The recent decision by the Ford government to close 10 safe injection sites in the province and placing a hold on any new sites will cost lives—plain and simple. The data is clear and unequivocal. The number of deaths due to overdoses drop dramatically when a safe injection site can be accessed. That fact is backed up by study after study, in country after country, and in decade after decade. Safe injections sites save lives.
It can logically be deduced that ideological and populist dog whistle closures of safe injection sites will result in more deaths due to overdoses.
Those deaths cause immeasurable pain and suffering to the families and friends of those individuals suffering from the illness of addiction, often through little or no fault of their own, contrary to the cherished beliefs of those whose deregulation and poor oversight of the pharmaceutical industry has led to the current opioid epidemic.
But that’s okay in the Doug Ford and Tory playbook. It plays well to the conservative mindset that too often blames the victim instead of taking aim at the corporate greed that largely put us in this predicament in the first place. Faced with intense acute and chronic pain, sufferers were offered what was then touted as a non-addictive option, Oxycotin, which proved to be anything but. Some, it is fair to say, began taking opioids as a recreational drug, or an escape from hopelessness, abuse and not knowing the full dangers of what they were getting into.
Many supposedly “safe” recreational drugs have been adulterated with opioids by drug dealers intent on cheaply upping the buzz of their product—thanks to the steady supply coming into this country from China or other rogue authoritarian regimes.
Contrary to all-too-popular belief, safe injection sites do not lead to an increase in crime or addictions. The data on that is clear. Nor do they contribute to the proliferation of discarded needles and other drug paraphernalia—which, if one stops and thinks about it, makes perfect sense. The needles are captured in the sharps containers located at the injection sites instead of being tossed aside by the unsupervised drug user. Counterintuitively to what the Ford acolytes believe, the closure of the sites make the chances of a child stumbling upon the needles on their way to and from school all the more likely.
What closing the sites will do is make it far more likely that someone’s loved one will die.
These are families that have already been buffeted by the pain of watching their children, siblings, parents or friends descend into the hell of addiction. These are families who live in hope that, one day, their loved ones will be able to climb out of the abyss of drug addiction hell and return to them as productive members of society.
That can’t happen if the person suffering from addiction is dead. What these closures will do is heighten the anxiety of those families who have already suffered enough. To anyone who has travelled to downtown Sudbury can attest, the number of white crosses commemorating drug overdose deaths in that community is growing at an alarming rate. Many of those crosses bear the names of people from Manitoulin Island and stand in silent sentinel to the suffering and dashed those hopes irrevocably.
Governments of all stripes and partisan flavours are complicit in the current opioid epidemic, having allowed this crisis to build to its current levels and profiting from the revenues implicit in its building.
The addition of new “hubs” aimed at transitioning addicts away from homelessness and providing supports to those seeking to find a path to recovery are laudable in themselves—but this is not an either-or dichotomy. Those hubs should have been long in place to complement the safe injection sites, not being offered up as a public sop to help cover the ills that will come from this decision.
Coupling populism and dog whistle politics with a humanitarian program is not a real solution.
Balancing the books by knowingly dealing in death should not be either.
With this announcement, the Ford government has said it loud and clear—garnering a few more votes from their base is far more valuable to them than saving the lives of our loved ones. There are few families across this great nation who have not been impacted by the opioid crisis and this decision will do little, if anything to make things better. You have to be alive to access addiction counselling and/or move into a shelter or affordable housing.
We are one of the most prosperous and well-educated nations in the world. We can and must do better.
