Ex-top Ottawa cops at odds over injection sites
Supervised drug-injection sites help keep police officers and other first responders safe, says a former deputy chief of the Ottawa police.
No, says his former boss, they encourage abuse and addiction and ultimately support organized crime.
Larry Hill and Vern White are formerly two of Ottawa’s top cops. They know each other, worked together. Their positions on supervised injection sites, expressed in separate interviews, couldn’t be more opposed.
Hill was a career Ottawa cop. He worked patrol, the tactical squad, professional standards, staff jobs like research and planning. He was head of the senior officers’ association before becoming deputy chief in 2000. In that job, he did a lot of the force’s outreach to groups with which it had difficult relationships, such as Ottawa’s gay and visibleminority communities. He retired in 2008.
White was in the RCMP for 24 years, much of it in the North (he was credited with markedly increasing the number of aboriginal Mounties), before being named Durham’s police chief in 2005 and Ottawa’s in 2007. He was chief here until 2012, when Stephen Harper named him a Conservative senator.
Four community health centres, led by the one in Sandy Hill at Rideau and Nelson streets, are in various stages of planning to add supervised injection sites to their existing clinics and programs for regular drug users. On Monday, Ottawa’s board of health is to decide whether to encourage them — as the city’s chief public-health doctor Isra Levy recommends — or stand in their way. Hill plans to be there; White is thinking about it.
The dominant law-enforcement view is that safe injection sites encourage drug use, and that has always been White’s argument. The drugs people shoot in them are illegal, sold by dealers connected to webs of organized criminals.
“I do not support supporting illegal drug activity,” White says. “First of all, that means we’ve given up. If I follow that line of thinking, wouldn’t the next step be legalizing? I don’t support that.”
White does support programs that give addicts clean needles, if they don’t give out “hundreds at a time.” Those save infections and stop the spread of HIV and AIDS, which is vastly more prevalent among injection-drug users than in the general population, along with hepatitis C.
How is giving needles to people who’ll use them to inject illegal drugs different from giving them a supervised place to inject those drugs? The senator hesitates.
“I guess for me — In a way you’re probably not totally wrong,” he says. “But I have to say the number of AIDS patients we were seeing, without a needle exchange, was horrific. So I guess I can get there on that.” An injection site, though, no. “I understand addicts need multiple avenues of escape. Provide them with suboxone or methadone or whatever else you want to provide them, instead of having them buy drugs off the street, from organized crime. You can do that now. You don’t need a permit or anything special,” White says. “Doctors, do your jobs.”
(The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre has a methadone and suboxone clinic, distributing prescription drugs that take away withdrawal symptoms, and a needle exchange.)
The idea that we should be urging addicts into treatment is a smokescreen, Hill believes.
“Addiction is a very misunderstood thing. How human beings are when they are severely addicted to anything — somebody who’s severely addicted to gambling has to go into a crisis mode and lose everything, their home, their marriage, before they say they’re ready to be treated. It’s the same for anything,” Hill says. “It’s an invisible affliction. It’s really hard to reason with somebody who’s in the midst of an addiction that they should seek treatment. They will never — there’s a lot of people who have an alcohol addiction, who will fall off the wagon 10 or 15 times before it finally sticks.
“To simply say, ‘Put people in treatment,’ is something that will be extremely difficult to do.”
Hill says he first thought seriously about harm reduction in the early 2000s, when a police superintendent called him for guidance on the city’s plans to distribute kits for crack smokers that included clean pipes.
Who deals with street addicts when they’re making a scene somewhere, Hill asked himself. Who attends when someone is passed out on a sidewalk?
“It’s the police that will get the first call. It’s the paramedics, in some cases the fire department,” Hill says. They’re the people who get stuck with needles, who get blood and spit and vomit on them. “Harm reduction, in essence, protects these officers. How can I say no to that, when society has turned a blind eye to marijuana, when it’s going to be legalized probably within a year? How can we say, when it comes to hard drugs, that we’re putting aside the health issues and dig our heels in on the legal issue?”
Chronic drug abusers live on the margins, but nobody starts that way. Jurisdictions across the United States are struggling with opiate crises, with addictions that begin with prescription painkillers like oxycodone and progress to street drugs like heroin when the prescriptions run out. Canada is second only to the U.S. in prescribing such drugs.
“There’s addicted people in all parts of the city. Couldn’t agree more. But these people are functional addicts. They go to work. They’re not spreading disease from the street level. At least not at this point — if they keep going down the road to the dump, they’ll get there,” Hill says.
Besides that, an injection site gives addicts regular contact with people who can arrange treatment.
“At least they have access to that information. Right now, they don’t. They’re in an alley, there’s nobody talking to them,” Hill says. An injection site won’t encourage drug use, he argues, it’ll corral drug use in an isolated and supervised place.
I asked each of them to explain why he thinks the other has a different view.
“There’s a couple of things that stick in the officer’s craw that they can’t seem to work around,” Hill says. “There’s an illegal activity going on. Illicit drugs are being bought and used in the presence of a doctor, in a legal clinic. They have a hard time getting around that — should we even be doing that as a society, and as the police?”
A police officer is accustomed to clear rules and safe-injection sites are grey zones. They’re extensions of needle exchanges, which we’ve gotten used to but which still make many officers uneasy.
“When the needle exchanges started happening, and it was gaining traction, officers were told, ‘Don’t hang around the needle van because then the users won’t come to them.’ Police officers don’t like to be told they can’t conduct their mission — be wherever they want to be in the community,” Hill says.
White suggests Hill isn’t thinking like a policeman. A doctor sits across from a drug addict and wants to help, wants to deal with the case right in front of him or her. White gets that, but:
“Our job is not to represent the one, our job is to represent the many,” White says. “I think he probably focuses on the one ... My job is not the same as a medical doctor. My job, when I was the chief and I would argue my job now (as a senator), is to represent the residents and what they want, and I don’t think this makes residents safer.”
The experts have all weighed in: Ottawa is teetering on the precipice of an overdose crisis. Supervised injection sites can save the lives of some of the people at risk. The city’s health unit and chief medical officer now say they support a safe-injection site. Six city councillors who sit on the health board are all open to the prospect, which they’ll debate on Monday.
Now it’s time for the mayor and police chief to rethink their position.
Jim Watson has long insisted that, rather than invest in supervised injection sites — safe places where drug users can inject drugs with sterile needles and where medical staff are on hand in case of overdose — money should be spent on drug treatment. Police Chief Charles Bordeleau, meanwhile, has raised the spectre of increased crime and drug trafficking near these sites, though former deputy police chief Larry Hill does support the harm-reduction sites.
Nobody argues against treatment, of course. But the health unit, after studying drug use — about 30 to 40 users die each year in Ottawa — has concluded a safe-injection site should be one weapon in the city’s arsenal. It’s hard to ignore such expert advice.
Watson has long had the political strength to set the city’s agenda, despite having only one vote on a council of 24. But facing mounting evidence on this issue, his grip may be loosening.
It’s true the safe-injection site decision isn’t up to council or the health board: it’s the federal government that grants exemptions to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. But the views of local officials are taken into account.
Three community centres, in addition to the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, which is already well into the process of opening injection booths, are considering opening their own supervised injection spots. “It makes sense ... because injection-drug users are not concentrated in one area,” says Jack McCarthy of the Somerset West Community Health Centre.
Some of the fear over the site in Sandy Hill — from residents and the police — is that there will be an influx of addicts to the area who will steal whatever they can to finance their habit. Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury has said his ward doesn’t want to have the whole city’s drug users clustering there. His fears would be alleviated if services were spread out.
Ottawa may not need four safe-injection sites. But there are addicts all over town, and people are working hard to care for them. The health unit and councillors are slowly accepting the bulk of the evidence about how to help them — and claiming ethical high ground at the same time.
The mayor should follow suit.