The Tragedy of the Commons is a Cow Eating Reject-Candy

by Mackenzie Berg

One morning this summer during a sleepy Chemistry lecture, I was sitting next to my lab partner, a young man from Myanmar via Singapore, and I asked him what he thought about his job: Stacking fruits and vegetables into neat pyramids for eight hours a day at a large grocery store in Rainer Beach. Did he ever think about where all this produce came from? How it was grown? Whose hands tended it? I wondered all of these things.

He was amused. Answering with gently incredulous “No?”, capped with an upward lilt and a questioning smirk, — the same one he often used to ridicule me for not knowing better when I got an answer wrong on our homework. Albert, whose real name is Phyo Pyae, is 21 and doesn’t have much space in his mind for thinking about the origins of food.

For shame! How not to talk to a smoker.

By Ashley White

Smoking.  It’s pretty bad for you.  The heart, lungs, brain, liver and gut all get pretty beat up by cigarrettes and their nasty brew of preservatives and toxins.  Hair gets smelley. Nails get grody.  Teeth get Beetle-juicey.  Duh.  No one doesn’t know this.   In fact, smokers know it best.

Yet, public health departments around the globe operationalise the ‘smoking is bad for you, don’t do it’ metaphor in all sorts of visually-provoking multimedia.  A friend passed this interesting collection to me last week.

There’s the “she was such a pretty girl!” {said in high-pitched shamey-sad voice} take.

Better medical services for street-based sex workers

By Kerry Porth

‘Angela’ is a woman I used to work with in Vancouver.  Her story, sadly, is typical. Angela was in her early 40’s and had been living in the downtown east side of Vancouver for many years.  She was addicted to crack cocaine and prescription pain medications and engaged in street-based sex work as a means of survival. She was attending a support group program at my then place of work, which serves to provide counselling support and education to women in the sex trade.  Over the months of working together, our staff became aware that she was experiencing severe pain in one of her legs due to an infection.  It took several months, but the staff and her peers in the support group managed to motivate her to seek medical attention for her leg. She visited the emergency room at a local hospital twice, only to be treated with disrespect, accused of drug-seeking behaviour and left to wait for so many hours that she simply gave up and left.   Because Angela had to spend so much time seeking care, it gave her less time in the day to work and she began to suffer the effects of withdrawal.   Thus, her vulnerability to predatory clients increased because she would accept jobs that were more likely to expose her to risk and violence out of an increasing need to earn, and then to use.