Dozens making use of new safe-injection site

Temporary clinic has been open for a week in building at Victoria and Dundas Sts.

It has been nearly one week since Toronto opened its first city-run site for people to use illegal intravenous drugs and, so far, three dozen people have used the controversial service.

“We are thrilled to be offering this life-saving service to the community,” Dr. Rita Shahin, Toronto Public Health’s associate medical officer of health, said Saturday.

“The very first client that we had when we opened our doors, to us, represents a potential life that we may have saved. We had 36 visits in just five days, which . . . represents a great success. We look forward to more people becoming aware of the service and helping more people in our community.”

The temporary clinic, located at Victoria and Dundas Sts. in a building that already houses The Works needle-exchange program, has been open since Monday.

In a plain clinical room, up to three people at a time can inject pre-obtained drugs with clean needles. Staff — two trained nurses, two counsellors and a manager — can keep an eye on up to nine drug users per hour and hope each will stay at least 15 minutes for rest and observation and signs of overdose.

The site is open from 4 to 10 p.m. Monday to Saturday.

City staff did not deal with any overdoses this week at the temporary site, Shahin said. Nor was there need to administer Naloxone, an antidote for the powerful opioid fentanyl, a drug responsible for a growing num- ber of overdose-related deaths.

Health Canada had previously approved three larger permanent safeinjection sites for Toronto: one in the building where the temporary site is now located, as well as one in South Riverdale and one in Parkdale. They were expected to open this fall.

But after local harm-reduction advocates, concerned about an increasing number of overdoses, many of which are apparently related to the highly toxic painkiller fentanyl, opened their own unsanctioned “pop up” safe injection site in a tent in Moss Park, the city pushed ahead with its temporary site.

That “pop up” site in Moss Park has been operating for two weeks, from 4 to 10 p.m. daily.

About 20 to 25 people inject on site each day and an additional 20 people smoke crack or methamphetamine, Nice Boyce, a volunteer at the site, said on Saturday.

The Moss Park site has stopped or reversed12 overdoses and volunteers (80 in total, 25 of them medically trained) have closely monitored many more at-risk people, according to Boyce. “These are all people who would have died, ended up in emergency costing thousands of dollars, or would have been prone to assault.”

Boyce said some of the same people come every day and there are no plans for the “pop up,” funded by donations from a Go FundMe page, to shut down now that the city site is up and running. In fact, Boyce said organizers of the Moss Park site are exploring implementing a program for people to check their drugs for fentanyl.

For some people, the downtown city-run site may be too far for them to travel, Boyce said. And for others, who are used to injecting in alley- ways, they feel more comfortable in the tent in the park rather than the more sterile clinic-like environment, he added.

Toronto police have so far allowed the unsanctioned site to operate. Last week, a department spokesperson, Mark Pugash, said police have met with the organizers and agreed on “a number of conditions which we think go a long ways towards minimizing risks to public safety.”

“We’ll continue to operate on a dayby-day basis, but we have no plans to change our position,” Pugash said.

As for the city-run site, which has had fewer visitors in its first week than the Moss Park “pop up,” Shahin said that because the site opened so quickly there wasn’t a lot of time or opportunity to promote the service. With files from David Rider and Betsy Powell