16 yo: first drunk, how not to pick up girls, Navy Rum.

At different times in my life  I’ve felt forever 17.

Part of that is that I got drunk for my first time at this age.  When people get drunk for the first time their emotional development takes a hit. The more times a person gets drunk or stoned the more they’re actually subjecting their brain to a chemical brain injury. Alcohol, which had once been of no importance in my life, went from that family relative abstinence position, to being a part of most of my recreation.  With a decade or so all my friends drank socially. I married women who came from alcoholic families and enjoyed drugs and alcohol as I did.  Smoking a joint was taboo in my youth but by my 20’s I’d smoke pot in the hippy era, occasionally then hashish in Morocco.

30 per cent of people simply don’t use drugs or alcohol.  60 percent don’t like the effect. They are the true social drinkers, one or two glasses with meals at most.  Maybe having tried a drug but not persisted.  By contrast I’m part of the 10%.  I’ve tried most things once and really did like the feeling that came with red wine , nicotine and marijuana.  I’m thankful I never liked anything else particularly. I certainly am thankful that crack and fentanyl weren’t available when I was young because like cigarettes they’re very addictive causing physiological dependence rapidly.  I’d smoke a pipe monthly then weekly then daily and switch to cigarettes and spend that last year  ‘trying to quit’. 

Whenever I quit,  eventually I started smoking again,  several times after months of being off cigarettes.  I’d plan to quit drinking for a year knowing that I’d always restarted smoking when I was drinking.I’d also in my last year of smoking tried to use marijuana to quit only to be rolling ‘shake’ marijuana and Drum tobacco together in the last months.  I was married to a woman with a severe cocaine and drug addiction so admit I used cocaine a half dozen times but thankfully I preferred a glass of wine or a bottle of wine and a joint.  

Modern marijuana, BC Bud is almost as powerful as LSD.I’d tried that in my 20’s and like mushrooms it simply ended after a few times.  Hallucinogens are like that for the vast majority of people.  No major addictive capacity. Not like alcohol , nicotine or cocaine or opiates.  

I was pleased  to join AA eventually as an adult because a friend said as I’d stopped drinking and smoking for months I might enjoy the “club’ of folk who had also stopped drinking. All that was required for membership was a ‘desire not to drink’.  I had that desire because I was sure if I drank I’d pick up a cigarette.  In those days we believed that lung cancer and COPD rose exponentially after 10 years of smoking history. When I reached 10 years I quit but three months later started.  I was abhorrent of smoking , the stink, the ritual, and the abuse to the body.  Marijuana smoke was less bad but the combination of nicotine and marijuana was the worst. So there I was a binge drinker who’d quit nicotine several times that year, 1 to 3 months each time only to start while drinking.  Cocaine was going around always at the parties and I passed. My Aboriginal alcoholic friend amused me by trading cocaine for booze. I could relate. I also felt that if my partner was ever to address her cocaine , pot, nicotine and booze  addiction I’d have to set the example by quitting drinking   I’d married her because I liked that she had all these addictions and her own supply and dealers  at the time.  I really liked her black friend who was a regular pharmacy.  I’d tried ‘geographical cures’ but they’d fail because we’d just start together months later somewhere else.  

At 17 that’s when this part of my life began.  We’d call it fun, fun and trouble and then trouble.  It was fun for a decade or two then the trouble began.  I liken alcohol and drugs to an external ‘stress reduction control’ ,  like a ‘thermostat’.  Our natural systems have amazing resilience and flexibility.  The external models are unfortunately only good for minor or acute stresses and tend to worsen outcomes when there are severe or chronic stresses.  As I was attracted to women with addiction their emotional thermostats were broken. It was like I was always with a 13 yo and my emotional development was 17. Under the stress of work and marriage, more alcohol made it more difficult rather than easier to function. Like driving a car, where the road gets bumpy and a drink might calm the nerves.  But as the bumpiness continues and  increases and the journey persists .more alcohol simply makes the driving worse.  That’s what relationships are like with alcohol and pot. My last experience with a partner on cocaine was even a hundred times worse. I never want to live with someone addicted to opiates or crack. The blood level of the drug dictates the irritability and anger of the person.  It’s nothing to do with external factors.  I tell people, we drink at funerals or baptisms.  Eventually we “flat line” and the drugs or alcohol serve to help us ‘feel’ again. These are all ‘depressives’ and ‘anxiety’ inducing. For many it becomes quite upsetting even terrifiying to have any variation from the stable depressive state so drugs and alcohol are then maintained to manage the emotional and at times physical withdrawal. What ever shows externally is merely a reflection of the amount of drugs on board. When she was on cocaine she was a sexy happy brilliant woman. Off cocaine she was a lying crazy dangerous psychopath.  

Which is one of the issues with drugs and alcohol.  In psychiatry they are the ‘great chameleons’.  A chronic cocaine abuse can not be distinguished from a borderline personality disorder, narcissist ,or even psychopath.  All drug and alcohol addicts with rare exception appear as Bipolar II.  Some schizoaffefctives and a whole lot of manic depressives and social phobia are simply drug or alcohol addiction or withdrawal.  Of drugs the psychiatric conditions reduce dramatically.

I’m an addiction psychiatrist now. So well 17 was a sweet year with so much positive happening I’ve spent a lot of time individually and in therapy reflecting on that first drunk..

A friend whose name I forget had his license and got his father’s car.  We were all over 16 but I’d not learn to drive or get my drivers license until I was into my 20’s.  My second wife where the male members of the family mostly died of alcoholism taught me to drive but I will ever be thankful to her and her father who taught her, on how to park.  I can park any vehicle in the tiniest space thanks to her dad’s professional formula.  She was a great teacher as well as being beautiful.  My father was a great driver but not a good teacher. I tried to teach one fellow to drive and that was my life time limit on teaching someone to drive. My mother caused two driver instructors to quit their employment and choose another career.  

My friend had this Mercury convertible with lots of fin.  Baby blue and white.  We’d found a bottle of navy rum and planned this weekend. Four guys who I don’t remember were a part of this fiasco.  We’d never drunk and we were all virgins and we’d never dated.  I now realize that this had to have happened when I was 16 and a half before I met Nina.  

17 may well have been so significant because I met Nina.

This memory lane exercise is revealing that way. I know I was still in the gym club because Keith is around.  I really wonder who else was with us that night. 4 guys. The leader from Wildwood had the dad’s car and parents not home. .  He knew me when I was seeing Kathy because he was always asking if I’d got laid and I’d say no and ‘itls none of your business’.  “She’s going go be wearing panties on her honeymoon with a hole in them”..   I remember him saying that. He was definitely an Iago.  Crude too. But a virgin like the rest of us.   He had that false bravado and sex experienced talk that the least competent often feigned to put the group off the scent of fear.  

This night we planned to pick up some girls and take them back to his place where the parents had left him foolishly with the house and car.  

I truly remember honestly believing that as we had a car and a bottle of rum and a private place to go girls would be chasing after us to have sex with us. Really. It was a fairly universal belief of boys my age at that time.  Women could not resist booze and cars and the shagging pad.  Really. I know it sounds crazy but adolescents is an acceptable age of frank insaniety.

We were quite shocked that this fundamental belief about man hood and women and dating was rapidly shot down that day.

We drove all over the city pulling up beside pretty girls, single and in pairs, 4 guys in a cnovertible and we’d try a wide variety of ‘Hey beautiful, want to ride’....’hey gorgeous, come join us we have a bottle of rum” . “Hop in we’ve got booze and we’re having a party”.

This did not prove a winning formula.  We as guys were definitely shocked.  Really shocked. We even showed them the bottle of unopened Navy Rum and the driver revved the car but nothing happened. 

It was worse.  I  remember this well. Most of the  girls ran away some giggling others not. .  The worst of the runners was the girl who ran through the hedge falling down and picking herself up pulling her white sweater out of the branches and looking back over her shoulder as she gained earth departure momentum and trajectory.

We really couldn’t figure out what was our problem.  Really, dozens of girls ran.  All turned their back on us.  We really were just trying every pick up line we’d heard in the media. I pity the young men today raised on rap.  

Finally after hours of failure we met success. We pulled up beside two sisters at a bus stop and offered them a ride. We showed them the rum and their eyes lit up.

Years later I would learn that they both had hyperthyroidism which explained their bug eye look. They were also already alcoholics because the sight of the bottle had them climbing over the convertible door into the back seat.

Now we were ready.

Back at the friends place the girls opened the bottle and passed out drinks, mega shots for themselves.  They ‘d eventually drink half the bottle. One of the guys began to puke. More kids showed up with beer and someone had gin. Another kid was puking in the back. 

 Keith Carter was there and did a back handspring. I remember that because I tried it and didn’t make it. Years later I’d see a movie with Denzel Washington as a pilot who drank and remembered Keith, the gymnast who could perform flawlessly in any state.  I wasn’t  an Olympic athlete or Denzil Washington.  I simply cannot do back handsprings drunk.  I actually tried it twice in the living room breaking the lamp the second time. I really thought with the advantage I gained on Navy Rum, I would do them better than Keith. This was truly not the case.  The guy whose house it was called a halt to this important lesson before more furniture was broken.  

  The girls were sitting drinking and chain smoking and we guys were suddenly competing doing strange antics.  Some guy had gone out to puke and fallen into the hedge getting himself trapped till some one rescued me.   The music got louder and louder. 

I had never been drunk. I was drunk. I was fascinated by the lack of coordination. This became readily apparently when Keith walked on his hands down the stairs maneuvering around the corner without difficulty and continuing to the bottom. That’s when the major train wreck occurred. I walked down on my hands to the first landing but rolled down the next set of stairs.. Some kid who wasn’t a gymnast had followed me and rolled down two flights of stairs crashing into the guy who like me only made it to the first landing.  A bunch of bodies tangled together at the bottom caused weird laughter and required more rum.  

The police sirens sounded and the house was exited. I don’t know what happened to the girls. Maybe a taxi sometime.  My friend was passed out on the kitchen floor.  The Rolling Stones  “I can’t get no Satisfaction’ was playing loud on the parents stereo .  More guys with more booze had arrived when someone said there were girls. I vaguely remember the girls wanting to go when the rum was finished.  There’d been some dancing.

My vague recollection is doing that staggering run across a city street to the huge dike around the golf course. There were two guys with me. We looked across at the house where there were two or three police cars and kids being dragged and being put in the back seats.  Everyone was under age. No one was hurt. Maybe the police took the girls home.  Some kids were taken to the police station. I have no idea. I was puking on the dike and falling down standing up and falling down.  Eventually I just stayed down.  The two guys with me were trying to hurry me. That’s when a police car headed onto the dike. 

“Billy’s too drunk to run. He’s going to get us all caught. Let’s throw him down the dike.  He’ll be safe. We can run then.”

So next thing I know I’m being picked up from where I’ve chosen to sleep and one guys got my legs and one guys got my arms.  Then I’m rolling down the side of the dike and ending up in bushes on the side of the golf course.

The police car went  by following my friends who out ran it and would never be associated with that night.  

I woke up sometime in the wee hours and staggered home. It would not be the first time I had this experience of ‘returning to the barn’  on Autopilot.  I recall  zombie lurching drunken staggering falling progress maneuver well, not without shame. 

It was a relief when I got to my yard.  Like Robert Peary finally reaching the North Pole.  The dog didn’t recognize me or didn’t like the reek of puke and navy rum. He began barking ferociously while I shushed him as he backed up before me to the back door. He eventually greeted me tail wagging and stopped barking. I opened the unlocked back door and got into the the inside vestibule. 

My father opened the door to the kitchen which must have surprised me because I’d been using that as a prop and fell face forward on the kitchen floor my stomach hitting the top stair. I’m convinced that helped the next event.  My puke spewing out of me to cover the whole kitchen floor soiling my parents slippers.

Dad shouted, “You’re drunk!”

And I replied, “Who squealed?”

I pity my poor mom cleaning up after the drunk. I would do this for many a woman and man in years to come. I’d not be a puker after that night except rarely. Other than that first occasion I was sufficiently aware that I’d stop the car or head off to hug the porcelain.

Mom put me in the bath tub and I remember my father saying,

“It must be drugs, Jean. With all my time in the military I’ve never seen a man this drunk.”  

Navy Rum will do it every time.  Tequila is worse. I’d never touch Navy Rum again but I saw it do this gastronomical trick on many a novice drinker in years to come. 

In the morning I had cotton mouth and the worst headache known to man. I remember going out side in white shorts and tshirt to do a head stand hoping that blood to my brain would stop the pain that was utterly untouched by the aspirin my parents gave me. I was doing the headstand when the police arrived. I couldn’t stand but sat as they asked me if there’d been any drugs. I said no. They asked me who brought the rum and I frankly didn’t know. That was it. 

I didn’t drink again for a couple of years after that and when I finally stopped for good I’d do an exercise listing all events I’d thought were ‘bad’ in my life and wow , the vast majority of them had happened under the influence of alcohol or worse when I was hung over and didn’t give a damn what I said. 

I was grounded for weeks and no longer hung out with the friends from Wildwood. I’d continue at the YMCA Gym Club but I think my parents thought less of that. I truly believed that Mom  thought Keith Carter was an angel and was disappointed when she and his mom talked. She learned then that he was mortal.   My mother was convinced that if I had just stayed in the church group I wouldn’t have come under the influence of drunks.  Truthfully looking back I think the girls were the only ones who had experience with alcohol and they truly liked it.  But they had no intention of doing anything more than drinking with us. We were certainly not a sexy lot of guys .

The Godless and Soteriology

I listened to Rev. Flowers Soteriology 101 pod cast yesterday.  My commute time in Vancouver was doubled by the fog. Everywhere medical marijuana drivers had slowed their vehicles down so they could collectively stare and say, “Wow, Man!” It really was surreal and beautiful.
Vancouver is a bipolar city with moods fluctuating with the weather and commutes fluctuating due to poor administration of the road services from anywhere between a 1/2 hour and 2 hours daily.  The real money in the city comes from crime and government.  The criminals and the elite live in the city. The commuters like me are just the modern peasants.
Soteriology is the study of “Salvation”.  An end days prescription.  Like George Carlin, “What is this hand basket and where are we going anyway.”  Every day a person not on drugs or willing to forego the Starbucks coffee waiting in the city, gets up and drives their car either north or east, heading to the country or the prairies just to get away from the boredom of Vancouver in the darkness of ‘daylight saving’ and the rain of winter.
Snow and sunshine seem preferable to whiplash seeking pirates looking for ICBC insurance windfalls offered daily by the legal lottery that runs the province.  Meanwhile ,why work when the government taxes the workers while giving a pass to the criminals and speculators.  It’s the same with guns. Criminals have them. But the government taxes those who own them and pay taxes on them.  So the government simply does the same with workers, demonizing them, and punishing them with greater and greater taxes while leaving the criminals to prosper.
Salvation sounds like a lovely contrast to the media circus and the daily toil of hedonist smog producing bike laned city life especially as the government is taxing the air we breathe and water is now bought and sold.  Death has an appeal.  Euthanasia is marketed medically along with marijuana.
It pays to check out the tourist brochures of the various religions ultimate destination offers.
I once wrote a paper on Heaven and concluded that Christianity and Taoism had the best resorts in the after life. I didn’t really care to fight each day in pagan Valhalla.  Hanging with virgins didn’t seem nearly so appealing since the virgins I knew weren’t a particularly a attractive lot.
As a doctor I also know that the hymen restorative surgical industry is a thriving business.  The introduction of the birth control pill removed the whole need for virginity that leftover from  the agricultural and herding days of breeding, eugenics and  and thoroughbred children.  Today 50 % of the children of divorce are by DNA study, not those of the father.  Despite this, the  Jews continue to step on glasses at wedding.  Muslims kill people who look at their promiscuous sisters.  Myla Cyress, the penultimate Hollywood disease attacting slut, rides her ‘wrecking ball’.  New religions like feminism are sources of perpetual anger and ‘offence’ , like nation states in the empires building colonial days. New colonialists.  Different names, same old, same old , game.
Soteriology says each religion and each culture had some purpose and meaning.  Today the Godless simply lie and deny that they really want the most toys at the end but their agenda always is world dominance for purely hedonistic reasons. They don’t have an afterlife so can’t really care for their own children.  All must cease to exist when they, Gods of their own making,  no longer exist. No wonder there is an opioid epidemic.
The Buddhists by contrast are the most truthful.  Soteriology or salvation for them is ‘nirvana’ , ‘liberation from suffering’.  Life is ‘samsara” or the never ending cycle of misery.  All Buddhist humor is a kind of Vietnam black humor which makes their laughter so infectious.  Even Kierkegaard the great Christian theologian said ‘life is suffering unto death’.  Quite a contrast to the promises of politicians, whores, bankers, marketting agencies, and Hollywood.  Nothingness is the reward of life.
The Christian ‘salvation’ is saving the soul from ‘sin’.  Sin is a word used to describe the ‘missing of a mark’.  Christianity like Zen uses an analogy of the archer. The archer shoots an arrow and if ‘Good intentions didn’t pave the road to hell’ the arrow would always hit the mark. Christianity like Science asks the question of ‘outcome measure’.  The ‘deviance’ from the aim is called ‘sin’. In science we’d explain the ‘error’ as ‘windage’ , ‘arrow’ material’ , ad infinitude.  Christians say that sin follows from separation from God. Salvation is made possible in Christianity by the life and death and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, (God entered his creation, lived it, found it in error ,  corrected it, died and resurrected..  The cross of Christianity is the ‘cross road”. It’s all about choice and freedom of choice. Also I imagine God was just a tad cross as his creation when it killed his creatures killed him suggesting either a design error, a Robert Graves sacrifice of the king or downright naughtiness of children unattended. Apparently the computer reset didn’t take a Noah flood but the cosmic fix could be put in with ‘love’.
There is also however a pesky issue of ‘predestination’ and ‘grace’ .Soteriology addresses these ultimately Unchristian factors in Christianity.
A good Christian gets ‘mansions in heaven’ and time with God.  Virgins are apparently optional and singing replaces war. It sounds much more appealing as you get older.  You also get a new body while the Muslims must make due with the resurrection of the one they died in. This explains the mass exodus of male followers of Islam to Christianity after they have suffered castration by whatever means.
Only 1 in 1000 Muslims actually get to any kind of heaven so it’s a lottery system anyway with most ending up in fire and despair just like some Christian sects who feel the stick is far better than the carrot for managing the followers. Corruptions naturally goes along with either lottery system.
The Judaism Soteriological construct is as a collective not like Christianity which is individual. Jews are never individual tourists but must travel by the bus loads. The attraction of aetheism for the likes of Marx and other Godless Jews is that many Jews simply don’t believe in an afterlife “The dead know nothing. They have no reward.”  However other Jews do believe in an afterlife, though not nearly as attractive in terms of housing as the Jewish Christian sects believed.
In Hinduism Samedhi or Moksha is the escape from ‘samsara’ the cycle of death and rebirth.  This may mean like the Buddhists a loss of individuality but it might also mean a simple closing of this book before the opening of the other. This goes with the idea of this ‘caterpillar’ existence where enlightenment is a ‘butterfly’ existence. How can a caterpillar know as a butterfly. “I am the bubble make me the sea’.  There’s closure and possibility without the idea of a human ‘body’ or the anthropomorphism associated with the mystery religions.  The Sikh seed the ‘union with God’ as a drop of water joining the sea.
There’s a sense with the Godly that we’re all going in the same direction in a sense. Pesky pagans preparing to fight forever are as challenging to be around as those who truly believe that this is it and there are no consequences, except perhaps indigestion, for eating one’s neighbour.
Rev. Francis was challenging the Calvinist notion of preditermination, the idea that God’s chosen are already picked and the out come is ‘fixed’.  This has an anthropormorphic quality considering however we find that elections, soccer games and leadership positions are ‘rigged’.  Why not think that God has ‘rigged’ this life. The least taught book of the Bible, Job, certainly challenges the notion of Satan and dualism. Satan might well have been God’s companion creation or alter ego before the creation of more entertaining humans with delusions of free will.
Personally I’ve considered myself a ‘voice over’ on a ‘comic strip’ .  The question then is who is the writer. I’m writing my life or God or worse ‘the Borg Government of Canada’. And if the ending is ‘fixed’, as my dope smoking friend believes, “why worry, be happy.”
There’s a notion of ‘happy cabbages’ and I find when I ask people ‘why’ or ‘where are you going’ or ‘what do you want in the big picture’ they commonly simply shit themselves.  I know that beurocrats are the most disturbed by that question. They hide behind platitudes and swagger with confidence but the seed of doubt and the depth of fear is so readily apparent in their eyes.
Most who join armies have said simply, I don’t know I don’t care I just want to be a tool.  I’m here to pay for my family because that hedonistically feels good. Others believe the signs offering travel and education.
I am no more than an animal, they say. I mimic the words and motions of man but really no more. Everyone agrees with me. I represent everyone. I’m schizophrenic and leave me alone. Don’t ask me such questions!!!!
Soteriology. Thank you Rev. Flowers.

Justin Trudeau Again

No one has done more for my humility than Justin Trudeau. Just when I thought I could relax on my program, that nothing could upset my serenity, along comes Justin.  Ever since he said he smoked dope and recommended we all join him and there was no consequences he lost me.
Meanwhile I can’t help but think of my friend who was caught with dope, breaking the law, went to prison for 6 months, but being a good looking boy was gang raped, tried to escape prison, to avoid gang rape, and did 7 years hard time.  Now he rides with a biker gang and my friend of youth seems so far away in those far seeing eyes of his I can’t help but think of Justin Trudeau as Canada’s Hanoi Jane.  Yes the law should be changed. And yes I understand that you smoked dope like your mom and yes decriminalization is okay. But does the Liberal party elite need to be positioned to make millions and why can the new Canadian royalty break the law and almost boast about it.  Even lie a little, making it not a big thing, while others report it wasn’t a minor things but a major deal because drug folk always ‘minimize’ their use. Like the alcoholics who say I only had a ‘couple of drinks’.
Obama admitted to breaking the law and doing cocaine but he was ‘contrite’ about it. He was respectful of the wrong he’d done and being a lawyer seemed just a whole lot smarter than Justin about his past. Bill Clinton said ‘contritely’ he smoked dope but ‘didn’t inhale’.
I work as a medical review officer. It’s really hard now.  I see men and women in high office who never did anything worse than Justin Trudeau. But my job is to urine test them and see them regularly and ensure that they seen counsellors and don’t use drugs.  They’re more innocent than Justin Trudeau. They smoked a joint once or twice but someone ‘caught’ them and their jobs are more important than part time drama teachers and Members of Parliament. For a minimum of three and sometimes 5 years they have be ‘abstinent’ and accountable for not using drugs. Even Ford went to treatment, but he wasn't a liberal.
I smoked dope when I wasn’t working.  I’d been advised by a psychiatrist to do it and was buying marijuana from a doctor and I was a wine connoisseur drinking with psychiatrists who thought I was a ‘light weight’ because I didn’t drink that much.  I’d binge on a weekend every 6 months after a long stretch of endless call. Eventually I was diagnosed with PTSD and ironically marijuana is one of the drugs of choice for this condition.  My psychiatrist who I saw for anxiety after dealing with the hangings in the suicide epidemics and too many deaths and too much family grief and insanity at home and at work, well, he was ahead of the times.
But the authorities were not. They were, as is usually the case, decades out of date and only interested in control and dominance.  This was probably the case because so many of them, like Justin Trudeau, were living a lie and smoking dope and getting drunk and whenever they could point a finger at someone else, they did.
So I peed in a jar at the beck and call of a number system and did it so much that the punitive, incredible disturbed person who was working out their personal issues in their position of authority, uneducated and ignorant about the field, was finally told there is no reason to ‘drug test, Dr. Hay, unless you do it for political reasons’.  I’ve had a lot of shit come down for defending lost causes and people with a target on their back because of their politics.  As a physician in the frontlines you are prone to getting hit by so called ‘friendly fire’.
But Justin Trudeau didn’t do thousands of hours of his time getting treatment for his ‘recreational use of marijuana.’  As it was explained to me, “marijuana was illegal’, ‘you broke the law.’  “holding office is a privilege, not a right’.
My dog was killed because I wouldn’t ‘falsify’ the results of a pot smoker who wanted to hold a high government office.  My colleagues dog was killed too.
I just see Justin Trudeau’s face and I see Stuart the white Scotty and I see him seizuring from presumably anti freeze.  The south african doctors dog was done in the same way because he like me refused to compromise our position. The police told me that was the warning and my life would be next.  Money is a major motivator.  The pay for high government office is exorbitant.  What’s killing a doctor’s dog.
Right now another drug addict is threatening to kill my dog.  It’s bringing up a lot of the old shit.  Seeing Justin Trudeau is bringing stuff up front that I thought was well buried. The nightmares have returned.
I just see Justin Trudeau and I think of the ‘double standard’ and ‘arrogance’ and ‘hypocrisy’.  I also can’t help but think of my friend Dugald Christie, the lawyer who started the Pro Bono Law in BC for the poor dying in a hit and run as he rode his bicycle to burn his robes again on the supreme courts steps, the first time because there was no ‘justice for the poor’ in Canada, this time ‘because there was no justice for the middle class’.  Only the rich like Justin Trudeau are above the law and can even shout
“Get the Fuck out of my way” grab old men and elbow women in the tit.
It cost me about a half million dollars in loss of time and a lengthy legal battle because I said ‘fuck’ in the workplace. I got kicked out of high school for saying ‘fuck’ and admitting to saying ‘fuck’. That was when Justin Trudeau’s father Pierre Trudeau was lying and saying he said ‘fuddle duck’.
It’s not surprising that people joke and say, ‘how do you know a politician is lying?  Their lips are moving.”
I was such an idealist once. I’m looking forward to death because I’ve been so disappointed in life by the lies , and bullies and the hypocrisy and now Trudeau.

So when I see him I’m actually getting stomach pains and wanting to retch. I know it’s not him. I know I’m ‘sensitive’ and he triggers me. I try not to watch the news or hear what he says. I’m more entertained by American news because they expose all the lies of Hillary , the poppycock of Bernie, and the bluster of Trump.  I think of our last election and it was like it was rigged.  I felt like I was watching a soccer game more than I ever felt watching a hockey game.  All marketing.
And the obvious playing to the low classes and the women.
It was a disgusting Justin Trudeau  titty show and the girls lapped it up.  I thought what a low we’ve come to if  this is why women got he vote, so they could get a Playgirl Playmate in the PM’s office.  Where are the women who would have objected to men voting Pamela Anderson for PM?
The young vote for the young.  The ultimate ‘yuppie’ girl and boy show so reminiscent of his father and Maggie all the while Maggie was stoned out of her gourd and Trudeau was off somewhere else when she was dry humping band members on stage.  When we will learn what Sophie’s mental illness is, to be married to a Trudeau.  That’s how my mind thinks. Twisted and sad.
Next he’s giving billions to the UN and I loathe the UN for it’s fat bureaucracy, gangster line up, all those African leaders who kill homosexuals and the Arabian leaders who have their sex slaves and the communist leaders who kill everyone else.  What a gallery of rogues. So what’s Trudeau giving $4 billion dollars to this appalling organization.
Then he’s so unscientific.  Of course there’s global warming. It’s the alternative to an ice age. But Climate Change says that man is doing it by breathing so Agenda 21 of the UN is really a communist manifesto , a totalitarian solution to the ‘skies falling ‘ propaganda.  And we’ve now got a minister of Climate Change.  The only thing I like about his cabinet is a Sikh Minister of Defence and the idea that Canada has a Sikh minister of defence before India does.  Yet I can’t help but wonder what other country in the world has a Canadian in cabinet.
All day long I see Canadians who are struggling financially. It’s happened over night. In the past I simply didn’t see so many people having trouble making ends meet.  And people out of work. I don’t know what the stats say but this last year everyone seems to be looking for work.  I was happy when everyone was employed and while the rest of the world was going through the greatest world economic crisis since the 30’s Canada was managing the best.  Now we’re selling seats on our third world bus.
I’m afraid. I’m looking forward to retirement.  I’ve worked more than 30 years, studied 12 and worked two jobs. I started work at 12.  Justin Trudeau wasn’t working hard at university, always a playboy and now he’s got the wife and kids and in laws along for his work taking vacation and doing more time ‘modelling’ than the models I actually know.
It’s all rigged too. It’s all Hollywood ‘reality tv’.  He’s a soap opera star.  Sophie and He are the new Kardashian’s.  It’s Rapp.  It’s something utterly sickening to me.
I retch inside.
And I know it’s not him.  It’s my issue.
I’m a Christian. I’m supposed to pray for him when he lies. I’m supposed to pray for him when he irritates me so much I feel nauseous.
I’m supposed to be focussing on the day and not worrying that I’ll be pushing a shopping cart or in jail because Justin Trudeau is a dark cloud on those who worked in Canada all their lives and being so young and wealthy he doesn’t care at all about the old people.
I don’t have a pension.  I’m not rich. I’ve given so much of my life to others that I had this silly dream that one day I’d be able to take some time off, a few months, a vacation.  I seem to be working a lot. But then I’m working 12 hours a day , 60 hours a week and then I’m playing hard because if I don’t do something to counteract what I hear and see I’d go insane. Mostly I feel comforted in the woods , at sea. I’m anxious a lot.  Not like I was but there’s this frustration.  I am so weary with the weight of more and more government and more and more people not working. I feel at times like I’m the last person working in Canada and I’m holding up all this interfering grandiose, overbearing royalty , this government upper class, bureaucrats upon eurocrats, and more and more administration, more and more people watching doctors do their work, telling us how to do our work and not willing to be in the frontline, millions of chiefs and no Indians.  I’m so tired of people complaining that they can’t get any services, that they’re angry that they wait months to see me and I’m late an hour and I’m supposed to be thinking about ‘customer service’ and yet there’s just no bodies and more and more paperwork and more and more people sick and unemployed and we’re being told that people need more marijuana and it’s getting sad.
Justin Trudeau may as well say it: He doesn’t think I’m a Canadian and he doesn’t want me in his country. “Get the Fuck out of my Way?”
And I just keep asking myself where can I go.  Where can I go to get away from Justin Trudeau.
Meanwhile my brother has cancer and I’m praying and thankful for the doctors and nurses and yet frustrated by the delays.  Everywhere these days, like in all communist countries, there are line ups and waitlists.  I don’t want my brother to wait.  I don’t want my patients to wait.
But I’m also old and we’re all dying.
So Justin reminds me of me when I was a stupid young man and voted for his father. My father thought I was an idiot.  “You’re not living in Quebec. The Liberal Party is only for Quebec. “  “You speak English and you’re living in western Canada, I wouldn’t mind if you voted Conservative or NDP but you’re a fool to vote Liberal.”  We didn’t know about communists back then. The Wall hadn’t fallen and all the secrets about the USSR and the Gulag were hidden. We thought Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a great intellectual. Paul Johnson hadn’t written his book, Intellectuals back then, showing the poverty of the Intellectuals and their hypocrisy.  I really was affected by the red carnation.  I didn’t know that the liberals took the blue out of canada with the rape of the flag.  The communist red colour was all Trudeau cared about.  I’d not heard the song “I guess that’s why they call it the blues” back then.
I was as young and stupid as Justin Trudeau back then.  My wife was a thousand times more beautiful and smarter but we were both always working and couldn’t afford to dress her in ten thousand dollars suits every day like Sophie. She’s a model for Sex in the City. I think it’s great for the fashion crowd in Canada. She’s marketing their wares and taking home the spoils.  It’s just that I always remember how much my wife worked to buy that first Holt Renfrew Suit . It was months of savings.  We were interns and residents back then and she needed some clothing for a special occasion. She was prettier than Sophie will ever be after a night caring for a dying neonate.  I was always so tired and so poor and such an intellectual and we couldn’t have children.  There was always the abortion in that story.
Women didn’t have choice. They couldn’t afford to have kids. They had to work.  When I was young one adult could support another adult, two children and own a house and car. Now only Justin Trudeau and Sophie can afford that luxury.  Most women just get abortions.
And they’re bringing in physician assisted suicide and the health care system doesn’t want to pay for pain meds and we’re being told not to prescribe oxycontin and my friends working with the dying are being discredited for prescribing too much pain killer.  It’s like when I found 4 brain tumours after ordering 6 MRI”s of the head and got a letter demanding that I explain why I’d ordered so many tests.  It didn’t matter that I saved lives.  It was all about the cost.  If I spend money on patients then the administrative staff can’t get their new computers and trips to the bahamas for staff meetings and all the other perks that eat up the health care budget so doctors and nurses haven’t anything for patients who are crying where only we hear them, administration never anywhere near the front line.
My soldier friend told me about counting bullets in Afghanistan and thinking about the fat cats in Washington DC.  There’s no rationing bullshit in the higher ranks.
But ‘authority comes from God’.  My psychiatrist friend says that I must ‘trust in the Lord’.  I think of the early Christians with the likes of Herod and Nero.
then I think of Carl Jung and these ‘archetypes’ are externals of my own internal world. Justin Trudeau and Sophie are just the negative parts of myself that I have n’t owned. Satan is just the ‘shadow’ the part of yourself that you haven’t forgiven.
I keep hearing stupid people tell me how Canada’s reputation in the world is great now because of the journalism and media crap.  They were ‘ashamed’ we weren’t taking more refugees.  They have this weird idea that the ‘world’ actually thinks about Canada. I loved living over seas and reading the newspapers around the world and seeing that Canada wasn’t mentioned.  Not even in the news in London or Istanbul or Tokyo. Yet the literally psychotic marketing of the liberal party is as bizarre as those people who say we must walk gently on ‘planet earth’ , ‘she’s a goddess’ and ‘feels your anger when you stomp’.  Meanwhile I’m thinking of the great stomping Tom Indian dances I  went to at the rodeo and this fruitcakes are thinking that Canada is the centre of the universe because they live in outer podunk and that the planet is conscious of a footstep. Yet they think Christians and Jews and Buddhists and Hindus are nuts for their beliefs.  Half the time these people are telling me they’re atheists or secular but their ‘god’ is money or the ‘stock market’ or their latest cosmetic vegan diet. They’re all just consumers and critics and I hate to poke their balloons but they’re idiots with a whole lot of google nonsense in their heads and mainstream media program.
I talked to an old journalist and we reminisced about the days of the Winnipeg Free Press. “I’m ashamed of what my profession is today” he said.
It’s not Trudeau. He’s just the outer trigger.
18 years ago I smoked my last joint.  I think he’s still smoking dope.  I’m glad I didn’t drink the kool aid.  I stopped smoking cigarettes. I stopped the legal and the illegal smoke. I stopped smoking. My whole body, this being that is me, this sacred temple that lives on breathing, thanked me. I’m breathing fresh air today.
I think of Justin Trudeau smoking with his friends.
I’m not envious.  I’m just sad.
More and more people are smoking these days
And we worked so hard to stop the tobacco companies. Those psychopaths in the boards, the killers of their own people, we fought them. Now they’re putting their money behind Trudeau and marijuana.
Smoke.
Up in smoke
Sulfur smells.

Gratitude derailed

Thank you for the light in the morning when I walk the dog. This morning the sky was blue and the crocuses have returned. I’ve seen daffodils and now the neighbours tulip stalks are up.  I’m so looking forward to the tulip days to come.  It’s like somehow this year I lost faith in the fall and winter coming to an end.  My brother’s diagnosis has brought me face to face with aging.  I’m seeing illness all about me in a way that I’ve not for so many years.  There’s always been the itching sensations after treating the scabies patients.  The germophobias that assail me somedays.  I know that I can’t go out from fear now some weekends.  The attacks come back. There’s this lack of faith that I’ve had.
My decision to stop marijuana smoking as occasional as it was still remains an issue too because even though I drank and that was little compared to the mainstream today I felt I was wrong to be ‘breaking the law’ by smoking marijuana. As a professional it didn’t matter that I did this on holidays or weekends. It didn’t matter that I bought my marijuana from doctors or that I smoked marijuana with doctors , psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses and lawyers. It didn’t even matter that I had seen a psychiatrist who recommended that I smoke marijuana given my wife’s illness.  All that didn’t sit well with me.  Spiritually I’d felt that I wasn’t right. I’d made a promise to God to change my life. And I felt that smoking marijuana was breaking the law and I didn’t consciously break the law.
I was and am and always was a law abiding citizen for the most part even though in Canada today the legal system and bureaucrats and parliamentarians think people who are law abiding so called good citizens are fools, that’s what I was.  I’d speed in my car occasionally but these were lapses of judgement.  The marijauana smoking was conscious. I truly believed that the State was wrong, not just in it’s views of individual behaviour with respect to drugs but with its views towards sex and a variety of ’social laws’.   As I got older I saw that Canada wasn’t a ‘free society’ in a lot of ways and when I smoked marijuana I was ‘rebelling’.
Yet here I was riding on roads made by the collective.  I was enjoying the clean water and food that came from the collective.  I was thankful for the courts and parliament for the jails and laws that fought murderers and thieves  I enjoyed so much of what our ancestors had given us in our buildings schools and churches.  I was being paid as a physician through the organization of health care. I was taught as a physician.  These were all ‘lawful’.  So what was I do ‘breaking the law’.  Why was I smoking dope.  I drank wine and that wasn’t an issue.  I was a wine connoisseur. Yet when I drank wine I smoked cigarettes and marijuana. I’d concluded as a physician that smoking cigarettes was stupid, evil, extraordinarily unhealthy and that the tobacco boards were organized crime. I further thought that our government was corrupt to arrest marijuana smokers but allow tobacco producers to be rich and major influences on the supreme court and parliament.
When I drank legal alcohol I’d smoke again though I’d quit and when I was smoking cigarettes I’d prefer a joint so I’d break the law and get some marijuana as well. I’d even tried cocaine but was glad it didn’t agree with me.  My pleasure seemed to be red wine and smoking a mix of low strength marijuana and tobaco.  I thought I was ‘cool’ when I was a little buzzed.  Like I was James Bond and Sherlock Holmes and that I could write and play guitar better. I was wrong . I also thought I was a better lover. I was slower but I don’t think I was a better lover. I know too I didn’t think about work and I didn’t worry and I was just happy to sit and let the world go round and round as compared to my normal state where I’m trying to help and work and concerned about what I could do next.  I certainly never worried I wasn’t fulfilling my destiny or doing all I could be or achieving my potential or what others thought when I smoked a joint. I was utterly narcissistic and definitely purely pleasure oriented. A hedonist. Canada is a country of hedonism today or some might call it "shedonism'.
But I was breaking the law.
So when I stopped I sought help from the Physician Assistance program.  I couldn't get my wife to address her illness so I felt the best way was for me to admit my problem, and that this would lead to her getting help.  I was a politically outspoken person who had represented a lot of cases against the totalitarian corrupt authorities.  I’d been an outspoken critic against communists and fascists and Canada breeds both in abundance in high places.  I had integrity and told the truth and defended patients from abuses from above as much as I fought the diseases which plagued them from within.  It made me a lot of enemies.  Reporting a pedophie means that he’s caught but the ring survives.  Reporting a doctor doing unauthorized experiments on patients for profits catching him but not the nest. Always the very authorities whose job it was to protect patients were collecting their pay and not doing their job.  I was a vigilante good samaritan, doing the right thing.  But of course, when the criminal was caught, it was naturally asked why the beurocrats who are paid millions to protect patients didn't get these 'big fish'.  They naturally looked bad and they hated people like me.  I think too that they're there to 'protect' those 'special  doctors who aren't like the rest.
I had to do it .  It was a thing I had with this ingrained integrity and ethics and morality that said that doctors shouldn't be killing and that eurocrats shouldnt be colluding.  Of course everyone wondered who was getting kickbacks.  Why  were these doctors getting away with murder.  The elite protects its own.  It’s disgusting but true.  To get ahead they have to have protection within the courts and high places and especially within the bureaucracy. I exposed this.  If you do good in Canada you will be burnt. I was a whistleblower and whistleblowers are all collectively condemned in Canada.  The State thrives on 'informants' and encourages 'confidential informants' and administrators carry little black books like all good communists do but 'whistleblowers' are another thing.  They disrupt the common business of corruption and undermine the whole 'institution baksheesh' industry.  The Reformer is the enemy of anyone who benefits from the status quo.  The whole job of the elite, the bureaucracy and the courts is to resist change.  Change  threatens  the powerful.   The lie is they are always 'promoting change' deceitfully.  Lie, lie, lie!  Deny. Deny Deny!  It's the halcyon cry of the courts and bureaucracy.  Fuddle Duck!!!
I cause change.  My generation was a ‘change catalyst.’
My question at the time is what do I do with my drug addicted wife and how can we get help with our marriage.  I’d been divorced and concluded that I  was facing another divorce and the common ingredient in my divorces was that my wives and I drank and smoked marijuana.  Of course given feminism in it’s day and the radical feminists in beaurocracy they had long concluded that all divorce was the cause of men, another common ingredient in marriage,  so drugs were irrelevant.  This was before lesbian marriage with its similar rate of divorce so the idea that men were the cause of divorce went out the window but too late for my marriage.  I divorced.  I was punished as men are in divorce .  It's a sexist society, i.e. men are sexist.  I was also punished as marijuana smokers were in the day.  Marijuana smoking wasn't actually punished but rather being truthful about marijuana smoking.  The same as homosexuality. For the longest time homosexuality wasn't punished as long as you were not truthful about it.  Society is that kind of lie.  I was punished because while the bureaucracy paid lip service to the idea of ‘disease’ the individuals involved in the programs were holier than thou and claimed that they were the guardians of the public good.
Yet they didn’t care that the prime minister was smoking dope as a teacher and that the prime minister was smoking dope as an MP.  They didn't about the irreparable damage he did as a teacher and the irreparable damage his example has had on children.  Baseball players and hockey players are condemned for smoking marijuana because they are an 'example' to children but Justin Trudeau was smoking marijuana when he was an Member of Parliament so what kind of example does that set for children.
They justified all that they did to me and others by the idea that we were a threat to society. I was never a threat to society and never made a bad decision. I loved the movie with Denzil Washington as the pilot because that’s what I saw in my case and for those around me.  This horrible ‘war on drugs’ world was coupled with beaurocratic pomposity and deceit.
So my marriage ended.
The friends of the men whose friends I’d caught stealing, killing and raping, suddenly gloatingly became my superiors holding my freedom in their hands.  I was terrorized by a little hitler and his little eva brawn.  And today I’m afraid of drugs because I believe seriously that too many people in Canada are on drugs and that the only way we have been able to get another lying Trudeau in leadership is because Canada is a nation of stoned drunks.  I would have voted Trudeau when I was smoking dope.
So I’ve not handled the election well. I’ve not handled watching 18 billion candian dollars go to the PARTY.  I’ve not handled the lies well and the idea that others don’t ‘get’ it.  I’ve also wanted desperately to smoke dope again so I can join the stupidity and not be aware of what’s happening.  I’d like to smoke dope and believe that there isn’t illness and everything is an illusion and that if I just have my dope mind I’ll get by.  When I smoked dope it was like I was one of the batteries in the  movie Matrix. I thought the Matrix was the best movies about the drugged and the awake.
I’m awake today.It's hard to be awake.  I think of the millions who were not caught up in the Hitlermania of their day or the Lenninmania of their day.  There's this 'mania', an orgy that I could get myself caught up in when I was smoking dope and drinking. I liked the group grope and hedonistic throb of the club scene when I was a little high and in denial of reality.  I loved the escape to adolescence, the disregard and animal like awareness that drugs brought.  I smoked a joint and drank some wine and I was blatto.  My IQ dropped and I had trouble following conversations or walking to the bathroom. I was demented.  Usually I was actually more aware than the thousand or so others in the club since I was only a light user in public and at home I used to just go to bed early.  I was a happy drunk, if drunk is the right word.  Rarely was I angry but like all couples drinking we had our shouting matches.  She was always a public ranter screaming at me when I wanted to get her home public scenes worked well for women.  I remember trying to get drunk women into taxis to get them home with even drunker men trying to keep them at parties and me caught between these two drunken nightmares.  Sometimes I went home alone and worried all night if she'd get home somehow.  When I went to Al Anon I was the 'wife' and my stories were the norm for that group. I fit right in.  They'd all been their with their drunks and addicts.  And yes, some of them had joined in but the fact was we'd always been the 'adults'.  We'd been the ones who had to 'get the other home' or take care of the 'adult' business the next day. I was always 'papa'.  I am seriously tired of being the 'man' .  I always knew I could take care of myself and I could take care of others but that if there was trouble I really couldn't rely on the wife to take care of me. She was hardly able to take care of herself.  It wasn't just out in the wilderness but in the city. I've watched the new rage of girls in high heels beating up guys in tv movies and it's more of the lie.  I've known too many situations where there's three or four men and I'm defending myself and a woman and the woman is usually drunk and stoned and often caused this scenario but probably won't remember what happened the next day.  Or she'll rewrite the script to be something like a Supergirl scenario and ultimately she'd find a way to blame me for her drunkeness or being stoned legless.
I’m thankful fortmy sobriety. I’m thankful I’m not stoned. I’m grateful for the relationship i have with family and true friends and the journey I’ve been on if only because it helps me related to the horrendous abuse that so many Canadians have had who when they smoked dope at their jobs were subjected to forced treatment for the benefit of society. I am thankful that Justin Trudeau driving his car stoned didn’t kill anyone and I didn’t kill anyone even though I now know that people who smoke dope are ‘impaired’ for 36 hours though they feel the effects of marijuana for only a few of those hours. I’m thankful I didn’t hurt anyone except my beautiful ex wife with my unkind words because her drug addiction was so much worse than anything I experienced and I never was understanding of her it mpairment because I was totally caught up in the narcissism that drugs does to self and relationships.  I know today that relationships are the first thing harmed by drugs and that we can’t really know each other when we’re in a parallel play only because our only intimacy is with the ‘drug’.
I suspect there’s a ‘dose ‘ factor. I think there’s a ‘steady state’.  Certainly pharmaceutical medications don’t ‘impair’ like ‘self administered pleasure’ drugs. I don’t suspect there is a ‘low dose’ that can be helpful but that this isn’t like the aspirin where we know the dosage by years of study.  With marijuana it was always ‘good’ weed’ , bad’ weed’ and effects over time. I truly don’t think ‘maui wow’ was ever strong enough to do more than what a beer did but BC Bud is “killer weed’ far more potent than possibly cocaine or tequila.  A regular hallucinogen.  I hope one day that agents like SATIVEX will make dope safe.
But I’m struggling with this right now.  When I hear Truedau speak I could swear he’s had a joint especially when he smirks to himself.
I loath that the Trudeau household was a Maggie filled dope house of second hand smoke when my friends were being put in jail for one joint. I hate the double standard and I’m really struggling with getting old and thinking I may be dependent on institutions like my parents were and have to trust again. Because I stopped trusting 17 years ago when I divorced and I witnessed the worst medical care I’d ever believed possible and saw first hand abuses of power that I never in my life would have thought could occur in Canada and yet were done to me.  I’m lucky to be alive.  God had other plans. I put my living down to the intervention of an unknown female Irish psychiatrist and some Christian doctors who believed in truth and love more than profit and power.
But I’m struggling. A whole PTSD time coming back to me and questions between me and God about prayer and faith and gratitude.  And rumours of war and end days and Freud saying ‘maybe the paranoids are right’ and me thinking really ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’.  And everyone seeming to be smiling their joint like smiles, while  I’m standing on the street during “Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ scene.  The smell of marijuana reeks. I can’t get away from it in Vancouver.  It’s worse than the smell of second hand smoke or stale beer.
I'm hoping for tulips and that this too will pass. I'm hoping that with spring I'll snap out of this and find gratitude. I know I'm needing to deal with resentments and fears and that I have to get my head into the same room as my head. I've got to be thankful. I've got to find a way of seeing this present situation in a way that spiritually makes me a better person. I always remember Dr. Ney, the great anti abortion physician saying, the world is full of bitter people. You have choice.  He'd cry when he heard of more babies being killed.  I see the light going out in the eyes of people when they're on drugs and alcohol. He saw the light going out in the world when a baby was killed because there was no hope and no one cared for life.  Death stalks the earth.  But there is gratitude.  And with an attitude of gratitude there is no room for the darkness, fear and resentment.  That's what Hal Morley told me and Hal was a light in the darkness.
So again I must find gratitude.  Thank you God that I'm alive. The daffodils are out.  Soon the tulips will return.

Justin Trudeau and Me

I don’t know Justin Trudeau. He’s just an actor and an act. I’ve never met him personally. I met his father, shook his hand and when I was young thought him a great man. My father thought him dangerous, a French intellectual who hated the English and didn't even know where Western Canada was.   Now older, I think everything I dislike about Canada stemmed from Pierre.
I’ve met Mr. Chretien and Mr. Turner and Mr. Harper. They were all great men in their own right.  Mr Justin Trudeau will likely be another fine prime minister.  I hope so.
I’ve been particularly critical of him.  This stemmed I think, most from the vicious, low class, low brow attacks on Mr. Harper.  I have this thing that goes back to playing defence in hockey as a kid and doing martial arts. If you hit me or mine, I’ll hit you back harder, lower and longer.  I'm not proud of it.  Something genetically Irish and Scottish.
I’m a Conservative.  Apparently a red tory. I used to be a blue liberal. I’m proud of being a Canadian and a Conservative. The elections were disgusting.  So I’ve stooped to the same level. You want to play dirty. You want to fight dirty. I’ll fight dirtier. I'm not proud of it. It's just that this is the trait that has kept the 'true north proud and free'.  Pierre changed the flag to a Liberal Quebec flag. Maple leaves don't grow in western Canada.  Megalomaniac that he was he took out the blue that had always been part of Canada and said 'fuck you' symbolically except being a liar, he just said 'fuddle duck'  I paid some million for saying 'fuck' and admitting to saying 'fuck'.  No one knows the high price of truth in this country. I do.  I've paid a fortune for saying 'fuck'.  By the time Trudeau's lies were really apparent and I was much older I was thankful for Mr. Turner. I knew him and admired him. He was a true western Canadian.
Now Justin Trudeau is PM.  And I can’t help but criticize him. Not just because he’s doing everything he promised but because he represents everything I dislike and always have. And that’s why it’s more about me and less about him. He probably doesn’t deserve half my loathing and distaste for him.
I’ve analyzed my feelings a bit and I know I've just got a skin of the onion still what I see isn't very good.
1. He was born with a silver spoon.  What’s wrong with being born wealthy with a huge trust fund.  What ’s wrong with coming from a line of wealth like his father too inherited.  What is it about me and the Lords.  There’s a twinge of Scottish Irish Working Class hatred and envy of the ‘betters’. I carry this quite possibly inheritted working class taint even though quite frankly I was raised middle class. My grandfather left Scotland to get away from the Lords and Monarchy of Engand. He came to Canada because a man could be free and equal. Canada was a meritocracy. He worked hard and became the Reeve through his service. Pierre Trudeau turned Canada from a Meritocracy to the Mediocrity it is today.  This welfare nation. This communist country of upper class dictatorship.  
Maybe it’s a middle class loathing for the ‘idle’ rich. Meanwhile the rich I have known and known well have been anything but idle. Further I’ve admired my friends who have passed on to their children the best.  Justin is Pierre’s son and Pierre loved his family by his work and what he left, as in Justin’s trust fund. Pierre might have been the worst Prime Minister Canada ever had but he was still a good father, not a good husband and probably not a good lover but obviously a great father.  Justin was blessed with Pierre as his dad just as I was blessed with my father and grandfathers.
2. I don’t think Justin had a better childhood. I don’t envy the rich their growing up. I was fortunate in my school and associations so I have never thought it would have been better to have met the Queen as a child.  To me as child, my Toronto Aunt was royalty.  I loved my friends and my neighbourhood and the wonders of childhood.  I like the teen years and can’t say i have anything against Justin. I didn't think of in crowds and out crowds until I was a teen.  As a kid I had my friend and we all had bicycles and we explored and rode and played sports and talked.
3. I did dislike the ‘rich kids’ when I was a teen though.  I disliked the way the ‘law’ favoured them and how their father’s money got them off.  I disliked the lack of a level playing field and the protection and special status that money bought. I disliked the kids who because they were rich got away with rape and theft and bullying.  I was actually happy when I heard the rapists were caught as lawyers and businessmen and their father's money and family couldn't keep them out of jail.  I don’t know if Justin got away with anything. He was probably one of the good guys a party boy, not very bright but not stupid.  There's no doubt his father was bright but Justin is like George Bush. George senior was a genius but the sons didn't get a whole lot of father's brains.  Even the already famous, "It's 2015" line was fed to him by a woman.  He's an actor. His father was a writer.   Some of my teen friends were good guys and they were rich and they didn’t get any ‘special breaks’.  Sure their parents took them to Hawaii and some had great cars and  trips to Europe but I hunted and fished with Dad and my brother. I  had a mother that loved me more than a kite loves the wind.  I had an idyllic childhood and youth. I’d never change for a thing. And Justin lost a brother and I didn't lose a brother so I know Justin has had the deepest pain of all. So he's more than the pretty boy he comes across as and I don't give him credit for that.
4. But my friend smoked dope and got caught. He went to jail and one thing led to another and seven years later he was out and riding with a biker gang. We’d meet up years later. He was hard.  He’d been punished for breaking the law.  I smoked dope and paid a very high price, maybe a million dollars in time and amends for breaking the law smoking dope.  But Justin and his mother were potheads.  All the while my friend was in jail and I was paying my dues for having smoked dope here was our future Prime Minister breaking the law, being a criminal, with his criminal family, not once, not twice, but over and over again. And all around me in British Columbia my neighbours were making billions of dollars owning houses and buying fast cars and living the lives of rich drug dealers, breaking the law.
So I even appreciate that Justin would want to ‘decriminalize’ marijuana.  I don’t think the State should criminalize half the behaviours it does. I think that thanks to Pierre we're living in a legal theocracy and that since Pierre Canada is no longer the land of the free. Communism makes men slaves.  I don’t think my friend should have gone to jail for what he did and the guards in the jail should protect young guys from what the guards and other prisoners do to young guys. Then maybe they wouldn’t want to break out of jail to get away from being gang raped again or beaten by dirty guards or raped by guards. I believe my friend.  I believe that he was wrong to smoke dope but the punishment didn’t fit the crime and he’s a hardened criminal biker today.  I think it’s great that Justin Trudeau wants to stop guys going to jail.
That’s a good thing but it doesn’t change for me that he was a criminal and his mother was a criminal and I paid a huge price and my friend paid an even huger price and now I’m supposed to respect this guy who got away with being a criminal because he had money and didn’t have the conscience I did. I self reported my smoking dope and stopped smoking dope. I haven’t smoked dope in 17 years. I spent half a decade getting urine tested and subjected to all manner of humiliation and punishment and condemnation. Always I was told I should be grateful. I am grateful.  I just can’t help loathing , utterly loathing and despising the rich of this land and the way they are so far above the rest of the people and how they hypocritically act like they’re one of us.  I think the law of the land was more for everyone before Justin Trudeau but today there's a law for the rich and a law for the poor. Justin Trudeau is no more like my very human friend than a lizard is like a man.  My friend is hurt really really badly and he got hurt just for smoking dope.  And yes I think this should stop but there are a lot of people who got hurt and I can't look at Justin Trudeau and his mother and not see Hanoi Jane. Jane Fonda and Justin Trudeau seem like peas in a pod to me.
I don’t think pot should be legalized, decriminalized yes, but not legalized.   I really don’t think pot should be legalized.  I am deeply offended knowing all I know about pot and pot addicts and the industry and the criminals in it and the effects of addiction and here’s this swaggering smiling acting fellow who not only lies and smokes dope breaking the law and smoking dope but I’m in a country of people who don’t seem to get why there are American soldiers who don’t forgive Hanoi Jane for her betrayal.  Even her apology sounded like a lie.  I’ve not even heard Justin Trudeau apologize for being a liar and a law breaker and getting away with it.
Probably in his circle ‘everyone was doing it’.  I know ‘in my circle’ everyone was doing it.  All sorts of academics and colleagues were smoking pot. I smoked pot with university professors, heads of departments and lawyers and yet I’ve stopped and by telling the truth I have paid a hefty price, maybe a million dollars. I’ve worked two jobs and paid off major debts because of the massive punishments that I was told was a ‘privilege’ for me to be able to undertake. Meanwhile from all accounts Justin Trudeau and certainly his mother were sicker than I ever was and yet Justin Trudeau as impaired as he was , as a teacher and now as a PM is quite simply above the law.I've seen a lot of teachers who smoked pot and paid a huge price for doing it, some losing their jobs, others going to treatment all being fined in time and money for 'breaking the law.'  Justin hasn't paid his dues.  I think Putin is more of a man than this swaggering play boxer pretty boy.  But I carry the scars of knifes from the fights I was in and I've faced a lot of guns.  Stupid of me.  But Trudeau is playacting being a man and I know Mr. Harper was a man. Mr. Chretien was a heavy dude and Mr Turner was a good man.  None of them acting like 11 year old boys act.  I can't help but think of Isaiah and his 'long necked women and their boys" when I see Justin play acting a man.
And that’s what gets me. I don’t like the unfairness of it all. I remember when we got caught doing harmless pranks our parents grounded us. I remember the teachers condemned my friend and I and we had to stay after class. I remember that the rich kids smashed a bunch of stuff in the school and their fathers with lawyers came and paid for the damages and that was that.  No extra time in school. I heard one didn’t get his $100 allowance that week.
So it’s ‘unfair’ and I’m ‘projecting’ all my anger and unresolved frustration and resentment at our ‘system’ that’s ‘unfair’ on this guy I don’t know.
I owe him an apology personally. He probably only deserves 90% of my disgust with him and all those like him. And the fact remains that I’ve broken laws too. I’ve sped and done my share of cutting corners but I ‘confess’ and have paid the price.  And I certainly wouldn’t suggest that all the highways speed limits should be 160 km an hour because that’s what I’ve driven my harley at.  i’ve paid a whole lot in speeding tickets too so it’s not like Trudeau who hasn’t done a night in jail or got a record for breaking the law.
I just can’t help thinking of my friend whose now as much a law breaker as Trudeau maybe is and I wonder why I have a conscience and why I tell the truth.  We joke and say that when a politician opens his mouth he lies but in fairness Canada has been fortunate in it’s politicians.  I love this country but the fact is I’m afraid of where it’s going. I think Justin Trudeau is promoting war and division in Canada. And frankly given how the Liberals have treated western Canadians as shit for as long as I can remember I really would like Canada to separate.  I keep coming back to the fact that I can’t find it in me to support this guy who I really would like to be drug tested and  pay a year or more of his life for doing drugs and law breaking without consequence.  I know I was wrong to break the law and drive my Harley at 160.  I don’t recommend everyone do it.  That’s where Justin really gets to me.
He’s an emperor. The French like Emperor's. But I'm Scottish Irish Canadian and we like democracy. The Greeks may have invented democracy for the rich but the Scots made democracy work for all people.
Now for my peace of mind I have to let it go. I have to accept Justin Trudeau is our Prime Minister until British Columbia separates from Eastern Canada and stuffs Quebec where it belongs. It's the most despicable province in Canada and has taken billions and whined endlessness threatening to divorce all the while no one but Quebec was allowed to vote on their separation. I and any real Western Canadian would have said. Go.  Now they've taken all Alberta's money from the fuel and they're taking all the Navy Contracts and other Government Contracts all over again.
 I some how have to heal that sense of self pity that there are two classes of people, the rich and everyone else.  Justin Trudeau is the rich and I’m just one of everyone else. That’s paranoid thinking, as stupid as communism which I hate so what I’ve got to do is understand what Justin Trudeau represents for me personally and what it is in him I don’t own in myself. Because when we hate someone intensely we are admitting that they are something within our selves that we haven’t owned.  I don't like Mila Cyrus but I know that she represents my inner slut and I envy her being able to essentially be the equivalent of male trailer trash and get paid for it.  I have to come around to thinking Justin Trudeau  just a really sick person like his mother is a really sick woman.  I have to feel sorry for him and accept him as another human who is deeply flawed and very disturbed. I have to move beyond this place of hurt and defensiveness to acceptance of the way life is.
I’ve got to recognize too that I’m growing old and ready to die.  I want to die peacefully. I want to have some time for retirement and some time for myself. I’ve given my life to others and served and worked and I see Trudeau as a major under achiever , a ‘slacker’ and ‘playboy’ and then because of his ‘name’ he’s ‘found’. Justin Smith would never have got to be prime minister. This is a dynasty thing and I hate that for Canada. That's where inbreeding killed Europe. That's what caused the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Like the guys who get jobs in acting not on their own merit but because their father was the King. I admire our young royals because they served in the military and they did ‘serve’. Trudeau by all appearances is a major narcissist but then I see him as a good father and husband and I’m neither so I’m probably jealous of him, his youth, hopefulness, his young family and his security. I don’t feel secure. I ‘m afraid and he frightens me more than ISIS or street gangs.  But my jealousy and my fear are as much about me as about him.  I cringe every time he gives Canada’s hard earned money to some hair brain cause or some french gangster thug friend.  I remember his father bankrupting the country, nationalizing energy, turning the country into a communist state, destroying democracy and making the laws a perversion of the appointed supreme court. And now his son is going to destroy democracy more and entrench his french favourites and his communist corporate buddies into powerful roles and it’s just me. I know it’s so much me.
It’s seeing all the torture victims that come from communist countries, hearing all the personal tales of the family members of those killed by communists and then watching him destroy the monument to victims of communists.

I have to let him go. I have to forgive him and his father and make peace with the ‘government’ .  I have a resentment with authority that goes back to all the strapping and caning I got  in my school and the stupidity of some of my teachers. But the majority of my teachers   were great. I've got to focus on the positive.  I've not seen one positive thing Trudeau has done yet but I've got to look for the half filled glass and not focus on the glass being emptied by graft and stupidity. My school principal was a violent man, a sadist by today's standards.  But if I was in Russia or China or Isil I’d have lost a limb so I have to be grateful.
I have to be grateful that Trudeau isn’t Hitler or Stalin or Obama or Mila Cyress or the Kardashians.  Things could be a whole lot worse.  I am sorry. God help me to see Trudeau and his family as just sick people that need love not hate and help me to let go of the fear that I have from my imprisonment.  Help me know God that you are in charge. Help me find peace in you. This is a world of lies.  The Trudeaus are liars.  Help me to accept them as sick and not see them as sociopaths. Help me to love and help me  to let go of fear.  God help me restore my peace of mind.
God grant me to serenity to accept the things I cannot change (Justin, Justin’s Mother, The UN Climate Change Hoax, the Corruption of Buffet and Obama, Hanoi Jane, the Mafia Biker Gang run Quebec and Pedophiles)
The courage to change the things I can (my bad attitude, my fear, my critical finger pointing judgementalness,  my self pity and resentment).
And The wisdom to know the difference (between me and everything else).

God help me. God help Justin Trudeau. God help Canada.

Justin Trudeau, Liberal Party, New Prime Minister of Canada and Drug Addiction

Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, is the new Prime Minister of Canada. Though a long standing Liberal I left the Liberal Party some 15 years ago to join the Conservatives. I voted for Mr. Stephen Harper.  He lost after two terms as Prime Minister. I am by all measures a Canadian.  I loved Mr. Harper's service to the country. I loved the Conservatives in power if only because the Conservatives and NDP are the only parties that have cared for Western Canadians.  So I'm sad today that Mr. Harper and the Conservatives lost.

I personally am soured by Mr. Justin Trudeau.  I appreciate his 'honesty' that he smoked marijuana while working. Was he smoking marijuana while a school teacher or just as a legislator? I hear he has perhaps minimized the times he smoked marijuana.  Politicians aren't known for their honesty.

I am glad too that marijuana has essentially be decriminalized this last decade. I fundamentally don't agree with legalization because that actually means that marijuana can then be sold like bread or milk anywhere. I was very disturbed that the illegal marijuania distributions centres of Vancouver were offering free marijuana to anyone who voted.

What fundamentally bothers me though, is that I personally smoked marijuana. The last time was 17 years ago.  I bought it from doctors, smoked it with doctors and saw a psychiatrist who recommended I smoke it.  The trouble was, that I felt wrong about smoking marijuana and working as a doctor. It especially didn't seem right that I was smoking marijuana and working as a psychiatrist.

I was never 'impaired' at work.  I wasn't an 'impaired physician'.  I didn't present a 'risk to patient safety'.  I just didn't think it was right that I was breaking the law.  I also knew too many people who had suffered negative consequences of using marijuana, loss of employment, legal records and jail time. I have seen far too many relationships and families devastated by marijuana.

Justin Trudeau's mother was a marijuana addict.  I have thought that Justin Trudeau must be in some serious denial about the effects of marijuana being the son of an addict himself.

I have mixed feelings about the process of my own recovery now.  Personally I appreciate the spiritual benefits of the wonderful learning of recovery. I am so very thankful to have the clarity of mind restored that seemed somewhat lost the last year I smoked marijuana.   Administratively thought the process was essentially 'punishment'. It was framed in different language but the process was still punishment.   It was heavy handed, threatening, bullying, incredibly expensive, and shaming. There was and remains a 'double standard'. There are those who didn't get 'caught' and those who got 'caught' and people like me who sought help only to get caught up in the mixed message of a very sick and disturbed administration.

Now here I am today an addiction medicine specialist. I have patients who were like me. They have safety sensitive jobs. I see doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals.  I am expected to provide a rigorous treatment program with many random urine testing and onerous requirements because as I was told, these jobs are a 'privilege'.  They're not a right.

Yet here the highest job in the country has gone to a person who has committed crimes without consequence.  He's never been subjected to random urine testing, required to see psychiatrists, required to see addiction medicine specialists, required to attend counselling, had supervision in the workplace, or had the threat of losing his job if any suspicion fell on him. He has not had to be 'caesar's wife' in regards to his personal behaviour vis a vis the drug using crowd.

He hasn't had to deal with both the wonderful people in the recovery health care movement and the utterly sick and disturbed power weilding petty beaurocrats who holier than thou revel in their being above the law because they haven't been caught in their addictions.  Being in the system I know so many people who have 'avoided' detection like the privileged who 'avoided' Vietnam leaving that war to be fought by the average joe.

Maybe my angst today is about the rich and privileged and the sons of the rich and priviledged.  I don't like the double standard. Indeed I could have at any time 'avoided' the negative consequences that came from my seeking help when I was concerned that my failure to do so would eventually lead to a poor judgement.  I held myself to a higher standard than those about me.   I was 'offered' ways 'around' the 'system'. I was told I could 'deny, deny, deny, and lie, lie, lie' .  Those close to me who had been 'caught' actually have used lawyers successfully to avoid consequences.  Seriously people have told me over and over again what a fool I have been for my honesty.

 I appreciate Justin's  honesty therefore.  I appreciate that the laws are wrong. There are many law which we don't agree with but there is a sharp division between the law breakers and those who don't.  At least there once was. I don't appreciate that so many criminal drug dealers got rich by being smart and have 'cleaned up their act' by whitewashing their past. I know so many incredibly wealthy people whose wealth has come directly from the multi billion dollar drug crime industry.    I'm a hopeless idealist and romantic. I have a horrible scar of cynicism.

There but for the grace of God go I. I am not here to "judge" Justin Trudeau. The country of Canada has accepted that a man of acknowledged deceitfulness and drug abuse is acceptable in the highest position. The former head of the Supreme Court of Canada was a roaring alcoholic or had a bit of a problem with drink (depending on what language one chose.)  But he wasn't engaged in criminal activities.  He wasn't a law breaker, that I know of.  Unlike Justin Trudeau and his mother and a minority of Canadians.

I've been arguing for years that our judges need to be random drug tested if we're doing that to our athletes, doctors and pilots.  There's a double standard. There's hypocricy that reigns.

I'm just struggling today wondering how I'm going to do my job. I'm kind of regretting too accepting the considerable abuse I experienced in recovery.  The stigma and shame and being shamed so seriously by my superiors who I learned later were drunkards and did more drugs than I'd ever done. It's such a hidden epidemic. Meanwhile the minimization and deceit is rampant.

That's what I remember most about when I had the occasional toke.  I didn't think there was anything wrong with it.  I just thought everyone should 'lighten up'.  Hell, I hoped everyone would 'light up'.

And it will get worse.

I see Justin Troudeau, not as others do but because of my own journey and the journey I have seen others on, I see the double standard. I wonder how I can cause people to lose their incomes and jobs and future and families by saying, it's because of the drugs ,when doing drugs has won Clinton, Obama and now Justin Trudeau their highest positions.  How can I say to kids not to smoke dope.  At least President Bush got recovery.  Mayor Ford got recovery.  Most of Hollywood got recovery.  But not these guys.

It's confusing for me.  It worries me.  I'm struggling today.  I don't really care that much if the Liberals beat the Conservatives because they're two sides of a very centrist coin. I'd rather the Liberals over the NDP but truthfully I'd really rather have had Mr. Mulcair Prime Minister over Justin Trudeau.  Tom Mulcair wasn't creepy.  But I'm probably wrong.

I did this silly little study and asked a hundred or more dope smokers and drug addicts and straights if they wanted their pilot or physician to be smoking marijuania.  They answered unanimously that they didn't want him smoking marijuana.

Now I have the head of a multi trillion dollar business called Canada admitting to smoking dope, not once, not twice, but countless times.  We don't accept the 'word' of a doctor that he isn't smoking dope. We don't accept the word of a criminal that he isn't doing crime.  We drug test and find that countless, a very very high percentage of people who have ever used drugs, lie.

This is my personal problem.  It's a problem I have with Canada today.  It's a problem I have with our justice sytem.  It's a problem I have with the supreme court. It's a problem I have with the police.  It's a problem I have with authority. It's certainly a problem I have with the rich and privileged and those above the law.  It's a problem I have with double standards.   Its a problem I have with Justin Trudeau and his dynamic twisted family.

Maybe I'm just envious too. I've thought of that.

But this is why I didn't vote for Justin Trudeau more than anything else.  That's the best I can get to the matter of why I will support him as Prime Minister but I don't think I'll trust him. I won't trust him even as much as I trusted his father.  But I was younger when I voted for his father. I find it harder to trust today. I've been personally hurt by marijuana, drug dealers, tobacco companies, and especially drug addicts and twisted authorities and their sick double standard attitudes. I don't trust easily today. I don't trust Justin Troudeau.

I hope though that as Prime Minister he will earn my trust.But right now he has made countless promises. And I know drug addicts are the best people at making promises.

So I don't expect he will subject himself to random drug testing.  Even the Supreme Court expects that of others but won't submit themselves to that.  I would only ask that he make the one promise that really counts to me.

Justin, can you promise not to smoke dope any time during your reign as Prime Minister.  Really, if you talk the talk, can you walk the walk!

CSAM - Canadian Society of Addiction Medicine - 25th Conference - Ottawa - October 2014

Evolving Perspectives on Addictions (Perspectives Evolutives en Dependences)” was a great success with participants from accoss Canada and the United States.  President Ronald Lim and Conference Chair Paul Sobey,
combined with many others to make this educational experience at the Marriott Hotel clinically extremely beneficial as well as addressing evolving controversies.   Having a Methadone Clinic to attend at Dr. Gary Horvath’s DTES Vancouver Doc-Side Medical Clinic on Wednesday I didn’t make the first day though heard it was extremely well received. All the research and scientific advances in the study of electronic cigarettes and marijuana smoking were addressed.  Thanks to Paul I was emailed   Dr. Mark Wares latest paper.
Dr. Alan Budney , President, Division SO American Psychological Association presented on new regulations related to Marijuana.  Dr. Peter Selby updated the group on Motivational Interviewing.
All of the slides and references for conference are available on the CSAM site.(www.csam-smca.org/Office 403-813-8217)
Dr. Jeffry Turnbull, medical director of the Inner City Health Project, Ottawa presented on evolving psychosocial approaches to Addiction treatment while Dr. Tara Tucker addressed the critical issue of Compassion Fatigue.
Dr. Kim Corace, Director, and Dr. Melanie Willows, Program Development and Research in Substance Use and Concurrent Disorders Program, Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre, spoke on Bridging Research and clinical Practice:Key Strategies to creating innovative addiction treatment services.  Their presentation addressed the need and importance of the Hub and Spoke Partnership Model, the networking involved and how to get key players involved in the coordination of effort.  It was clear that a whole lot of work and effort had gone into the obvious successes of this remarkable program.
Mel Kahan,
Medical Director, Substance Use Service, Women’s College Hospital, spoke on the Rapid Delivery of Addiction Medicine Service to patients in Detox Centres and Hospitals: the H-SOAP project.  Dr. Kahan is truly one of my favourite ‘rock stars’ of Canada’s Addiction Medicine. His program identified that addicts with their particular series of crisis needed to be deal with  a hospital based service that was responsive to emergencies, psychiatric and internal medicine wards providing the critical cost saving and clinically relevant service at the time they’re needed not weeks or months later.  With his vision and experience he has developed a working model in his community that is practical, profitable and very timely indeed.





Dr. Corey Waller, Medical Director of Spectrum Health Medical Group Centre for Integrative Medicine presented on the major news topic of Prescription Medication Abuse. He was a very exciting speaker with humour, anecdotes and challenging considerations for advocacy at the highest levels.  





Dr. Marie-Eve Morin was a true delight presenting in French on the topic of the Doctor as Drug Pusher.  The conference had provided electronic sound devices for the real time translation of her superb talk.  My french is rudimentary so I really did appreciate this assistance and knew my American friend was loving this ‘international’ aspect of the Canadian conference.  Dr. Marie-Eve Morin’s reviewed the problems of prescription drug abuse, the history and recognition of these in Quebec and the advances in addressing the issues her and her associates had made.   It was a thorough and riveting presentation. C'est bien! Magnifique!
Dr. Beth Sproule,
Clinician Scientist, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, presented on A Case for Pharmacists and Prescription Monitoring Programs , Decreasing the Harms from Prescription Drugs.





Dr. Melanie Strike’s presentation was very well received, a very revealing presentation of clinically relevant research and insights that really did touch the core and complexity  of concern in the front lines of therapeutics.






Dr. Nady el Guebaly, the humble leading light of  International Addiction medicine has just published the definitive textbook of addiction medicine through Sprinter.com (ordersny@springer.com) “Textbook of Addiction Treatment:International Perspectives” Nady el Guebaly, Giuseppe Carra and Marc Galanter.
Dr. Nady el Guebaly introduced Dr. Ivan Montoya, National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA, Director, Practice Research Network, American Psychiatric Association. Dr. Motoya did a comprehensive review of the evidence based research on pharmaceutical treatments to date and introduced new treatments ongoing and/or under review.  This was a very exciting look at the possible future of pharmacotherapy with it’s attendant hope for those still suffering.











Monica Bawar, PhD Student,  Neuroscience program, and Brittany Dennis, PhD Student, Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, presented an elegant study on Factors Affecting Treatment Outcome for Patients Undergoing Methadone Treatment for Opioid Addiction: A Focus on Sex Hormones and Chronic Pain. I was delighted personally to learn from this research that testosterone levels are related to dose of opiods and that there didn’t seem to be any evidence that one opioid acted differently than others. My methadone patients occasionally complain of reduced libidido when they start treatment which struck me as strange because most of the heroin addicts in general complain of lack of libido secondary to any opiate use.  Heroin has never been considered a sexual performance enhancing drug so it was helpful to hear the detailed work of these researchers who also addressed how factors of chronic pain might well contribute to relapse in methadone patients.








Dr. Andrew Smith, Staff Physician, Pain and Addiction Medicine, CAMH presented on Partial Agonists and Half Truths: The Use of Suboxone in the Treatment of Chronic Pain. Dr. Smith’s presentation was a most interesting case presentation with remarkable insights and developments that spoke well to the true complexity that clinical practice presents.  It was really helpful clinically to see how an otherwise difficult and tragic case of a highly successful individual with chronic pain could be best  addressed. The use of Buprenorphine was critical in the resolution of the case which had a previously hard working man utterly prostate with disability but with appropriate care back at work and doing the recreational activities that they so enjoyed. It really did speak to the miracles that we all have seen in this difficult but rewarding work.


“What’s New in Hep C” talk by Dr. Curtis Cooper, Director, Ottawa Hospital Viral Hepatitis Program, was a fascinating  simply for telling us about the facts and success of the new and highly effective treatments for Hep C that are now available. The difficulty that remains is getting the funding for these truly historic advances. 








On this positive note with a celebration of all the new research and advances in the exciting cutting edge field of addiction medicine, the conference closed. Next year’s conference will be in Calgary Nov. 5-7 at the Coast Plaza Hotel (admin@csam-smca.org)
Personally I was delighted to buy Dr. Merville Vincent’s book, Diagnosing and Treating Addictions, An Integrated Approach to Substance Use Disorders and Concurrent Disorders.  Ms McCullough, now in Toronto with Edgewood,  formerly of Vancouver was in the welcoming room when I arrived. It was great to see her again.  Dr. Vincent, psychiatrist with Edgewood is one of the best clinicians in the field but also a very clear thinker in what can often be a fuzzy area. His lectures have always been well worth the effort to attend.
I was equally delighted to actually see Dr. Nady el Guebaly’s Textbook of Addiction Treatment:International Perspectives.  Copies were present for perusal but we couldn’t buy them on sight but had to order from the publisher.  Seeing them was worth the wait as all of us in Addiction Medicine have been looking forward to this comprehensive text. This book had been the talk of the Kuala Lumpur Addiction Medicine conference I'd attended last fall. Now I’m waiting for my copy to arrive and many hours of enjoyable reading this winter.
 For the flight home I was thankful to obtain the latest Canadian Journal of Addiction, the Special Edition: Medical Marihuana: Furthering an Objective Debate. Given all the nonsense in the media and the lies perpetrated by those with  major conflict of interest I’m looking forward to reviewing the truth and science of the matter.   The journal has  articles  by Dr. Nady el Guebaly, Harold Kalant, Mark Ware, Meldon Kahan, Shery Spithoff and Anna Reid.  What a great read this will be.
Thank you CSAM organizers and presenters. What a great conference! A bientot!