Safe-injection site can stay open into winter
Volunteer, officials agree on safety plan to use heavy-duty tent in Moss Park location
A provincially supplied weatherproof tent will let the Moss Park safeinjection site stay open in cold weather after all.
Volunteers, who in the summer opened the unsanctioned site as an emergency reaction to the deadly overdose crisis, had said Sunday they couldn’t use the tent provided by Ontario’s Emergency Medical Assistance Team (EMAT).
That’s because some people heat their drugs with a lighter before injecting them. EMAT officials were strongly discouraging open flames in the tent for safety reasons.
But Monday discussions involving the harm-reduction professionals who have staffed the safe-injection tent, provincial officials and Toronto fire officials, produced a safety plan that allows for open flame under prescribed conditions.
They include any flame remaining a safe distance from oxygen used to treat people who overdose; lighters being the Bic-type where the flame doesn’t remain indefinitely; and that as little combustible material be kept in the tent as possible.
“We will be using the EMAT tent for the first time today,” Leigh Chapman, a harm reduction worker who lost her brother, Brad, to a suspected fentanyl overdose, said Tuesday af- ternoon. Temperatures are expected to plunge below freezing Friday, which would have made the thin summer tent unusable.
“We’re grateful on an interim solution, but we’re still not being consulted on these plans being made around us,” Chapman said, adding the volunteers, known as the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, think the best winter solution, until they get Health Canada approval to move permanently into the Fred Victor Mission, likely in early 2018, is a trailer with a lockable door rather than a tent.
Councillor Joe Cressy, chair of the city’s drug-prevention agency, lauded provincial officials for responding quickly to the flame concerns. Toronto fire officials say the new tent is actually safer than the old one because it has fire-retardant material, he added.
Shortly after the Moss Park site opened in August, hosting the first of more than 2,000 injections and the reversal of at least 85 overdoses, the city opened a Health Canadasanctioned safe-injection site at the Works needle exchange at Victoria and Dundas Sts.
The Works has hosted more than 800 injections and intervened to prevent 10 overdoses, according to Toronto public health. The city is expanding the number of injection spaces and hiring more staff to expand in December.
Two other sites — one at Queen West Central Toronto Community Health Centre on Bathurst St., and South Riverdale Community Health Centre near Carlaw Ave. — are expected to open this month, bringing Toronto’s total to four safe-injection sites. All are stocked with naloxone, an overdose antidote for opioids including fentanyl. Toronto Public Health has distributed more than 1,700 naloxone kits since January — pharmacies also hand them out — and has trained more than 1,200 city staff and others on how to use the kits to save lives.
The action to reduce overdose deaths comes too late for many people, advocates say, but still represents a sea change from even a year ago. Then, politicians wondered whether supervised use of illegal drugs, pioneered in Vancouver, would be politically feasible in Toronto.