Pubdate: Tue, 04 Jun 2013
Source: Other Press, The (CN BC Edu)
Copyright: 2013 The Other Press
Contact:  http://www.theotherpress.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2684
Author: Sophie Isbister

THE TRUTH ABOUT RIGHT-WING CRACK ADDICTS

Rob Ford, Harm Reduction, and Hypocrisy

After taking a blow in the polls during the British Columbia 
provincial election on May 14, Canadian left-wingers enjoyed a bit of 
schadenfreude from the east, in the form of Toronto's Conservative 
Mayor, Rob Ford, and his now infamous crack video.

In case you spent the last half of May without an Internet 
connection, I'll get you up to speed: there is a video in existence, 
viewed by two Toronto Star reporters and one reporter from the 
website Gawker.com, which appears to depict Mayor Ford smoking crack 
cocaine. Gawker broke the story on May 16, and quickly set up a 
Kickstarter account (affectionately called the Crackstarter) with the 
intent to raise the $200,000 the owners of the video want for it. The 
Kickstarter has already raised the money, but no tape has yet materialised.

So who's Rob Ford? Accused of sexually harassing female opponents, 
charged with a DUI, and famous for public drunkenness, Ford doesn't 
have the best record-and that's just his personal life, not his 
political record. To give you a taste of that, here's something he 
said back when he was a lowly city counsellor: "If you are not doing 
needles and you are not gay, you wouldn't get AIDS probably, that's 
bottom line... those are the facts." Anti-fact, anti-bike lane, 
anti-media, and anti-LGBTQ; you could call Rob Ford the anti-Gregor 
Robertson, basically the polar opposite of the mayor in Canada's 
major West Coast city.

But to me, the most appalling aspect of this whole controversy is the 
attitude that Ford and other right-wing politicians take towards drug 
addicts that aren't their cronies. According to the Gawker report 
that shed international light on the scandal, Ford and his other 
crack-smoking buddies in Toronto's elite all get their goods from the 
same dealer. A lot of people are smoking crack and ingesting all 
kinds of controlled substances in the city of Toronto, but the only 
ones that Ford and his ilk seem to hate are the poor ones.

Which only reinforces my belief that it isn't drug addicts that 
right-wing politicians hate, it's poor drug addicts. Conservatives 
don't hate the investment banker who sniffs an eight ball up his nose 
seven times a week; they don't hate the business owner who does 
heroin every day and can afford it; and they don't hate alleged 
politician crackheads like Rob Ford, who is publicly adamant that he 
is not stepping down and intends to run in and win the next mayoral election.

So what kind of drug addicts do conservatives hate? They hate the 
ones they have to see. They hate the intravenous drug users who would 
benefit from safe injection sites (proven to save lives), which Ford 
has vocally opposed. They hate impoverished, street-entrenched youth 
who hustle for $10 rocks whenever they can. And they hate the 
homeless drug users-just not enough to give them homes, as evidenced 
by this Ford quote from 2005 on harm reduction: "It's euthanasia. 
You're just giving them a place to kill themselves. That's what is 
going to happen. You might as well just have a crematorium beside the 
crack house." Ford went on to say, "I know for a fact that tough love 
has worked and I'm talking from personal experience. If you just 
enable someone and give them a place to live and money, nothing changes."

Easy for you to say, Mr. Ford. Nobody's taking away your home and 
money, and nobody ever threatened to. Rob Ford, and his hypocritical 
attitude toward drug addicts, is emblematic of the entire failed 
right-wing approach to eradicating the illness that is drug addiction.
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