A good first step

More than 20 temporary supervised sites were opened in British Columbia in the past year

It may be temporary and jerry-rigged and running on reduced hours, but Toronto finally has its first safe injection site up and running.

Kudos go to both Toronto Public Health for announcing the initiative last week and Ottawa for fast-tracking approval for the location.

The site at Victoria and Dundas Sts. opened its doors on Monday afternoon. It will be staffed by two nurses, two counsellors and a manager to ensure that addicts have a safe, sterile place to inject illegal drugs and don’t die from an overdose.

That’s something 87 people did in the first half of 2016, according to the public health department.

Indeed, there were 79 suspected overdose patients in Toronto emergency wards in the last week of July alone, a week that also saw at least six suspected overdose deaths.

The new site should help to reduce that terrible toll. But it has taken much too long to open and there is a lot more for the city to do to prevent overdoses. Indeed, the site might not even be open yet if it hadn’t been for the work of harm-reduction staff at other sites in the city who opened an illegal pop-up safe injection site at Moss Park, forcing the city to think outside the box.

Only days before the pop-up location opened, the city had been saying it couldn’t get three approved sites open until November and temporary sites were not an option. Happily, Toronto Public Health got the ball rolling in the right direction after the pop-up site opened and Ottawa jumped on board.

Still, there’s more that can be done until the permanent sites are ready.

First, the temporary site could simply extend its hours. While the permanent sites will be open from 10 a.m. until 10 p.m., the temporary location is open only from 4 p.m. to10 p.m. That means addicts have a smaller “safe” window in which to inject drugs. Longer hours would make them less likely to inject alone in parks and alleyways, as they often do now, and risk a fatal overdose.

Second, the volunteers running the Moss Park pop-up site are concerned that addicts in that part of the city won’t go north to the new legal site. So why not open more temporary locations? More than 20 temporary supervised sites were opened in British Columbia in the past year. If they can do it, so can Ontario.

Third, police Chief Mark Saunders could reverse course and have his officers trained to properly use naloxone, the antidote to an overdose. In a perfect world, it is best administered by health professionals. But in the current crisis, all trained first responders should have it.

Toronto’s drug overdose problem is bad and getting worse. Health officials, politicians and first responders must work together to stop the death toll. The temporary site is a good example of that co-operation, but it’s only a start.