Overdose-prevention sites are a matter of life or death. Ontario’s government has made its choice GlobeDebate
and a Toronto writer. She has written extensively about opioid painkillers, substance use and pain.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Around 1,265 Ontarians died of preventable opioid-involved overdose in 2017; Canada’s illicit-drug supply is contaminated by non-prescription fentanyl and other nasty surprises, such as the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil, recently found in “heroin” in Toronto, Ottawa and small-town Ontario. Meanwhile, to date, no one – no one anywhere in the world – has ever died in an OPS or supervised consumption site.
Once it took power in a province with an already accelerating drug-poisoning crisis involving illicit opioids, the PC government decided to look for evidence, as it likes to do when good evidence lies thick on the ground. The Health Ministry gazed into the sky and, apparently, came up with codswallop.
To prevent addiction and address related prevalence of pain, suicide and anxiety in Ontario, evidence suggests we must reverse trends toward unaffordable housing, inadequate income and precarious work – and governments must effectively tackle them, rather than fuel them. Most OPS clients are regulars, homeless or insecurely housed, chronically traumatized, with multiple mental- and physical-health challenges.
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