Ottawa green-lights injection site

Overdose-prevention program starting in tent earns funding and home

The team of front-line volunteers who stepped up to take on the growing opioid crisis in Toronto from an unsanctioned site in Moss Park have secured federal approvals to keep operating, along with six months of funding and a permanent home.

Starting as just a tent, the overdose-prevention site has been open since August 2017 in opposition to city and federal rules that frown upon a 12-metre trailer parked in the public space and which require exemptions to allow for the supervised drug-consumption services offered inside.

But as the crisis claimed 187 lives in Toronto between May and October 2017, police and bylaw enforcement officers stood down as nurses and harm-reduction workers staffing the site together reversed 200 overdoses at last count. Not one person has died at the site.

Zoe Dodd, a co-organizer, said that in the summer of 2017 a rash of overdose deaths in the city and a conversation involving the mayor at city hall about how to respond — a conversation that excluded harm reduction workers — “was really the first that lit us.”

At the time, three official supervised-injection sites had been approved in the city but hadn’t yet opened their doors.

“We couldn’t watch more people die, just attend funerals all the time,” Dodd said by phone Friday. A small group showed up in the park that August, pitched a hard-to-set-up white tent, and started receiving clients. Lawyers were on hand in case they were arrested.

“I think we just didn’t imagine that we’d make it through that day,” Dodd said.

She couldn’t have imagined the tent would go up every day thereafter, auxiliary tents too, and well into the winter — that they would be in the “epicentre” of an ongoing emergency. In November, a union donated the trailer rental that also became a makeshift shelter for those experiencing homelessness. The workers became advocates for those they served as the city’s shelter system struggled to meet demand. In December, CBC’s popular Metro Morning radio show named the volunteers 2017 Torontonians of the year.

The site is now scheduled to move to a permanent home in the Queen and Sherbourne Sts. area next month. The trailer will remain open until then.

“We just kept going,” Dodd said.

Now the site is partnered with the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, which operates a supervised-injection service out of its Queen St. E. site.

There are four such sites in the city and soon to be five overdose-prevention sites.