Vancouver combats heroin by giving its addicts the best smack in the world

It seems counterintuitive that doctors in Vancouver, Canada are giving patients free heroin, but that’s exactly the point

People who battle heroin addiction spend a lot of their time looking for their next fix. This often means selling their bodies for money, breaking into cars, or robbing people in order to satisfy their need for heroin. What if there was a way to allow them to get their heroin fix without harming anyone else? This is exactly the treatment that is being prescribed for such individuals in Vancouver.

While only currently available for 26 registered patients, doctors are prescribing them with a 3 times a day dosage of heroin in order to allow them to function normally while working or carrying out daily tasks. This practice has its origins in Europe, and is now reaching the west.

For those who do not wish or simply can’t bring themselves to kick their heroin habits, this is the best alternative. This practice allows such individuals to fulfill their need, while being the least dangerous drug addicts that they possibly can be.

Men Defining Rape: A History

It seems counterintuitive that men have been defining what constitutes the rape of a woman for thousands of years. For example, The Code of Hammurabi states that the rape of a woman is simply property damage to her father. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 states that if you rape a virgin woman you must give her father 50 shekels and bring her to the altar.

There are countless examples of this throughout history. Rape has had a very unstable and constantly shifting definition. Dr. Lawson Tate, a 19th century gynecologist, went as far to state that it isn’t rape if the woman doesn’t squirm to escape a man. This man helped the police with criminal investigations, including rape, and was certain that a woman couldn’t be actually raped if she didn’t want it.

Feminists have been fighting to raise the age requirement for statutory rape consideration since the 1890’s. Later feminists proposed to get rid of virginity requirements and and exceptions under marriage, in which they eventually succeeded. They also wanted to make rape definitions gender neutral.

It took until 2012 for the FBI to update its definitions of forcible rape. The new legal definition contains more forms of sexual assault. This includes mental or physical incapacity, intoxication from drugs or alcohol, or age.

That Daily Shower Can Be a Killer

It seems counterintuitive that a daily shower could be viewed as a deadly risk, but that’s exactly what it is for someone who is elderly. Falling is a very common cause of death for older people.

The author proposes that the risk of falling the shower could be about 1 in 1000. However, with a task such as a shower being so frequent as every single day, the risk is absolutely there. At that rate, it would take less than three years to fall in the shower and possibly die.

The people of New Guinean have a kind of “Constructive Paranoia” when it comes to repeated risks. Living in America means that we have a lot of ways to recover from disaster and there aren’t as many threats to us that we really have to worry about. New Guineans don’t have a lot of doctors or security personnel to heal/protect them. Studies show that we undermine a lot of mundane ways to die in preference of worrying about things such as crazed gunmen or terrorist attacks, which are things that we can’t control.

We should develop some kind of “hyper vigilance” but not let it control our lives. We can do this by assessing every situation for what could happen, and how frequently we will be ending up in these situations. The goal is to keep our risk of dying far below 1 in 1000 each time we carry out a task.