Nearly one-in-five new HIV cases are the result of drug users sharing dirty needles, an extrodinarily high number. Some cities have attempted to combat the epidemic by giving free clean needles to addicts in exchange for used ones. These programs are highly controversial in the U.S., with many insisting such programs encourage drug use and increase crime. Should your community be funding needle exchange programs?
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Basic Human Rights Include the Right to Health
- From Chicago Recovery Alliance
By Chicago Recovery Alliance - Positive Change
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BASIC HUMAN RIGHT...SINCE WHEN?, SAYS WHO?
Basic Human Rights can only apply to personal ID matters (any supra-structural category), and in any other context to non-rivalry of rights.
That means, everybody have the right to fight for X. But anybody have the right, by condition or definition, to X.
Whether needles or medical treatment automatic rights are a destruction of the rights of other social rules obedient citizens, and that is not justice.
Social order can not survive on hostage taking menace.
To appeal to the pandemia argument is exactly that, a hostage taking threat.
In order to survive societies have condemned some attitudes and behaviors. One of them are drugs.
To assign responsabilities is futile endeavour...nature or nurture debate has not been solved yet.
The path of the middle on the drugs affair is legalizing drugs, a methadone program, and a compulsive restoring programm for drug adicts (of course, paid by adict with work while in treatment and after that...but the public is encouraged to support the cure financially -if it is their will-).
- Ricardo
January 18, 2009 12:22PM
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I call shanannigans!
We have a basic human right to life. Not to health . This is because one human's rights end where another's begin. So one man has the right to live freely and does not have the right to take away another man's right to live. The entire meaning of the right to life is that another person cannot rightfully cause you death. Then we also have the right to property and an unstated right to our own time and energy . In other words, you cannot force me to work for you and you cannot take what I have earned.
To say that everyone has a right to health is in itself a contradiction. Health sometimes relies on an expert and expensive treatments. Well, making a doctor serve someone is impinging on that man's rights so you have no right to do that. An addict having a right to needles is like saying everyone has a right to a car. I need a car because I can't get to work without one. Or I need a needle because I'll get sick without one. Simple solution: earn what you need by working for it. This is the only way large groups of people can live together peacefully. (Or communism but I'm not a big fan because there's not much freedom...) Every man deserves to use his time to help himself. A doctor does not become a doctor so that others can demand that he serves them.
If my community decides that they all want to fund needles to drug addicts, I need to live somewhere else. People who mess up in life should get what they deserve.
- sunshiner424
October 2, 2009 11:54AM
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