"In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts": Dr. Gabor Maté, Physician at Vancouver Safe-Injection Site, on the Biological and

Well, just last year the newly-appointed drug czar and former Seattle police chief had called for an end to the so-called “war on drugs," raising hopes among advocates of harm-reduction approaches to curbing drug use. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal last May Kerlikowske said “People see a war as a war on them. We’re not at war with people in this country.”

I’m joined now here in the Democracy Now! studio by a doctor who has spent the last 12 years working with one of the densest populations of drug addicts in the world. Dr. Gabor Maté is the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver Canada’s Downtown Eastside. Dr. Maté also treats addicts at the only safe injection site in North America, a center that has come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government led by Stephen Harper.

Dr. Gabor Maté is the bestselling author of four books, his latest just out in the US is called “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction.”

Dr. Gabor Maté, Vancouver, Canada-based physician and author. He is staff physician at the Portland Hotel Society, which runs a residence and harm reduction facility as well as Insite, North America’s only supervised safe-injection site. His four books, all bestsellers in Canada, include “Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates And What You Can Do About It”, “When the Body Says No”, and his latest, “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction.”

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