Overdose strategy requires a safe space

In the southwest corner of Moss Park, the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society marked its seven-month anniversary this week.

Yet in the past week, they’ve noticed a change.

I began noticing an increase in police presence over the last two weeks. I saw more cars patrolling the neighbourhood and more officers on the streets. Perhaps, I thought, it was because I was outside more often now that the freezing cold weather had eased off.

Then I saw a tweet from Zoe Dodd, a member of the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society who said, “Everyday we are dealing with an increase in police presence that didn’t exist for the 6 months. We may be unsanctioned but we are training and shadowing new sites, sharing our policies and all we need is a park permit to b sanctioned.”

Since late summer, over 5,000 people have come through the site’s doors. Actually, having doors is a relatively new phenomenon. When they set up last August, volunteers crouched under a tent; they stocked their supplies from a van. They took down the whole operation every day until things slowly started becoming more permanent.

The province donated a heated tent. In late November, the Canadian Union of Public Employees donated the trailer where I met Tave Cole, a volunteer whose day job is a working in harm reduction at South Riverdale Community Health Centre. “When we opened, we had an informal arrangement that the police would give us distance,” says Cole.

Because many — though not all — drug users are people who are lowincome, racialized and struggling with mental health, they have a reasonable fear of police. The Toronto Overdose Action Plan notes that people attending an overdose often hesitate to involve police. The city’s survey that informed that plan found that “89 per cent (of survey respondents) rated police not attending overdose events as having a very large or large benefit to the overdose crisis.”

Volunteers in Moss Park said the police presence has a dual effect. People are less likely to go to the overdose prevention site when they’re worried about being arrested and seeing police in the neighbourhood creates a crush of people escaping into the shelter.

“It’s a public safety problem more than a criminal law problem,” says Dane. (Toronto Police did not respond to my request for information or comment.)

Cole told me they’ve been able to reverse 188 overdoses.

“When you take into account people having a safe space and not having to be in a hurry to use, we’ve probably done more harm reduction than that,” she says. Another volunteer, Dane, noted that the OPS service in the park acts “as a point of connection to other services.”

“For every person that comes to inject, we’ve had five people come in for socks, hot chocolate, information,” he says. By their count, that means they’ve served more than just the 5,000 people who enter the trailer to inject; rather it means they’ve helped 30,000 people in a variety of ways.

In Vancouver, there was a 36 per cent increase in arrests for heroin according to Susan Boyd, a researcher from the University of Victoria; overall, 73 per cent of all drug arrests in Canada were for possession. Their job is to make the city a safer place. For people in and around Moss Park, the police presence makes them less safe and their lives that much more precarious.

Residents and service workers are taking up the responsibility to ensure safety on the streets. When it comes to people who use drugs, that responsibility is more complicated for police.

To save lives, everyone must step up: municipal, provincial and federal governments have a lot of work to do. But the police must also find a way to allow drug users a safe place to inject and, hopefully someday, recover.

Inside the trailer, Tave Cole prepared for another day as people began lining up outside.

“We’re just always busy.”