Unhoused, Mentally Unstable, Drug-Addicted -- Don't Worry, Government is There to Help ...

A drug user slumped in a lane in Vancouver. Photo by NICK PROCAYLO/Postmedia

"[The Sandy Hill injection site's impact on the community has been] catastrophic."

"[The consequences of the social disorder and crime around the site] have surpassed what we could even imagine when [our] 2016 letter [of conditional support before the site opened] was written."

Action Sandy Hill 

 

"Anecdotally, with that centre being closed, we're hearing from the community that there has been an increased amount of issues that they're seeing."  

"They're noticing ... quite a dramatic increase in problematic behaviours [fighting, open drug use and open sex trafficking] in that area, and they're certainly asking for more of a police presence, which we are absolutely dedicated to providing."

"Those people who have normally been using that service are now using in the community. So that's often on private property, in their backyards and on porches and alleyways."

 "What I'm hearing from the community is that the problems that were already prevalent in that area in the north end of Sandy Hill have just become more and more common. More public drug use, public drug trafficking and just social disorder."

Sgt. Paul Stam, Ottawa Police Service community outreach and engagement, downtown core

Derrick St John is acting director of consumption and treatment services at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre. (Guy Quenneville/CBC)

 

A large detailed package representing an exhaustive analysis for the study of community-located safe injection sites has recently been assembled, to aid government in decision-making over the usefulness of those sites as opposed to the community backlash their presence has engendered. In Toronto's Kensington neighbourhood a legal challenge was launched with the claim that legislation passed in Ontario prohibiting injection sites from operating within 200 metres of schools and daycare facilities violates the charter rights of drug users. 

The overarching argument in support of the safe injection sites placed within communities in central city areas is that people confident in the use of Naloxone can administer the drug when an overdose occurs. Site staff are trained, and they are often drug users themselves, knowledgeable in the use of drugs and their potential aftermath. At the sites a small percentage of drug users across the nation may inject dangerous street fentanyl leading to overdoses. That scenario changes after 'office hours' when users still overdose with no one nearby to give aid, a common enough occurrence.

 

A view of the new hoods hanging over the booths where clients prepare and use drugs under supervision at Sandy Hill Community Health Centre's OASIS program. (Nick Persaud/CBC)

The provincially appointed supervisor of Toronto's South Riverdale injection site wrote a report noting that endless waves of client (and staff) overdose deaths were such frequent occurrences that staff morale plummeted. In the charter challenge litigation, lawyers representing Ontario presented expert witnesses who established the science around injection sites is not settled. The 2022 Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis notes "there is no evidence that accessing a site lowers an individual's risk of fatal overdose over time." 

The author of the 2012 feasibility study leading to injection sites opening in Toronto and Ottawa, Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, reported that "many" drug users disclosed in interviews they would not use an injection site if they had to walk more than a few minutes once obtaining their drugs. Logically translating to drug dealers required to be operating within a few blocks of sites for them to be effective. In other words, encouraging drug dealers to potentially sell outside a site within 150 metres of elementary schools and daycare facilities.

 

According to Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe, an expert witness in the spatial dynamics of crime for the province, injection sites cause "microlevel" concentrations of crime and disorder. A recent study of Toronto injection sites shows assaults increasing by 61 percent, robberies by 62 percent, and break-and-enters by 47 percent within 100 metres following the implementation of sites. Dr. Ratcliffe, acknowledging that the rate of crime tends to level out over five years, notes the study "does not explore the wealth of other possibilities" to explain why the initial crime spike gradually subsided; police are discouraged from having a presence around injection sites, as an example.

 

With little incentive to switch to hydromorphone, fentanyl addicts sell their safer supply at bargain prices to buy their substance of choice. Photo by Darryl Dyck/The Canadian Press

 

The issue is one of a number of initiatives impacting on health care for the Canadian public that filtered down from the federal government over the last ten years of Liberal rule under Justin Trudeau, who gifted Canada with: 1) legalization of Cannabis, 2) Medical Assistance in Dying (government-approved-legal-suicide), and safer drug injection sites. And not to be overlooked the distribution of opioids meant to wean users away from unsafe, often lethal street drugs like fentanyl and carfentanil. 

 

The distributed opioids make their way to the black market with users trading them for the more powerful fentanyl. The more readily-available opioids on the street, for example, has led to greater introduction and use by young people. And opening government-approved Cannabis shops for legal purchase of the drugs has not led, after all, to closing the market for illegal drugs on the black market, which continues to thrive.

 

People stand outside a Downtown East Side safe injection site in Vancouver. Photo by Nick Procaylo/Postmedia/File