Search still on for foothold in war against OD deaths

When night fell Friday, there was no safe injection site in Lowertown’s Raphael Brunet park. It wasn’t the first time; inclement weather had forced it to close before. But now, it’s final. Thursday evening was the last hurrah.

This harm reduction site was a new sort of facility, if a tent can be called that: health-care-by-freebooters, offering services that government had shuffled, instead of sprinted, towards delivering. “It is shameful that so many individuals have had to sacrifice so much to fix that failing,” said a statement by Overdose Prevention Ottawa as it announced it was ending this unsanctioned injection site.

OPO’s little foray into health care and overdose prevention, by supplying a spot to use drugs safely, raises an unavoidably relevant question: When is it OK to break the law?

It’s widely accepted, morally, that you can justifiably run a red light (carefully) to get to the hospital in an emergency. Or use violence to prevent violence. Or steal a loaf of bread to feed starving orphans. Health care, though, is fraught with far more complex ethical and practical questions. A supervised injection site, meant to keep folks from dropping dead by ensuring they have a hygienic, safe spot to inject, is by default abetting illegal drug use.

That doesn’t bother me — and it doesn’t bother many others, either, as long as the site itself is governmentapproved or operated, as part of a harm-reduction approach. Odd, isn’t it? Because the rightness of preventing an overdose death surely depends not on who does it or where but, rather, what the outcome is.

Now, though, there’s a legal overdose prevention site up and running at Shepherds of Good Hope, and another at Ottawa Public Health’s Clarence Street building.

This, the OPO “pop-up tent” organizers say, makes their own little operation, which they say has served more than 3,400 people since late August, less necessary — and they deserve credit for forcing action from the authorities.

Incidentally, on Thursday, the B.C. Coroners Service announced its latest count: 1,103 overdose deaths, so far, in British Columbia. Last year, there were 607. Ottawa has been spared in comparison: OPO says it reversed five overdoses in its time in business; four people die each day in B.C. from overdoses.

That’s not to downplay what’s happening here, but to say “Thank God it’s not worse.”

Without safe injection, people will die. Simple as that, even in Ottawa, where we’ve experienced the opioid crisis in a lesser form than Vancouver. People may die anyhow, and there could be unintended side effects in the area where these sites exist, sure. But that’s life in a city. If an injection site were needed in the Glebe or Centretown — my neighbourhood — I’d say bring on the syringes.

And if the government is unwilling or paralyzed, like Mayor Jim Watson’s Ottawa has been for so long, there’s a very real practical benefit to self-deputizing. Of course, this is perilous territory, because it has no natural end point, especially once it slides into other issues. The question on so many lips is: If society provides clean needles, a spot to shoot up and a new crack pipe to boot, why shouldn’t we starting handing over heroin, too?

The thing about this slippery slope is that we’re all sliding in precisely the right direction. Reaching the bottom of the slide looks like being able to pick up a little packet of heroin along with your groceries, pot and medication on an afternoon outing. Newly minted NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has floated full decriminalization of illegal drugs, though I doubt any federal party that plans on winning — sorry, Mr. Singh — would adopt it as a formal position.

It’s actually a relatively simple question that Canadians and politicians must ask themselves: What’s the strategy that’s going to lead to the lowest possible body count?

Because it isn’t the one we’re trying now. The Overdose Prevention Ottawa tent was a symbol of our failing. Tyler Dawson is deputy editorial pages editor of the Ottawa Citizen.