Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.
Centretown Community Health Centre
(420 Cooper Street)
Admission is free
For over ten years Dr. Gabor Maté has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, mental illness, Hepatitis C or HIV and, in many cases, all four.
In his compassionate and compelling book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Dr. Maté begins with a dramatically close view of his drug-addicted patients. He weaves the stories of real people who have struggled with addiction with the latest research on addiction and the brain. Providing a bold synthesis of clinical experience, insight and cutting edge scientific findings, Dr. Maté sheds light on this most puzzling of human frailties.
He also takes aim at the hugely ineffectual, largely U.S.-led War on Drugs (and its worldwide followers), challenging the wisdom of fighting drugs instead of aiding the addicts, and showing how controversial measures such as safe injection sites are measurably more successful at reducing drug-related crime and the spread of disease than anything most major governments have going.
Dr. Samantha King’s engaging book Pink Ribbons Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy challenges the corporatization of the search for a breast cancer cure.
In 2005, more than one million people participated in the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for the Cure, the largest network of 5K runs in the world. Consumers thoughtfully choose products ranging from yogurt to cars, responding to the promise that these purchases will contribute to a cure for the disease. And hundreds of companies and organizations support Breast Cancer Awareness Month, founded by a pharmaceutical company in 1985. What could be wrong with that?
Highly revelatory—at times shocking—Pink Ribbons, Inc. challenges the commercialization of the breast cancer movement and its influence on ideas of good citizenship, responsible consumption, and generosity.
King traces how breast cancer has been transformed from a stigmatized disease and individual tragedy to a market-driven industry of survivorship. In an unprecedented outpouring of philanthropy, corporations turn their formidable promotion machines on the curing of the disease while dwarfing public health prevention efforts and stifling the calls for investigation into why and how breast cancer affects such a vast number of people. Here, for the first time, King questions the effectiveness and legitimacy of privately funded efforts to stop the epidemic among women.
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