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A pair of vending machines stocked with crack pipes for drug users in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside elicited blunt words from the Harper government over the weekend, with Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney reaffirming the government’s quest to end drug use and limit “young people’s access to drug paraphernalia.”

The project, run by a non-profit resource centre, has seen the two machines dispense sterile pipes for 25 cents in an attempt to prevent users from cutting their lips on broken pipes and potentially transmitting such diseases as HIV and hepatitis C.

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It had gone unnoticed by the public for eight months, selling more than 22,000 pipes until this weekend when CTV News questioned the minister’s office about the initiative.

“While the NDP and Liberals would prefer that doctors hand out heroin and needles to those suffering from addiction, this government supports treatment that ends drug use,” read the minister’s statement — an apparent reference to the two parties’ opposition of a bill currently in the House of Commons that would make it harder to open safe injection sites, like Vancouver’s high-profile InSite centre. The centre was the subject of a controversial standoff between a provincial health authority and the federal government in 2011, when the Supreme Court ruled against the government’s long-standing attempt to shutter it.