Drugs have taken a heavy toll in an Ontario city where rising rents and toxic drugs are making times tough for the most vulnerable. The Globe went downtown to see how people are coping
Paramedics in downtown Oshawa help a woman, identified by her friends as Sabrina, as she lay on the sidewalk steps away from where another woman was treated for a drug overdose with Narcan.At about 6:30 p.m. one recent evening a man rushed through the door of Convenience Plus, a cluttered downtown corner store. “Have you got Narcan?” he asked. The cashier handed him a rectangular red-and-white kit. The man dashed out the door again.
Convenience Plus is right in the thick of it. The little store at the corner of John and Simcoe streets is a popular pit stop for those suffering from homelessness, addictions and mental illness. they would bed down, but thought they might end up at a local drop-in centre that has chairs to doze in. For those who pass through Convenience Plus, life seems to be getting harder and more dangerous all the time. Oshawa is a thriving community of 170,000 that is enjoying a building boom and attracting thousands of students to its well-equipped colleges and universities. But it has a stubborn poverty problem in its downtown, where its neediest residents roam from shelter to soup kitchen to clinic, some of them sleeping outdoors on even the coldest nights.
By the time he’d grabbed the kit and ran across the street to Memorial Park, his girlfriend was in a bad way. A middle-aged woman in a headband and green coat, she sat on a park bench, her head rolling limply backward. The man sprayed a shot of Narcan up her nose.
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