Toronto council should approve injection sites: Editorial
TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – Toronto city councillors should do the right thing and approve three injection sites that could save hundreds of lives.
July 5, 2016
Toronto city council has a simple decision to make next week – whether to approve three supervised injection sites. It should do the right thing and move ahead with a project that could save hundreds of lives.
There’s powerful evidence in favour of safe injection sites. The city’s medical officer of health has set out a compelling case that they save lives by giving drug users a clean place to inject drugs, using sterile needles, without fear of arrest. Trained nurses would be on hand to respond to overdoses by injecting users with naloxone, an antidote to excess opioids.
That alone would justify opening supervised sites. Deaths from overdose in Toronto are rising sharply; the latest statistics show they were up 22 per cent in 2014 to 252, from 206 the year before.
There’s a good chance that many of those people could have been saved if they had been kept alive long enough to receive effective treatment for their addiction.
A striking example came just on Monday, when the board of health heard about the fate of Brooklyn McNeil, a 22-year-old woman who had planned to speak to them in favour of supervised injection sites. Instead, board members learned that she had died from an overdose on June 22. Her silence spoke volumes.
Aside from saving lives, supervised sites should have a positive effect on the surrounding community. The reality is that many drug users will inject wherever they can in the absence of a safe, supervised place.
They will shoot up in parks and alleys – and often leave needles behind for children and others to find. Councillor Joe Cressy, chair of the city’s drug strategy implementation panel, has said that supervised sites “move drug use and needles from our streets, our parks, our backyards and our coffee shops.”
Most of the public seems to get that. Traditional opposition to supervised sites has faded in light of the evidence about saving lives and community safety. A Forum Research poll in March showed that support has actually grown in the past few years. Most of those surveyed – 57 per cent – agreed with having supervised injection sites downtown.
The city wants to approve three sites in existing health facilities – one at Bathurst and Queen Sts., one near Dundas Square, and one in South Riverdale. If council gives the go-ahead next week, the next step will be for the city to ask Ottawa for exemptions under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
Councillors should seize the moment and push this project forward.
< https://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2016/07/05/toronto-council-should-approve-injection-sites-editorial.html >
Tags: crime prevention, Health, ideology, jurisdiction, mental Health, pharmaceutical, standard of living
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 6th, 2016 at 10:31 am and is filed under Health Debates. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
One Response to “Toronto council should approve injection sites: Editorial”
|
Leave a Reply
Recent Comments
Dear Editor,
I agree that supervised injection sites should be open in Toronto and all over Canada. It is great to see the city of Toronto is setting an excellent example for other cities and municipalities in our province and in our country, just like Vancouver, on the west coast. Supervised injection sites programs have proven to be successful in saving lives. We just have to look to Vancouver, to see the proof of that. I believe a further step that should be taken is the decriminalization of all drugs. A very successful approach has been in place in Portugal since 2001. This approach integrated supervised injection sites with decriminalization of drugs, as well as other social programs. Since the beginning of that approach in Portugal, there has been a reduction of drug overdose death from 80 per year (2001) to 16 per year (2012), a reduction of 90% of drug-related HIV infections, and reduction in the social cost of drug misuse by 18 % (https://www.scribd.com/document/254854076/DPA-Fact-Sheet-Portugal-Decriminalization-Feb2015-pdf). Portugal went from the highest population addicted to heroin, and drug-related AIDS deaths in the European Union, to the second lowest (3/million versus 17.3/million European Union’s average) since 2001. With cities like Toronto showing this type of leadership, it is my hope that provincial and federal governments would put policies in place to facilitate the health-centered approach towards drug-related issues that has been so successful in Portugal.
Sincerely,
Gisele M.
BSW student