump to any unwarranted conclusion about what sort of person I am, let me say that not only was I a homeless, single mother at one, thankfully brief, point in my life, but at the moment, earn minimum wage in a part-time job.
Never did I contemplate using illegal or addictive drugs. Having struggled through some very hard times as a woman in my 20s and coming out the other side, I resent taxes being taken to keep others in a life which I chose to avoid but which they did not. Nor do I believe it right to tax my minimum wage-earning colleagues to compensate for the poor choices of others.
My greatest fear is that we are collectively acting as enablers for the very behaviours that all of us would wish to prevent. We need to rethink our priorities as a society.
Maria Ungaro
Vernon