Needle exchange in prison

Last week was one of the most depressing weeks I've had in some time.Sometimes it seems the forces of intolerance have taken over the agenda.Then I remembered that intolerance is the rule of the day and listening to them rant is the price one pays to be an advocate for reform.It's sometimes really hard to listen to the way they trumpet things,even good things,because of the way they have to make everything about them being right and that their way is the only way to think and everybody else is wrong. Today,I read that the HIV-AIDS people are asking for needle exchanges in prisons.This isn't the first or even the tenth time that they've done this.I'm sure Stephen Harper or Wally Opal will throw the memo straight in the trash without comment.I was one of the unlucky people that became positive for hep C while in prison.I always had my own works but prison being prison there's often no time to clean up between injections or to obtain bleach.Bleach became contraband as soon as the institutions found out it was what people used to clean syringes.You got 15 days for a syringe and 10 days for bleach.Both had to be hidden in what usually turned out to be less than sanitary conditions.Several years back some politicians went on a tour of prisons and one of the things they looked at was the idea of a needle exchange.I have no idea what the justification is for denying a needle exchange policy in prison.Inmates will always find a set of works and do their thing.That's obviously not something the institutional heads are willing to concede. At the very least they should stop seizing syringes and allow inmates access to bleach.With all the things a heroin user is supposed to fear the only thing that caused me any lasting damage was prison policy.I had a lot of dental problems but just as much of that was caused by an overzealous effort by our drug squad to persuade me to open my mouth.When I came to I was short a tooth and a lot of my upper gum must have been stuck to somebody's hand cuff.I lost all my front teeth eventually, from neglect and bad diet but it's all repairable except for the Hep C.Just another example of how the drug war kills more people than the drugs ever could.The school board health officer released a report yesterday stating that students were using less alcohol, tobacco and marijuana but were showing up obese and with more STD's and were very unfit in general.Because the pot use was down the report was said to be a positive one?Another example of society's disconnect from truth or reality whenever drugs are in the picture.There are days when I seriously think that if most people on the planet dropped dead it would be seen as a great victory in the war on drugs because of the drop in drug use.