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Red Deer family hosting fundraiser for single mom battling cancer for last 11 years

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4 minute read

From Jessica Ryan

Being diagnosed at age 23 a young woman’s life began to unravel and change more than she could have ever expected.  Diagnosed with stage 3 cancer Jamie Carswell fought through every hurdle and obstacle in her way!

Jamie faces challenges that only very few have to undertake, and time and time again continues to battle the disease.  At age 29 she became a mom and had a dear friend carry a child for her as, the disease made that challenging.  Now age 34 Jamie continues to battle her 4th bout with cancer over her 11 years of diagnosis.  This life-altering disease has left her a single mom to a 5 year old son and she now requires daily homecare by her mother Pauline Carswell.  Pauline is known in Red Deer by her many years of competitive and leisure leagues at The Red Deer Curling Club.  Her Father Robert Carswell owns and operated the non profit Red Deer Boxing Club for over 30 years in Red Deer.  Both her parents help raise her son alongside her as well as reside together.  Three generations living in one home, and not the usual way we are taught to view life.  Her mother attends to her daily needs and this has proven difficult in a home filled with barriers that have given little accessibility to continue care at home.

Currently they are building a wheelchair accessible home to help ease and support her daily life.  This home will provide the required access for her future, while providing a forever home for her son to grow up in.

The Event will be held November 24, 2018 – 7:00 pm at Elephant & Castle Pub and Restaurant #500 Timberlands Drive, Red Deer.
(Dinner available 5:00 pm onward with pre-sale tickets)

We are pre-selling tickets which will include : Pub Classic Dinner menu ( excluding Pub Steak) and live entertainment.
We will be having door prize, raffle items, silent auction and more.

We ask you to invest in our mission by attending or contributing to our fundraiser Pub night.

We have a account set up for those that want to contribute but cannot make the event.

Your participation as a sponsor of cash donation, goods or services will help ensure that three generations of family are given financial help for medical costs, loss of income, costs to raise a child, and future needs for their forever home.  These financial burdens are greatly stressful on everyone involved.  I am making it my mission to alleviate some of these factors causing daily concern for the family.

With the help from our community we can take part in the mission and we can do it together!

Thank you for helping us reach our goals!

[email protected]

Registered to an auto deposit Bank Of Montreal account to etransfer or donate today.

Click here to connect to our event page on Facebook.

Respectfully,
Jessica Ryan
403-877-3507

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Community

SPARC Red Deer – Caring Adult Nominations open now!

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Red Deer community let’s give a round of applause to the incredible adults shaping the future of our kids. Whether they’re a coach, neighbour, teacher, mentor, instructor, or someone special, we want to know about them!

Tell us the inspiring story of how your nominee is helping kids grow up great. We will honour the first 100 local nominees for their outstanding contributions to youth development. It’s time to highlight those who consistently go above and beyond!

To nominate, visit Events (sparcreddeer.ca)

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Addictions

‘Harm Reduction’ is killing B.C.’s addicts. There’s got to be a better way

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Susan Martinuk 

B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy

Since 2016, more than 40,000 Canadians have died from opioid drug overdoses — almost as many as died during the Second World War.
Governments, health care professionals and addiction experts all acknowledge that widespread use of opioids has created a public health crisis in Canada. Yet they agree on virtually nothing else about this crisis, including its causes, possible remedies and whether addicts should be regarded as passive victims or accountable moral agents.

Fuelled by the deadly manufactured opioid fentanyl, Canada’s national drug overdose rate stood at 19.3 people per 100,000 in 2022, a shockingly high number when compared to the European Union’s rate of just 1.8. But national statistics hide considerable geographic variation. British Columbia and Alberta together account for only a quarter of Canada’s population yet nearly half of all opioid deaths. B.C.’s 2022 death rate of 45.2/100,000 is more than double the national average, with Alberta close behind at 33.3/100,00.

In response to the drug crisis, Canada’s two western-most provinces have taken markedly divergent approaches, and in doing so have created a natural experiment with national implications.

B.C. has emphasized harm reduction, which seeks to eliminate the damaging effects of illicit drugs without actually removing them from the equation. The strategy focuses on creating access to clean drugs and includes such measures as “safe” injection sites, needle exchange programs, crack-pipe giveaways and even drug-dispensing vending machines. The approach goes so far as to distribute drugs like heroin and cocaine free of charge in the hope addicts will no longer be tempted by potentially tainted street drugs and may eventually seek help.

But safe-supply policies create many unexpected consequences. A National Post investigation found, for example, that government-supplied hydromorphone pills handed out to addicts in Vancouver are often re-sold on the street to other addicts. The sellers then use the money to purchase a street drug that provides a better high — namely, fentanyl.

Doubling down on safe supply, B.C. recently decriminalized the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. The resulting explosion of addicts using drugs in public spaces, including parks and playgrounds, recently led the province’s NDP government to attempt to backtrack on this policy — though for now that effort has been stymied by the courts.

According to Vancouver city councillor Brian Montague, “The stats tell us that harm reduction isn’t working.” In an interview, he calls decriminalization “a disaster” and proposes a policy shift that recognizes the connection between mental illness and addiction. The province, he says, needs “massive numbers of beds in treatment facilities that deal with both addictions and long-term mental health problems (plus) access to free counselling and housing.”

In fact, Montague’s wish is coming true — one province east, in Alberta. Since the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019, Alberta has been transforming its drug addiction policy away from harm reduction and towards publicly-funded treatment and recovery efforts.

Instead of offering safe-injection sites and free drugs, Alberta is building a network of 10 therapeutic communities across the province where patients can stay for up to a year, receiving therapy and medical treatment and developing skills that will enable them to build a life outside the drug culture. All for free. The province’s first two new recovery centres opened last year in Lethbridge and Red Deer. There are currently over 29,000 addiction treatment spaces in the province.

This treatment-based strategy is in large part the work of Marshall Smith, current chief of staff to Alberta’s premier and a former addict himself, whose life story is a testament to the importance of treatment and recovery.

The sharply contrasting policies of B.C. and Alberta allow a comparison of what works and what doesn’t. A first, tentative report card on this natural experiment was produced last year in a study from Stanford University’s network on addiction policy (SNAP). Noting “a lack of policy innovation in B.C.,” where harm reduction has become the dominant policy approach, the report argues that in fact “Alberta is currently experiencing a reduction in key addiction-related harms.” But it concludes that “Canada overall, and B.C. in particular, is not yet showing the progress that the public and those impacted by drug addiction deserve.”

The report is admittedly an early analysis of these two contrasting approaches. Most of Alberta’s recovery homes are still under construction, and B.C.’s decriminalization policy is only a year old. And since the report was published, opioid death rates have inched higher in both provinces.

Still, the early returns do seem to favour Alberta’s approach. That should be regarded as good news. Society certainly has an obligation to try to help drug users. But that duty must involve more than offering addicts free drugs. Addicted people need treatment so they can kick their potentially deadly habit and go on to live healthy, meaningful lives. Dignity comes from a life of purpose and self-control, not a government-funded fix.

Susan Martinuk is a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and author of the 2021 book Patients at Risk: Exposing Canada’s Health Care Crisis. A longer version of this article recently appeared at C2CJournal.ca.

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