Researchers in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary have found that a nutritional supplement has significant
benefits for people with a psychiatric condition known as bipolar disorder. Mental health researchers Bonnie Kaplan, PhD, and
Dr. Steve Simpson presented the results of a small-scale study to the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychiatric Association
yesterday in Victoria, B.C.

“The initial research looks at a small group of people with bipolar disorder, and our early results are extremely encouraging,”
says Bonnie Kaplan, PhD. “Our study shows that on average, people taking the supplements find their symptoms are reduced
by more than 50% compared with the symptoms they experienced while taking their usual medications.”

The open label study includes 10 men aged 20 – 46 years old who, thus far, have been taking the broad-based nutritional
supplement for an average of more than 6 months. Symptoms usually improve within a month.

Study results show that once the participants start taking the supplement, their need for traditional medications is reduced by
two-thirds. “For some patients, the supplement has entirely replaced their psychotropic medication and they have remained
well,” says Kaplan. People who previously needed an average of 2.8 psychotropic medications are now taking only 1.0
psychotropic medications along with the supplement. The study also finds that side effects from the supplement are minor
(nausea) and temporary.

The supplement has 36 ingredients, 34 of which are natural dietary vitamins and minerals including Vitamins A, C, D, E, various
B vitamins, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, copper and potassium. The other two ingredients are antioxidants.

“I was skeptical at the outset of this study,” says Kaplan. “However, the results are quite striking. The findings certainly warrant
further exploration of this supplement as a new treatment for bipolar disorder.”

The Alberta Science and Research Authority has given the research team a grant for a half million dollars to conduct a
randomized, placebo-controlled trial of about 100 people with bipolar disorder. It was launched this July, with results expected
in 2002.

“I’m very encouraged by the initial results of the doctors’ research,” says Alberta Innovation and Science Minister Lorne
Taylor, PhD. “Innovation and Science is all about finding new ways to treat old problems – and we shouldn’t be afraid to look
for ways to complement the excellent work being done in pharmaceutical research.”

The supplement, known as E.M. Power, was developed by The Synergy Group of Canada Inc., an Alberta-based organization
dedicated to researching and overcoming disorders of the Central Nervous System.

Kaplan’s work is funded by the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation.

• By: Michael Shapcott
  On: Mar. 8, 2010 Ontario Throne Speech: Non-profits are ‘unsung heroes’ of provincial economy

“You really need to take some higher education beyond grade 10.

Then maybe, you can get a real job and stop feeling sorry for yourself living in poverty, clinging to the likes of David Miller and net work of failures to!

Socialism, as proven time and time again, has one singular purpose – that is to reduce every citizen to the lowest common denominator – poverty. Misery likes company.

When I see my tax dollars being wasted to house people in Toronto who shouldn’t even be living here given that most working folks have to commute for hours a day to get to a town they can afford to live in from their own resources. At lease those folks have dignity and carry their own weight through life.

It makes me angry to see people living their life on a tax subsidy. And what do we get in return? What are these people doing for our city? All I hear about is crime and property destruction in TCH.

They spend 100’s of thousands every month just on security to protect the property we are financing. This is total non-sense!!!!

Screw socialism and screw public housing!”

Class resentment used to be the preserve of the left. That workers were too poor could be blamed on the fact that bosses were too wealthy. If governments needed money, the preferred solution – rhetorically at least – was to make the rich pay.

These old-style resentments encouraged both Marxist economics (based on the notion that profit is by definition theft) and the progressive income tax system.

Indeed, the entire post-war welfare state was designed to better the conditions of the poor, thereby ensuring that these class resentments didn’t get out of hand.

Today, class resentments have been turned on their head. The focus of anger is not the silk-hatted capitalist but his unionized workers, with their job protection guarantees, their pension plans and their good wages.

Increasingly, in the world of media and popular culture, it is not the rich who are blamed for their excesses but the poor – the undeserving welfare recipient, the shiftless single mother, the employment insurance cheat. Resentment has become a potent tool of the right.

This is the context in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is hinting at plans to roll back federal public service pensions.

Forty years ago, the unionization of public servants was generally seen as a good thing.

Unions were on the rise. They had made great gains for their members after World War II and, in terms of pensions, benefits and wages, were setting the standard for the entire workforce.

In that context, and given the growing importance of government workers like nurses, it seemed sensible to encourage public sector unions.

Even if public sector benefits might, at times, appear more generous than those of other workers, the general assumption was that this was temporary, that over time everyone would catch up.

True, cash-strapped governments might occasionally take aim at their own workforces – as Pierre Trudeau’s Liberals did in the mid-’80s, when they limited federal public service wage increases.

But even then, the underlying assumption was that such moves would be temporary, that public sector employees were no less valuable than anyone else and that, when the dust cleared, matters would resort to normal with all workers, both public and private, moving inexorably forward.

Somewhere in the 1980s and ’90s, this changed.

The underlying reasons had to do with the shift from an economy based on employees engaged in manufacturing, who were easy to unionize, to one based on workers engaged in services – many of them part-time – who were not.

In this new world, many in the middle classes found, to their shock, that they were not moving forward but falling back.

On the ideological front, these same decades saw the return of a laissez-faire form of thinking that had been out of date since the ’20s.

Sometimes called neo-liberalism, sometimes neo-conservatism, it provided intellectual justification for those opposed to the kind of social democratic policies under construction in countries like Canada.

The new ideologues took aim at the pillars of the post-war consensus, from the welfare state to the idea of taxing corporations to the very principle of progressive income tax itself.

Progressive income tax is based on a theory of fairness – that the rich should pay not just more than the poor but proportionally more.

The new ideologues countered with a theory of effectiveness, arguing (albeit without any empirical evidence) that flat taxes, where rich and poor pay the same rate, would encourage more investment.

They argued that corporate taxes were redundant since corporations are owned by people. Then they argued that the people who own corporations shouldn’t be taxed either, since this would provide a disincentive to invest.

Under the old consensus, it was deemed fair to levy higher taxes on those who make more money. The new ideologues argue that taxing income at all is unfair to those who produce, that consumption is the real social sin and that those who consume the most relative to their wages (that is the poor) should be punished through higher GST levies.

In modern Canada, the first concerted use of reverse class resentment by a political party can probably be dated to the Ontario election campaign of 1995, when Conservatives under Mike Harris attacked welfare recipients – particularly single mothers – as lazy, undeserving parasites.

But this recession has shown the full power of the new resentment. In both the U.S. and Canada, public criticism of last year’s auto bailouts was levelled not at the companies’ owners and managers but at their unionized workers.

During the bailout talks, critics and the public lambasted rank and file autoworkers for making more than $34 an hour, yet the fact that General Motors chief executive officer Ed Whitacre is slated to receive $9 million a year has received minimal attention.

None of this has gone unnoticed in Ottawa.

Hobbled by both its minority government status and continuing high levels of unemployment, Harper’s finance minister, Jim Flaherty, is unlikely to announce anything fiscally significant in his March 4 budget.

But he may well make use of the power of resentment.

Treasury Board president Stockwell Day has hinted that public sector workers should be prepared to make sacrifices after the budget.

Already, newspaper stories are beginning to appear pointing out the relative richness of public sector pensions.

Meanwhile, the public sector unions themselves are beating the drums against the expected government onslaught.

For the Harper Conservatives, all of this is useful. First, it removes the focus from the country’s real pension problems: Most Canadians don’t have workplace pensions; those who do have found their plans savaged by this recession.

British Columbia and Alberta have suggested ways of dealing with this, as have the federal New Democrats and Liberals. The Harper government has done nothing

Second and more important, an attack on public sector pensions refocuses class resentment along lines more amenable to the Conservative government.

The left’s resentments were predicated on the notion that if some are privileged, all should be. For all of its problems (and resentment is a difficult force to control), it was at least optimistic. At its best, it encouraged people, through their governments, to improve the lot of those who were hurting.

The new resentment is based on the presumption that if I don’t have something, neither should you. Its aim is not to improve anyone’s lot but to cut down to a common level of misery those uppity enough to think they deserve better.

It is pessimistic, antithetical to any kind of common action and angrily passive. It rarely focuses on the bigger questions because it assumes that, at high levels of state and economy, nothing can be done, that the best anyone can hope for is to protect his tiny bit of turf from a marauding neighbour.

It is a form of resentment that suits those in charge. For Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, it is a most useful passion.

Thomas Walkom’s column appears Wednesday and Saturday.

Bill C-15 could fill Canadian prisons with drug offenders

By Carlito Pablo

On March 2, the Pew Center on the States, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, released a report on the staggering growth of the American correctional system.

Entitled One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, the report noted that “sentencing and release laws passed in the 1980s and 1990s put so many more people behind bars that last year the incarcerated population reached 2.3 million and, for the first time, one in 100 adults was in prison or jail.”

It also cited the tremendous increase in the number of people on probation or parole, such that “combined with those in prison and jail, a stunning 1 in every 31 adults, or 3.2 percent, is under some form of correctional control.”

Why is this relevant to Canada?

“We only need to go south of the border and see a nation that enacted mandatory minimums related to drug offences from the mid-1980s on,” criminologist Susan Boyd told the Georgia Straight. “It didn’t reduce violence and drug use. So here we are saying, ‘We’re going to do this.’ ”

Boyd—an associate professor at UVic and research fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C.—was referring to the reintroduction in Parliament by the Conservative government of a bill that proposes mandatory minimum jail sentences for drug offenders.

If passed into law, Bill C-15 would, among its other provisions, throw people caught with one marijuana plant into the slammer for a minimum of six months. If growing a single plant is done on a property that belongs to another person or in an area where it may present a hazard to children, minimum jail time is nine months.

Worse, the bill seeks to increase the maximum penalty for this particular offence to 14 years.

Vancouver’s so-called Prince of Pot, Marc Emery, who is fighting extradition on charges of selling marijuana seeds to American growers, is a potential U.S. prison statistic.

Emery was handing out leaflets condemning drug prohibition, along with his wife, Jodie, on the south side of the city when the Straight asked him about Bill C-15. “Anything that puts more people in jail for drugs is going to fill prisons,” he said. “It’s a very expensive and failed policy that will only bring us more misery.”

The Pew Center on the States report pointed out that many states in the U.S. “appear to have reached a ‘tipping point’ where additional incarceration will have little if any effect on crime”.

In Washington state, which shares a border with B.C., the report stated, “from 1980 to 2001, the benefit-to-cost ratio for drug offenders plummeted from $9.22 to $0.37.

“That is, for every one dollar invested in new prison beds for drug offenders, state taxpayers get only 37 cents in averted crime,” it noted. “An updated analysis from 2006 found that incarceration of offenders convicted of violent offenses remained a positive net benefit, while property and drug offenders offered negative returns.”

Conservative Abbotsford MP Ed Fast deflected criticism that mandatory jail times haven’t worked in the U.S.

“First of all, on the issue of deterrence there’s contradicting evidence,” Fast told the Straight. “I don’t base my support for the legislation on the deterrent effect. I base it on the prophylactic effect of the legislation. Prophylactic means taking repeat, violent offenders out of our communities for longer periods of time.”

Bill C-15 is a reincarnation of Bill C-26, which the Conservatives introduced in November 2007.

In February 2008, a few months after Bill C-26 was tabled in Parliament, Boyd started sending Prime Minister Stephen Harper a weekly letter in an attempt to educate the Conservative leader about harm reduction and drug regulation.

Boyd did this for a year, and she sent her 52nd and final letter in early February this year. Bill C-15 was introduced on February 27, a day after the Conservatives filed Bill C-14, which toughens penalties for gang-associated violent activities.

As an educator, Boyd has this to say about mentoring Harper: “The prime minister gets a failing grade on drug policy.”

The economics of prisons in Canada

> Total correctional-services expenditures in 2005-06: almost $3 billion

> Share spent on custodial services or prisons: 71 percent

> Associated policing and court costs in 2005-06: more than $10 billion

> Number of correctional facilities in Canada in 2005-06: 192

> Annual cost of incarcerating a federal female prisoner in
2004-05: $150,000 to $250,000

> Annual cost of incarcerating a federal male prisoner in 2004-05: $87,665

> Daily cost of incarcerating a provincial prisoner in 2004-05: $141.78

> Daily cost of alternatives such as probation, bail supervision,
and community supervision: $5 to $25

Source: prisonjustice.ca

Latest News