Two overdose deaths have occurred under the back stoop of my downtown building.
From what I know, the victims — in separate incidents — were transients huddling in a small crawl space.
This troubles me a whole lot more than the discarded needles and used condoms strewn about. Lives matter more than property. The lives of down-and-out strangers no less.
I mention this here just to note that I’m well aware of how street drugs have seized some Toronto neighbourhoods by the throat. There was a brazen shooting on the patio of a bar across the street. The proprietor of a convenience store on the corner was stabbed to death.
None of which has stopped developers from shoehorning new condo buildings on every reclaimed wedge of urban space, clawing back lots block by block.
Somehow, we need to find a way to coexist, renters and property-owners and addicts and vagrants, to use an unpopular term.
So, I’m not upset that there’s a pop-up safe-injection trailer at Moss Park, a few hundred yards away. Or that another supervised-injection site has opened recently at the Fred Victor Mission, directly across the street.
With a national opioid crisis that shows no signs of abating, Canada’s largest city needs more such harm-reduction refuges, not fewer.
I remind myself constantly that these men and women, a disproportionate number of them Indigenous people and refugees, are my neighbours too, with every right to be here. They must have, or at one time had, loved ones. Each is somebody’s son, daughter, parent, sibling.
Doug Ford, whose own brother fell prey to addiction and admitted to using crack cocaine, should have a whit better understanding of how drugs can destroy a person, a family. How can anybody who’s ever loved an addict seek to deny them a tiny niche in this great big metropolis where the drugs they crave, can’t exist without, are consumed in a safe and hygienic environment, with health professionals close to hand in the event of a crisis?
Family of the late Rob Ford clearly had the financial means to get the former Toronto mayor into a residence rehab program back in 2014. And Rob Ford must have been at a point in his life where he was able to admit his problem and seek help.
But Doug Ford, who would and probably will be premier of Ontario come the June election, seems a hard, heartless man, lacking in empathy and compassion. I’ve not forgotten any of the sneering, the name-calling, the mendacity and the slime he spewed with access to a radio talk-show microphone.
Ford has sought to sand down those jagged edges in his current campaign to unseat Premier Kathleen Wynne. But he’s fundamentally the same nasty piece of work.
“What I’m not going to do is I’m not going to have injection sites in neighbourhoods,” Ford said during Monday night’s televised provincial leaders’ debate. “I’ve criss-crossed this province, I’ve talked to numerous people, that family members have had addictions and they’re telling me they don’t want an area that they can do more drugs. What they need is rehabilitation programs.”
That echoed a statement on the subject Ford made last month. “Ask anyone out there, if your son, daughter or loved one ever had an addiction, would you want them to go in a little area and do more drugs? I’m dead set against that.”
Ask me, Doug.
Because I’ve been there. I know scores of people who’ve been there, too. And while the best option is to wean addicts off drugs, the alternative to addiction shouldn’t be an early death under a back yard stoop.
Ford has promised $1.9 billion in provincial spending for mental health and rehabilitation programs. That’s great. But the front-line crisis is urgent, claiming more lives by the day: at least 2,947 apparent opioid-related deaths in Canada between January 2017 and September 2017, 1,460 of those in Ontario, according to the Public Health Ontario website. Some 4,500 emergency room visits across the country in the same time period.
At the Moss Park site, as of Tuesday, 203 overdose reversals recorded with the immediate application of naloxone.
That’s 203 lives that would likely have been lost if Ford had his way.
There are currently four official supervised-injection sites in Toronto and two overdose-prevention sites operating in Regent Park and St. Stephen’s Community House. A supervised-injection site, as Susan Shepherd, manager of the Toronto Drug Secretariat explained to the Star in an email, provides safe and hygienic conditions for people to inject pre-obtained drugs under the supervision of qualified staff. In Canada, legal operation of a supervised-injection service requires an exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, granted by the federal Health Department.
“Overdose-prevention sites are low-barrier, time-limited, and targeted services that are intended to help address the current opioid poisoning crisis,” said Shepherd. “They can be opened much more quickly than a supervised-injection site.”
These are operated by the province under the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care, also having secured exemptions from the federal government.
They’ve been out there since last summer, at Moss Park, because there were angels in this city who recognized the swirling crisis was already right in our face. Too much dying.
Those mental health funds that Ford has avowed — if you put any stock in a politician’s promises — would be far down the line, where the urgency is immediate, right now. Further, Ford ignores all the expert literature on the subject, which tells us that front-line administering at supervised-injection sites is the best-practice antidote and the point at which addicts are mostly likely to obtain assistance for their part-and-parcel issues — access to housing, therapy and clinical care.
Help them yes, but save them first.
Between 400 and 500 visits per week at the supervised inject sites in Toronto.
We make it about morality and lack of willpower and goddamn property rates. But it’s about health, it’s about a compulsion that often strips addicts of their senses. Never, however, stripped of their innate humanity.
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