Former police chief Mark Saunders the only candidate opposed to the city’s current decriminalization strategy.
, former police chief Mark Saunders stands outside city hall holding a naloxone kit — a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses — and says families are keeping them by their front doors just in case someone overdoses after getting accidentally spiked by a discarded needle.
Meanwhile, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has documented a significant spike in crystal meth-related visits in the past five years, prompting them to call on mayoral candidates to invest $500,000 in a walk-in addiction medicine hub with a methamphetamine and stimulant focus. “It’s pure fiction,” said Gillian Kolla of Saunders’s comments. Kolla is a public health expert who helped organize the Moss Park overdose prevention site and who is now based at the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Research.
“Right now, we can’t even control what we have. It’s like giving up,” Saunders said in a recent interview after a news conference in which he spoke about the need for law enforcement resources to accompany harm-reduction measures. Decriminalization would also help, added Hales, because then people would not have to throw away their drug paraphernalia because they were afraid of getting arrested.
Treatment captures a vast array of options depending on what the person wants, said Dr. Leslie Buckley, head of the addictions division at CAMH. It can mean a program aimed at stopping drug use entirely, but it can also mean seeing a psychiatrist to address concurrent mental health issues impacting substance use, addictions counselling or using medications like methadone.
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