SELLEY ON SAFE INJECTION SITES.
Isuspect this generation of policymakers, and the previous one especially, will struggle to explain to their grandchildren just what on earth they thought they were doing about opioid addiction. I don’t mean the likes of Donald Trump, who seems to think a get-tough policing approach — a “war on drugs,” perhaps — might get the job done. I mean smart, reasonably compassionate Canadians, by no means all conservatives, whose worries about safe injection sites in particular look bizarre even today, when people are still using them.
“It’ll attract rubadubs” — as if Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside was a middle-class utopia before Insite set up shop. “There’ll be needles in the streets” — more than if the safe injection site weren’t there, you mean?
And, of course: “Addicts should go to treatment instead” — as if people haven’t been trying and failing to get and stay clean this whole time; as if the alternative, on a day-to-day basis, might be not waking up the next morning to go get treatment.
To its credit, the Liberal government in Ottawa has loosened the regulatory reins. There are nine approved “supervised consumption sites” up and running across the country: five on the Lower Mainland, one in Kamloops, and three in Montreal. Six more, in Victoria, Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal, are approved and awaiting inspections.
An additional 10 are in the approval process; four in Edmonton applied more than three months ago; one in Ottawa has been in the works, officially, since February.
This looks like progress, and to a great extent it is. But on Sunday, a group of activists in Toronto implicitly asked another trenchant question: why does it take so bloody long to set up a supervised injection site? Why are we waiting? It’s just clean needles, chairs and tables, overdose treatment medication, a nurse and a phone.
So the Toronto Harm Reduction Alliance got itself a basic white tent, erected it in Toronto’s gritty downtown Moss Park, and put all that stuff inside it. Presto: A safe, supervised injection site — just about every bit as good, in every way that matters, as one with paid employees and an official certificate from the government exempting it from federal law. Organizers say one patron overdosed Monday night, and was revived.
He was just as alive the next morning as he would have been in a government-inspected and certified tent; he would have been just as dead had he fatally overdosed in an alley or bathroom or apartment.
This isn’t the first time harm-reduction advocates have gone rogue. A similar operation set up shop on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside last year, both to supplement Insite and provide services that it doesn’t — notably, responding to emergencies from the many people who, for whatever reason, choose not to shoot up at Insite. “When you’re dealing with emergencies like this, there’s no time to wait for the government bureaucracy to do its job,” co-founder Sarah Blyth told VICE News.
Indeed. If anything, I’m surprised this sort of thing hasn’ t happened more often. Toronto officialdom greeted the supervised injection tent’s arrival first with a shrug: police officers were on scene, but not intervening; neither conservative Mayor John Tory, formerly a safe injection skeptic, nor his liberal drug policy deputy Joe Cressy, had anything bad to say about it. Then it responded with action. The public health board announced it would open an “interim” supervised injection site in one of the alreadyapproved locations.
That’s a pretty solid result for the price of a tent! What was public health waiting for?
I have written before about how quickly public opinion seems to have softened on harm reduction and it’s not surprising. The death toll is staggering. Of late a lot more parents have watched in horror as their “tough love”/“go to rehab” approach failed to save their children from an overdose death.
A lot more of them are white and upper-to-middle class and well connected, and some of them are politicians. All of them wish their children could have had just one more day at least, and that’s precisely what harm reduction offers — whether it’s safe injection sites or police officers trained to administer overdose treatment or prescribing addicts a safe, pharmaceutical-grade product to shoot up instead of whatever junk is currently making the rounds.
Safe injection having gained widespread acceptance, at long last, I’m not sure how society avoids accepting all the other ways to save lives. Obviously, we would rather people not be addicted to opioids.
But if harm reduction requires a compromise in principle, it’s one with a blindingly obvious payoff: living human beings who would otherwise be dead. It reflects poorly on us that we resisted for so long.