Roundtable answers concerns about site
The BizSmarts downtown safety roundtable, held at city hall on Wednesday, was an opportunity for business people and others in the downtown core to directly address questions on the opioid crisis and the Supervised Consumption Site in Lethbridge, with local police, city officials and social services support staff.
One of the presenters, Sgt. Robin Klassen, commander of the Downtown Police Unit, said her team was working hard to round up suppliers and pushers, but stated these efforts must go hand-in-hand with social services like the Supervised Consumption Site to make all of the downtown safer.
“The DPU has to have a really good understanding of both the social side of things and the criminal side of things,” she told the audience of about 50 people present for the roundtable. “We have to be creative a lot of our times with our solutions and how we deal with the problems, because arresting doesn’t always result in a positive outcome for everybody. We arrest, they get out again, and we are often facing the same problems. We have to create new and better ways for working on these things.”
Klassen highlighted the work of the LPS PACT (Police and Crisis Team) pilot where a police officer works with a mental health worker in the downtown core. Klassen also praised the Supervised Consumption Site as a step in the right direction for enhanced public safety in the downtown.
Other speakers during the roundtable included representatives from the Canadian Mental Health Association’s DOT and Social Worker in the Library Programs, CMARD, Community and Social Development and the Clean Sweep Program, which provides jobs to homeless people or others in trying circumstances to help clean up Lethbridge’s streets. And Jill Manning of ARCHES, presented on the Supervised Consumption Site and its next major initiative, the Opioid Recovery Coaching Program, which Manning hopes will keep those addicts going through methadone and suboxone treatments on track with their recoveries.
The most eye-opening details however, emerged from Travis Plaited-Hair, executive director of the Sik-Ooh-Kotoki Friendship Centre, and Collete Ryostock, manager of the Lethbridge Shelter, who copresented on the major challenges facing their facility since the city’s opioid crisis began a few years back. The amount of injection drug users in and around the shelter has intensified, drug debris is everywhere and disruptive behaviour has intensified to dangerous levels, said Plaited-Hair.
“At the shelter our staff’s lives are on the line every day,” Plaited-Hair said. “Right now we are not getting support from anybody regarding our
current situation at the shelter. That (supervised) consumption site is a Godsend, because already Collette (our manager) has reported a decline in drug usage in the facility.”
“It hit us really hard last summer,” said Ryostock. “We saw a real change in our clientele at that time. The issues we saw at the shelter before we could easily handle, but this current situation is kind out of our hands. It came hard, it came quick, and last summer when our clients started to be outside the building using, and all these sorts of things, we had a really hard time keeping up with that. And that hasn’t let up since last summer.”
The colder-than-average winter also added to the problem, said Ryostock, pushing more opioid addicts into close quarters with each other.
“For us, in the winter it was an extremely cold winter,” she said. “In January and February it got really busy, and at that time where we do have a capacity for 111, but we are only funded for 80 beds. We were looking at above-normal numbers for our applicancy rate. Right now, most of the time, we are right at our capacity of 111.”
The shelter is thinking of installing blue lights in shelter’s bathroom to make it harder for users to inject there, and is hoping to create further bridges with organizations like ARCHES to come up with a new and safer management strategy for its 16 staff members, said Plaited-Hair.
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