Safe injection site desired
Fred Bowering scoured the underbrush at the side of the trails, carefully searching for syringes and other drug-related items tossed carelessly aside.
And he never fails to find them — often by the dozens — during his almost daily walks through Centennial Gardens.
“They throw them into the tall grass,” he said Wednesday morning while walking through the 10.8 hectares of parkland off Oakland Avenue.
“They discard them into the woods, you see there,” he said, pointing to syringes partially hidden by foliage, and another jabbed into a tree trunk.
Bowering knows he shouldn’t pick them up. He was pricked by one of the needles about a month ago and promptly had a blood test done.
The experience, however, hasn’t stopped him from continuing to clean up the needles he finds.
If he doesn’t, he fears someone might step on one.
“I can’t really just leaves these behind,” he said.
He now uses a tool that looks like a mechanical claw, given to him by a friend to safely pick up the needles he finds and place them in a plastic bottle for disposal.
“It doesn’t belong in a beautiful park. And it’s not just this park.”
Although the problem is most severe at Centennial Gardens, he said used syringes can also be found in Montebello Park, outside the public library and at city beaches.
“They’re found everywhere,” he said.
Bowering said he calls city hall to report the needles so often he fears he’s pestering city staff. But they never complain, and city crews usually respond promptly to remove the items carefully.
“I don’t mean to be a pain for anybody, but it’s for little kids, or people playing disc golf,” he said, referring to the sport that is similar to golf but uses a Frisbee instead of a golf ball.
Even people walking their dogs through the park are at risk of stepping on needles, he added.
His cousin Sue Bowering described the park as “gorgeous,” offering large fields of green grass that would be ideal places to play for children. But Sue won’t bring her two-year-old granddaughter anywhere near Centennial Gardens.
“Imagine if you’re taking your child down here,” she said, pointing at one of the discarded needles they found.
“Something needs to be done.”
Sue believes she has one possible solution.
She set up an online petition at change.org last weekend, asking the city to establish a safe injection site.
She hopes giving drug users an alternative place to shoot up might mean fewer discarded needles at the park and help address a “huge epidemic around the city.”
By Wednesday morning, within days of starting it, the petition had already garnered 180 signatures. Fred Bowering has no disdain for the drug users.
As a recovered addict himself, the 48-year-old understands the struggles the users face. “I feel for them,” he said. But an injection site would help the drug users, too.
“It’s not a place where they can go and just get high. It’s a place where they can get help,” he said. “They get help for their emotional and psychological issues.”
It’s an idea Merritton Coun. David Haywood said he would eagerly support.
“I know there have been a couple incidents where other smaller parks in my ward that had needles, including one park where a four-year-old girl got pricked with one,” Haywood said. “I know it’s controversial about having safe injection sites, but we’ve been trying. The city, volunteers, everybody has been trying to tackle this issue for the past two years. Obviously, we’re not making any headway.”
The city, as well as numerous volunteers, have taken steps to address the problem.
For instance, St. Catharines manager of business planning and strategic services Amy Tomaino said the city installed a box for the safe disposal of needles. That disposal box, originally located at the top of a staircase along Gale Crescent, was recently moved further into the park in the hope that more people will use it.
Tomaino said city staff also clean up any needles they find while working on regular park maintenance, “as well as respond to any calls from the community reporting needles.”
“Our endeavour is to keep all the parks safe for the community, so any required maintenance to keep them safe would be done,” she said.
Haywood said the park “is cleaner than it had been” as a result of the efforts. However, he remains concerned that there is “still this amount of needles found on a consistent basis.”
“There has got to be a different way to try to resolve the issue than we’ve been doing,” he said.
“I thought we were doing a great job, but it’s one of those things where it feels as though you take a couple of steps forward and then something happens.”
Positive Living Niagara executive director Glen Walker said his organization is one of a network of several Niagara agencies that have been looking into problems related to drug abuse.
Establishing a safe injection site is one option that has been considered.
But before such a facility is established, he said a feasibility study would need to be done.
“For us, a safe consumption site would perhaps target a small group of people that we’re currently serving, but not nearly the total number of individuals. It has its limitations,” he said.
“It’s really important to understand populations and the needs within communities. If we move forward, we need to have a really good study about what is the need.”
Niagara’s associate medical officer of health, Dr. Andrea Feller, also questioned the effectiveness of establishing a “supervised injection site.”
She said health department staff refers to them as supervised injection sites, because “there’s nothing safe ever about injecting drugs.”
But establishing one “doesn’t mean that we are going to prevent much of anything, to be totally honest.”
Such a facility does not address the causes of drug abuse, such as life circumstances, social determinants “and all sorts of other things that are involved with choices about how to cope, and risk.”
However, she said if the community is considering a supervised injection site, the first step would be to develop a feasibility study to gauge its impact.
Fellers aid the federal government’ s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act received Royal Assent in May, including amendments to simplify the process of establishing a supervised injection site.
The new legislation, however, includes benchmarks that a community would have to meet before it is granted permission to establish such a facility, such as demonstrating the feasibility, need and suitability.
“There’s that option — it’s not off the table — to look at supervised consumption sites, but it would be a big question as to whether any of our communities would meet the criteria,” Feller said.
In the meantime, Positive Living Niagara offers an array of other programs designed to reduce the harm caused by drug addictions, such as counselling and nursing services, and overdose prevention programs.
Through its StreetWorks program, Walker said more than one million hypodermic needles and supplies are provided to drug users per year.
About 80 per cent of those items are returned to the agency in exchange for new needles. “That’s a huge return rate.” Tomaino said the city is poised to invest $920,000 on park revitalization this year, including rebuilding the stairs leading up to Gale Crescent where many of the discarded needles have been found.
The city and federal government have each pitched in $385,000 to the project, while the Niagara Region is investing $150,000.
Tomaino said city council has also asked staff to look into the feasibility of adding lighting to the park, in the hope that the lighting might also help reduce the problem.
“All of the project components we feel will help enhance the current park usability,” she said. “We’re trying to make this a park where everyone can play, enhancing the experience and certainly continue to keep it a safe place for all.”