Safe injection site gets green light

Downtown site a good start, but advocates want more done to tackle opioid crisis

Health Canada has approved the immediate opening of a downtown supervised safe injection site to combat the opioid crisis in Toronto, but it’s not nearly enough, according to one of the founders of an unsanctioned pop-up site at Moss Park.

“It’s not a crisis response,” registered nurse Leigh Chapman said in an interview.

“I think it’s great that they have accelerated the opening of the sanctioned safe injection sites,” Chapman said, adding that it would be useful for the site to have extended hours. “It would be great if they could expand their hours and have much longer hours than we have,” Chapman said.

She said there are absolutely no plans to shut down the Moss Park pop-up site, which currently runs seven days a week, with volunteers working from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m.

“We can’t abandon these people who are visiting our tent in Moss Park,” Chapman said. “We are building trust and allowing them the opportunity to feel safe with volunteers who care about their well-being. The city should care too.”

More details on the facility at 277 Victoria St., near Yonge and Dundas St., are expected from the Medical Officer of Health on Monday morn- ing. The interim site there has approval to run until at least Feb. 28, 2018, according to Health Canada.

The Moss Park group has received funding from a GoFundMe campaign In addition to supervising injections, it has handed out more than 200 kits of naloxone to block the effects of opioids.

Toronto Mayor John Tory met earlier this month with harm reduction workers to talk about how to respond to the city’s opioid problem.

Health Canada has already approved safe injection sites at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre and at the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre, but those sites remain closed pending renovations. There were reportedly 2,400 deaths in Canada in 2016 blamed on opioid-related overdoses.

Chapman said her group has successfully responded to five overdoses.

“Generally, every day we see12 to 25 people,” Chapman said. “These are people that are injecting in the medical tents.” Volunteers take daily walks through Moss Park looking for discarded drug-injection kits and reaching out to drug users, she said.

“We’ve reached out to a place where there is open drug use and the population there is underserved,” Chapman said.

The problem comes as heroin, which is grown from poppies and illegally imported, is replaced by fentanyl, which is laboratory-produced and has high potency.