Drug shame near primary school

[eggman]

The media always highlights "the anxious wait" for people who've recently had a needlestick injury without ever noting the fact that transmission is extremely unlikely. I notice they seem to keep extending the widow period every time these sorts of articles are published too. For HIV, the window period is 3 months and for hep C it's 6 months.

and this is exactly what perpetuates this myth in our society today. Everyone is way more eager to believe what they read in papers like the Herald in Victoria and the Telegraph in NSW rather than look at the real statistics. Of course these people are in for an anxious wait, they read these papers too and all they know is you get stck with a needle and your HIV positive in 6 months.

mrK!NGP!N: Your comments are coming from frustration and you are not thinking about the big picture; and surely you cant be serious that homicide should be the penalty for being an IV user. I think your beef is more with a certain socio-economic sector of the society. It was pointed out in one of the other threads that IV users are from various walks of life. I associate with many of the so called 'functioning' IV users, they wear a suit mon-fri, have a european car and pay a mortgage - should they also be beamed up the backside of thier heads?

Kandy_Boo: Shooting galleries are an excellent solution and would be a fantastic answer, so to would be the govt monitored production and supply of heroin. However, we live in the real world where if the majority of the voting public don't like it; the govt wont support it. Then throw big business and finance into the equation and you can just forget about it.

Last thing, promise if you are reading this and you are a smoker, or most specificaly one of those smokers who through cigarrette butts on the ground, think about it next time you do that. Inconsiderate IV users are putting lives in danger and so are you. A small child can choke to death on a cigarrette butt as easily as get stuck by a needle.

 

[aunty establishment]

John Candy: I wrote you a reasoned response but Bluelight ate it and I don't have time to retype it. You make some valid points and I don't mind the criticism, but I am actually a licenced needle/syringe provider (though I don't practice any more as I live overseas now) and I like to think I'm reasonably informed on the topic. You're probably right, I am dulled to the issue, because I lived in the middle of it for so long and life is really not that bad for these kids. A needle stick injury can happen anywhere and even if it does, there's little to suggest you'll contract hep C or HIV.

Kingpin: You can be immunised for Hep B, so no...it's not worse than HIV. What's worse than HIV is ignorance, which unfortunately you are not alone in suffering from

 

[John Candy]

^^ Aunty, thankyou for writitng the response which was deleted, I know how frustrating that is, so thankyou. Regarding what I said, sorry, I went off without a) knowing the full facts myself and b) without giving you the benifit of the doubt that you actually may know what you are talking about. So once again, sorry.

Now, besides all that I do agree with some of the things that I said (as badly termed as they were) and I am glad that you agree with them too. Things like the public perception of needles, whether the fear of catching an infection from a needle is well founded or not, nobody wants to get stuck regardless.

Also that choice of schooling is not always as simple as "don't live in Junkietown" etc etc....

So, no bad blood ey? (pardon the pun)

Cheers.