While the source of the report may seem strange to some, coming from an HIV/AIDS organization, the authors state that their concern is the continual increase in numbers of HIV/AIDS case being caused by sharing needles. The medical bill for treating injection caused HIV/AIDS in the city of Vancouver alone is $215 million dollars a year. If nothing is done to prevent the use of illicit drugs these costs will continue to mount all across the country.

Of course this report is based on the programming of the previous government, so why release it now before the current government has had a chance to unveil their plan for dealing with illicit drug use. The answer is that the Conservative Party has made it clear all along that they are planning on taking even a harder line on law enforcement and doing even less in the way of providing funds for prevention and treatment.

While the previous government had been talking about the possible decriminalization of marijuana, the Conservatives promised in the last election campaign to scrape that plan and increase penalties for usage and make precursor drugs harder to come by. Not once did they make any mention of treatment or prevention programs.

In fact when contacted the government spokesperson made no bones about the fact that they will be putting an even heavier emphasise on law enforcement then prior governments. His claim that Canadians said that's what they want is somewhat spurious, as the majority of Canadians in previous polls had supported the idea of decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana.

According to the study that in spite of the high amounts of money already spent on law enforcement actual illicit drug use in Canada is on the rise, and with it so too the cost to the health cares system with the resulting increase in injection related cases of HIV/AIDS. Combine that with fact that there is no evidence that increased law enforcement programming decreases drug usage, the case for spending more energy on prevention, risk reduction, and treatment when it comes to illicit drugs becomes that much stronger.

But that doesn't seem to matter to our new government. According to Dr. Thomas Kerr, a professor in the University of British Columbia's medical faculty, and one of the reports authors, Canada does not have an evidence based drug policy. "I'm paid to treat disease and death, and I don't like what I'm seeing," he says. "There's way too much ideology and politics, and not enough science and principle."

Judging by the reactions coming from the office of the current Minister of Health, and the rest of the Conservative government, I don't think Dr. Kerr should be holding his breath waiting to see anything different soon.