Staying Alive

For the first piece of the month we've decided to share a story from the CBC's Fifth Estate. This is a particularly important piece about life on the edge for a couple of reasons, the first should be obvious once you watch the video, the second pertains more to the recent fallout from funding lapses in the federal budget for the CBC. 600 jobs have been lost and radio and television programming will be suffering signifigant setbacks because of it. This is the kind of investigative journalism that has put Canadian journalists on the map. Love or hate the CBC its pretty sad to see that it has to walk a tightrope for the difference between 35$ and 40$/taxpayer.

The synopsis of the episode is below the link. Be sure to read this to know what you're getting into as some of the images can be very disturbing to some. The entire content of the video and synopsis is CBC content, I'm just trying to draw attention to how a local population can be living life on the edge.

http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/2008-2009/staying_alive/video.html

Staying Alive
The federal government wants it shut down. The people who use it and who work there say it is saving lives. It is Insite, provincially-funded, and the first and only supervised injection site in North America where addicts can bring their drug of choice and, with the clean needles provided, can inject themselves. Insite's clients are some of the most desperate who live on Vancouver's downtown east side. Now, for the first time, cameras have been allowed inside the facility for an exclusive look at the place and the people. Follow Hana Gartner inside and make up your own mind about whether Insite is, as one federal politician has said, an "abomination", or whether there should be more of them in this country.