Pop-up care isn’t an opioid crisis fix

Let’s not fight fentanyl by turning to freelancers

Mayor Jim Watson is right: A Lowertown park is not the place for a pop-up supervised-injection site, and the operators should close it and move in with the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre.

Failing that, the city should shut it down. We can’t have a public health system in which, at a time of crisis, anybody can decide to set up shop and deliver care. That’s not good public health care; it’s a recipe for chaos, and we should not encourage it, no matter how well-meaning.

The mayor spoke after a group of activists operating under the banner of Overdose Prevention Ottawa opened the unauthorized site at Raphael Brunet Park. The group, which includes people with health-care experience and drug addiction experts, says the need is urgent and there’s no option but to act now to prevent more overdoses.

There’s no doubt opioid overdoses in the city and the province have reached epidemic proportions. Fentanyl overdoses are not only happening in the downtown core but in suburban enclaves of the city. Lives are at stake and the city needs to mobilize every available resource, but that doesn’t mean freelancers taking over public parks and dispensing their own care.

Once we allow that to happen, it becomes a free-for-all, with copycats popping up everywhere with no clue of how it will all end. What happened at the University of Ottawa is a prime example of how things can get out of hand.

The undergraduate student union, no doubt out of the goodness of heart, planned to arm about 100 student leaders with naloxone kits to combat overdoses that might occur during

The people running the site may be ‘experts,’ but even the best of experts get things wrong sometimes. What then?

orientation week for the new academic year. They thought that asking untrained students to administer naloxone to mostly 17- and 18-yearolds was a brilliant idea, and dropped it only after someone pointed out liability issues that might arise if something goes wrong.

The same goes for the OPO’s operation. Even if one ignores the hostile takeover of a public park frequented by families and kids, the thing to ponder is, what if something goes wrong? Who is liable, the city or OPO? The operators say the site has been used more than 300 times, and that’s fine. The people running the site may be “experts,” but even the best of experts get things wrong sometimes. What then?

Beyond that is the dangerous idea that operating within the law at a time like this is somewhat unheroic. “We’re kind of frustrated that (Sandy Hill) is not doing what we’ve done, taking the courage to just go ahead and do it,” Rick Sproule, one of the OPO’s organizers, said, accusing Watson of politicizing the issue. “We’ve got our necks out on the line. They are doing it the law-and-order way; well OK, but both approaches need to be focused on.”

Let’s get one thing straight: The people at OPO, well-intentioned as they are, are not the only ones with the courage and dedication to help people. Everyone from public health officials to the police, the mayor and ordinary people in the community are heavily invested in ending the overdose crisis and saving lives.

The fact that they are not setting up or supporting illegal sites doesn’t mean they are less committed to their unfortunate fellow citizens. Long before OPO came along, Sandy Hill was fighting hard to establish a secure injection site to help ease the crisis.

In the interim, all manner of people and groups have been doing their best to help, and no doubt would continue to do so. Sandy Hill officials worry that switching focus now to create an interim site could slow down efforts to establish a full facility.

Right now, what we need to focus on singlemindedly is to make sure Sandy Hill opens as expected, sometime in the fall, because that’s the best long-term solution for addicts.