Ford should approve safe injection clinics

The news that opioid overdoses are killing more Ontarians than ever before should set the alarms ringing in Doug Ford’s office.

Even more, it should serve as a call to action for Ontario’s premier. Instead of closing supervised injection and overdose prevention sites — as he’s threatened to do — Ford should open more of them.

Ford’s already wasted too much valuable time in devising a comprehensive strategy to deal with Ontario’s most serious health care crisis. As he dithers people die.

Ford denounced supervised consumption facilities during the spring election, unfairly arguing that they merely feed illicit drugs to addicts. In August, his Progressive Conservative government halted the opening of any new, temporary clinics to prevent overdoses, including three ready to start up in Toronto, St. Catharines and Thunder Bay.

Many healthcare workers rightly protested that ill-considered move, but at least Health Minister Christine Elliott claimed to have an open mind.

She agreed to an evidence-based review before deciding, by the end of September, whether or not to continue with both the temporary overdose prevention sites and the more permanent supervised injection sites.

Now, as decision day approaches, common compassion and human decency cry out for the existing clinics to remain open — and for new ones to be funded.

A new, national report released earlier this month revealed these powerful drugs killed 1,036 people in Canada from January through March of 2018 — a five per cent increase from the same period in 2017 and a 44 per cent jump from the first three months of 2016. More people are now dying from drug overdoses in this country than in traffic collisions.

There were 3,996 opioid-related deaths in Canada last year — an increase of nearly 1,000 from the year before. The situation was most dire in British Columbia and Ford’s Ontario where 1,100 people died of opioid overdoses in 2017 — 63 per cent more than in 2016.

Ford says rehabilitating opioid users by breaking their addiction should be the goal. But while such efforts are welcome, as New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath observed: “People can’t get treatment if they are dead.”

Many experts agree. At the end of August, 120 health groups — including the Canadian Medical Association and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health — sent an open letter to Ford urging him to reconsider his position on overdose prevention sites.

“There is long-standing evidence, evidence in academic, scientific, peer-reviewed journals that already conclusively demonstrates that supervised consumption sites are effective and save lives,” CMA president Dr. Gigi Osler said.

After that, another letter bearing the names of 862 health-care professionals expressed support for the overdose prevention clinics Ford had put on hold.

If all these statistics and experts can’t change Ford’s mind, we invite him to consider the data that prove these sites are effective. Staff at The Works, a supervised injection site in Toronto, reversed 203 overdoses in the facility’s first year. Another 200 overdoses were reversed over the course of nine months at a temporary facility in Toronto’s Moss Park.

Ontario has a deepening opioid problem. One partial remedy has already helped. Physicians and scientists advise the premier continue using it.

With more clinics operating, more lives would be saved, lives that, as Ford wishes, could be rehabilitated. Without new clinics as well as the ones already operating, even more lives will be lost to overdoses, lives that can never be turned around.

The right decision facing Ford could hardly be more obvious.