LEVY: The activists are wrong – decriminalization won’t solve Toronto’s drug crisis - "Since the trendy safe injection sites – which give addicts their drugs but “safely” – opened first in Vancouver and subsequently in Toronto, they’ve merely provided a turnstile of safe injections to addicts, turning them out on the street to roam Toronto’s neighbourhoods until their next safe fix. I spent many days prior to the pandemic observing and writing about the ill effects of “harm reduction sites” on surrounding neighbourhoods. Like in Vancouver, which started the trend, there has been very little rehab attached to harm reduction or enforcement. In both Toronto and Vancouver, there appears to be a zone around them which is impenetrable to police – a zone where dealers are allowed to sell their hard drugs with no issue."
Derek Finkle: Drug policy activists are only hurting themselves by calling opponents serial killers - "Dr. Andrea Sereda, the lead physician of a safer supply opioids program in London, Ont., responded with a post on X that began: “Social murder in Ontario.” The deaths that will inevitably result, claimed one of harm reduction’s loudest voices, “are at the feet of” Minister Tibollo and his entire government. So, to quickly recap, a platoon of harm-reduction activists and proponents of decriminalizing powerful opioids such as fentanyl, which is killing thousands of people a year in this country, tried to publicly guilt a group of elected officials into funding more supervised injection sites, and it didn’t work. Does this mean, as these free-drugs-for-all missionaries are shouting from the safety of their suburban homes, that ministers Jones and Tibollo are heartless human beings who just want more people to die? I’m going to go with “no” on this one, despite not voting for the ministers’ party. At the next drug policy coalition symposium, when coalition members conduct a post-mortem on why their campaign to save the Timmins and Sudbury sites failed, the first question that needs to be asked is this: Is our tried-and-true “blood on your hands” shaming strategy working anymore? It sure doesn’t seem to be. The truth is that the same progressive-minded public that was willing to experiment with supervised injection sites in Toronto and decriminalization in such places as Oregon and B.C. has since come to the very informed conclusion that these supposedly evidence-based policies were naïve , driven by radical ideology , poorly managed , based on dubious research and the cause of increased crime and disorder... It is offensive in the extreme when activists such as Michael Parkinson slough off drug dealers who moved into the area because of its supervised injection site, eventually killing a local mother, as an “isolated incident.” Sure, drug dealers allegedly shooting an innocent passerby might be a relatively isolated incident. But what was not an isolated incident was the fact that many of my neighbours complained about those drug dealers for years, just as they repeatedly voiced concerns about violence, theft and the open-air drug market the site permitted to flourish on its perimeter, contrary to the provincial guidelines it agreed to. And guess what? Those safety concerns were all ignored — until a woman was killed. To this day, South Riverdale has not acknowledged that it violated those guidelines by creating a safe area for this drug market outside its doors, within 150 metres of two elementary schools and six daycare facilities. Nor has it publicly admitted that it ignored the many expressions of concern around safety, especially the safety of children, it received over several years."
Dr. Moore wants Ontario to adopt B.C.'s failed drug policies - "Moore calls for more restrictions on alcohol and less on opioids... British Columbia has a much higher death rate from opioids despite embracing the “harm reduction” programs Moore is promoting... BC has not only embraced the “safer supply” model that Moore is suggesting, they also decriminalized all hard drugs last December. Each of these policies which are promoted by drug activists, are sold to political leaders as a way to lower the death count. It never works and as the death count mounts, we get more cries for further liberalization of drug policy. Ontario’s population is almost three times as large as British Columbia and yet, B.C. had more opioid deaths last year than Ontario. Dr. Moore is even adopting the activist call to never be judgmental with addicts... “No judgement, no expectations and no desire for people to stop using drugs,” was the philosophy posted on the centre’s website last summer when a tragic shooting happened. In Ontario, facilities like the SRCHC are supposed to try and direct people to addiction treatment and recovery programs. They weren’t doing that last summer, and they definitely wouldn’t be doing this if Dr. Moore’s philosophy became public policy... In his report, Dr. Moore cites Oregon as one example of success in this area. Except, after decriminalizing all hard drugs in 2020, the state is now reversing course after the failed experiment. Portugal is cited as well, but in Portugal there is a strong rehab component of their policy when is lacking here."
Clearly, "stigma" and "discrimination" are the issue, which is why Portugal is such a failure
Meme - Ginny Roth: "If you live in Leslieville and you're concerned about your kids picking up needles that surround the drug consumption site, you don't have to worry. In fact, if your kids collect enough they can trade them in for chocolate!"
"Got Sharps? Want Chocolate? For every full sharps container you return to COUNTERfit, we'll give you a chocolate bar. Thanks for working with us to keep our community litter-free!"
I worked at a safe injection site. What I witnessed was disturbing - "I fought as best I could to keep drug dealers away from the supervised injection site I worked at, but it was a battle that came with a price. The threats could be terrifying. One dealer I had kicked out of the facility came up to me outside and tried to pull my COVID mask off. He said he wanted to take a picture of me on his phone so his boss could come and wait for me after work... I had met with senior management several times during my years there, begging them to help us with the drug dealers operating around the centre – and often selling drugs inside the supervised injection site as well. But nothing ever changed. The drug dealers were as emboldened as ever... There were several people in peer positions in COUNTERfit. Being in a peer position technically meant you were supposed to have “lived experience.” Unfortunately, some of my fellow peers were still living that experience. Which meant these peers were either not showing up for their shifts or showing up in a state that was not exactly optimal for work... One of the first things I grappled with at South Riverdale was the fact that clients were regularly coming into the lobby with things they had stolen – groceries, kids’ clothes, packages swiped from the porches of nearby homes – and openly selling them there. Very rarely did someone walk in with stolen goods and leave without being able to sell them. One staff member regularly paid a client to steal his booze from the local liquor store. When I asked a supervisor why this was allowed to happen, the response was: “We don’t talk about it. We don’t see it.” This is one of my earliest memories of how we as staff — and back then the harm reduction staff was off to the side from the rest of the health centre – were instructed to operate by an established code... I had a nice rapport with South Riverdale’s former CEO, who retired right around the time I was starting to confront these things. If that relationship had been further along then, I might have raised the issue about staff abusing drugs. But one learned quickly at South Riverdale that there was a strict rule not to be violated: protect the drug user at all costs – even if it’s a superior. This decree was established from my very first day on the job, and it applied to those outside the centre as well. If someone in the neighbouring community called about wanting discarded needles picked up from a park, the response internally was, “Really, how dare they?” Or someone would say, “We have to go pick up those needles again before the NIMBYs have a bird.” A wall was built up from the very beginning for anyone who worked there. There’s them, and there’s us. Not once did I ever hear someone suggest that we should work together with those who lived in the neighbourhood. Not everyone was using drugs at work, but it wasn’t just one manager. It didn’t take long to learn another was also using out of her office. What I started to understand was that it was impossible for the management in my orbit to right the ship or make things better because everybody had something else on someone. If you rat me out, I’ll rat you out. I felt that by simply not doing drugs at work — or worse, not doing drugs with clients at work — I became a threat to my co-workers. It was that simple... There were times when we had to call the police or EMS because someone had locked themselves into a bathroom and was non-responsive. Eventually, it got to the point where clients were going upstairs to the medical floor and getting themselves buzzed into the washrooms up there. We’d get calls from staff upstairs 20 minutes later because clients had overdosed in their washrooms. Even staff members were guilty of passing out in the washrooms at work... The booths in the supervised injection site were supposed to be used for about 30 to 40 minutes per client. That gave the clients time to use, chill for a while, see how you’re going to react and then move on. They had the option of getting back in line again but that was the general flow. Instead, what started happening almost immediately after the supervised injection site opened in South Riverdale is that one or two of the users — who also happened to be drug dealers — would occupy a booth all day. They would just sit down and set up shop to deal inside to other clients as though keepSIX was their own personal dispensary."
One neighbourhood’s battle over unsafe injection, crime and murder - "For residents, the behaviour exhibited by some harm-reduction staff outside the building has been concerning for a long time. Several residents claimed to have seen harm-reduction staff using outside of the building. They have seen harm-reduction staff attempting to prevent plainclothes police officers from making drug-dealing arrests around the same perimeter. One neighbour said he heard a harm-reduction worker tell a client complaining about his lack of funds to just go and rob some houses on my street because “they’re all rich.” The events leading up to July 7 and what followed have been fairly polarizing in Leslieville. Some assumed the community outrage that followed the shooting was a knee-jerk response to the tragedy and that residents who expressed various safety concerns about the perimeter of the health centre were insensitive NIMBY-ists attempting to capitalize on a heartbreaking tragedy to clear the neighbourhood of its underprivileged and addicted or deny them important health services. This was not true... Drugs have always been part of downtown living, yes. But drug selling, buying and open use on the level we have seen over the past four years did not exist on the perimeter of the centre prior to 2017... supervised-injection proponents cited data from existing safe injection sites elsewhere that showed the incidence of discarded needles, open use, overdose, dealing, theft and drug-related violence typically went down after the establishment of such facilities. Some residents’ groups opposed to safe injection sites leveled critiques of that data, insights that now seem somewhat prescient... I asked Altenberg, the centre’s CEO, why more people were injecting drugs outside of his building than in his safe injection site. He replied by saying that some users inhale drugs, which they can’t do in the safe injection site. But he quickly admitted that most of the use on the perimeter of the centre was by injection. “It’s complicated,” he said. “It’s complicated” comes across as code for either “I don’t know” or “more users prefer to inject in a space that is not supervised.” “It’s complicated” was not the campaign slogan for what the city promised to neighbours like me in 2016. The question remains: How did this safe injection site come to create the problems that safe injection sites were purported to eliminate or decrease? How did it birth a very concentrated drug problem where one didn’t previously exist? The answer, to a large extent, is through its own policies and neglect... The study authors “recommend the establishment of a non-enforcement boundary outside of the (safe injection site) in order to lessen the effects of criminalization that drive some people who use drugs away from accessing services.” This non-enforcement boundary was quickly cited by Supt. Kimberly O’Toole from Toronto Police’s 55 Division, within which the centre falls, in the days following the shooting... Some centre staff had so tenaciously embraced the idea of a non-enforcement boundary that they were verbally disinviting police officers from being on or near the property. The non-enforcement boundary may have been a laudable concept for the clients of this safe injection site, but it turned out to be an unmitigated disaster for everyone else. Those with addictions didn’t need to go inside the centre to use; they could do so outside with impunity. It was the same for dealers. After a while, they came to understand that the police simply weren’t coming, and that the area around the centre was an ideal, risk-free sales zone. The research around the necessity for a void of policing for people seeking harm reduction had a massive hole in it — the necessity for safety for everyone else who lives and works around a safe injection site. It took the death of Huebner-Makurat to expose that hole... People were shooting up and passing out. Kids were weaving their bikes around not just needles, but unresponsive bodies, or addicts assaulting one another. A handful of residents, including my wife, were assaulted. A young child had a beer can thrown at him. I once removed human feces from a hopscotch course drawn with chalk by my neighbour’s children... “The pandemic has been difficult for society’s most vulnerable.” “Society’s most vulnerable,” I replied, “are the children trying to play in the lanes behind their houses because they have no schools or parks to go to. Your clients are adults with addiction issues.”... She explained that safe injection sites had no funding for security. I begged her to please do what she could to change that. Palmer said she would make some inquires and get back to me. I never heard from her again. What I didn’t find out until months later was that a half-dozen residents on my street had also met with Palmer at about the same time to make identical pleas for security. Palmer never got back to them, either... It was hard to come away from that meeting without thinking that the centre’s senior management either had no idea how to fix what was going on outside their own building or that they had zero inclination to bother doing anything because they were OK with it... Cole interjected again. “By taking that position, you’re driving the disenfranchised out of our neighbourhood!” I will give Cole credit on this point. At least he was being honest and clear about what his position was. For him, the safety of the children on our street was secondary to whatever came along with harm reduction... Apart from Cole, people who strongly believe in safe injection sites, for personal or political reasons, are typically very apprehensive to engage in discussions about competing interests. In a perfect world, safe injection sites and schools could exist side by side. This is not a perfect world. Concerned parents were clearly intimidated by a vocal minority at the town hall. The handful of live questions time permitted at the end were mostly not even questions — they were just opportunities for harm-reduction proponents to speak their mind... residents had also discovered that the centre itself was, indeed, responsible for the drug activity outside of the centre. In the 2016 implementation guide, it advises that the South Riverdale safe injection site assume a “Zero-Tolerance Drug Selling Policy…on or near its premises.” Not only did the centre completely fail to enforce this policy, but it also effectively promoted policies that encouraged drug dealing... A few of those listed as “neighbours” – who also happen to be known harm-reduction proponents – lived nowhere near the site."
Ford needs to shut down or replace leadership at Toronto drug site - "Dr. Sharon Koivu, a physician who helped open a safe injection site in London, Ont., and has shepherded many clients to treatment and recovery, says the people at the top of SRCHC have lost sight of the real goal... “It is a philosophy about being simply respectful of and to people who use drugs. No judgement, no expectations and no desire for people to stop using drugs,” the SRCHC states. “That is like a cancer doctor refusing to offer a patient chemotherapy because it might be uncomfortable,” Dr. Koivu said. She added that while treatment for addictions can be uncomfortable and painful at times, they save lives and that should be the focus of organizations dealing with addicts, not just keeping them addicted. Dr. Koivu said the entire reason for bringing safe injection sites into being was to help guide people towards treatment, something the SRCHC policy would appear to abandon. “With this policy, South Riverdale Community Health Centre is not working to improve lives,” Dr. Koivu said. “They are promoting a dependency on a service that should be meant to help them.” The philosophy, which has been posted to the organizations social media accounts and printed on official materials, is also contrary to provincial regulations for what the government calls “Consumption and Treatment” sites. According to provincial rules, such sites are required to offer “onsite or defined pathways to addictions treatment services.”... Ontario Premier Doug Ford has long been skeptical of safe injection sites and capped the number in the province at 21. He’s spoken out in favour of more treatment, something that clearly goes against the philosophy of the SRCHC, and many other activists on this file. Seems some of those activists are deeply embedded in Ontario’s Ministry of Health where multiple sources claim the health bureaucracy is pushing back against requests for options and action from Health Minister Sylvia Jones. The Ford government, including the premier and minister Jones, need to find the strength to do the right thing and either shut this facility down or fire everyone at the top. Anything short of that sends the message to the other facilities that following the rules and helping people get into treatment is no longer a priority."
The drug-industrial complex strikes again
This seems to be an anglo problem
Two arrests in deadly Leslieville shooting now connect it to drug site - "a fight broke out in that parkette, two of the men pulled guns and started shooting at each other. The men missed each other, but a bullet hit Huebner-Makurat, killing her. Everyone fled the scene, and according to police, a worker at the centre allegedly helped some of those involved escape... Khalila Zara Mohammed, 23, of Pickering, was charged with accessory after the fact to an indictable offence and obstruction of justice. Mohammed was profiled by CBC last year for the work she was doing with addicts in the centre’s harm-reduction program. “I think if there was decriminalization to happen, that would take away a lot of the stigma,” Mohammed is heard saying in the CBC report, advocating for an end to criminal charges related to illegal drugs. Now she’s facing criminal charges in relation to a shooting, allegedly for helping one or more of the shooters... one of those who police believe did escape that day, Ahmed Mustafa Ibrahim, 20, of Toronto, was charged with manslaughter, robbery and failing to comply with his probation orders. That last charge suggests he isn’t new to the criminal justice system... Arrested a week after the shooting, Damian Hudson, 32, was described as a walking time bomb with a long rap sheet. He’d been charged but acquitted of attempted murder, convicted in a vicious stabbing and of violating his probation orders 16 times along with a string of other offences... Defenders of the centre have always denied there was any connection between the death of Huebner-Makurat the harm-reduction programs there. That claim has always been difficult to believe, now it is impossible... The centre and its programming are under review by the provincial government to ensure they have been complying with the law, including addressing community safety concerns. That is something local residents have long complained about, saying SRCHC simply ignores anything that happens outside of their walls even if it is a direct result of the services they offer."
Toronto supervised injection site hit with class-action lawsuit - "Jacqueline Court... has not only witnessed violent assaults near the supervised injection site, according to the claim, but has also been “physically assaulted by intoxicated people” herself. Court alleges that she and her family regularly encounter people “fornicating and defecating” on and near her property and that her family “now feels unsafe walking around their neighbourhood at night, and travel by car where they would previously have walked.” The statement of claim includes a harrowing story about an intoxicated woman who threatened to burn down Court’s house. The woman, who was later arrested, emphasized that she would be doing so while Court’s daughter was inside... when neighbours brought forward their concerns about drug trafficking, loitering and violence to the health centre, its management “took no steps to address them, usually citing a lack of resources or a philosophical aversion to standard institutional responses.”... MAP is rife with “scientists” whose research is often overshadowed by their activism. One of them, Dr. Dan Werb, wrote a baffling op-ed in the Toronto Star after Huebner-Makurat’s death, defending South Riverdale by declaring that there is no correlation between gun crimes and supervised injection sites while neglecting to mention any other crimes or nuisances. Zoë Dodd, MAP’s inaugural Community Scholar, is one of the most vocal harm reduction activists in the country. Dodd is an ardent opponent of Adam Zivo and his columns in the National Post, many of which question various aspects of harm reduction policy, including so-called safer supply. She is not shy about responding to such critics by using rather unscholarly language. A few months ago, Dodd called Zivo “a goof” on X... A mother who participated in my session told a distressing story. A few months after the shooting, she was walking with her two young children across the street from the supervised injection site when she encountered a man walking toward her carrying needles and other drug supplies. The woman was trying to avoid eye contact but was wearing sunglasses and the man became angry with her for supposedly looking at him. “What are you looking at?” he said. “At least I’m not raping your children!”... Since 2020, Toronto police crime data reveals annual confirmed overdoses have tripled. Break-ins and theft went way up. Within a 200-meter radius of the centre, reports of assault recently increased by 60 per cent and 911 calls were on a sharp incline... I provided a 2020 study on the “impacts of the Lethbridge supervised consumption site on the local neighbourhood” by Dr. Em Pijl, then at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta... “In general, people can accept harm reduction, given appropriate information, but they cannot accept a real or perceived threat to their personal, familial, material or commercial interests. This perceived threat (of negative impacts) is more acutely experienced the closer one is situated to the area in question. This tendency reflects the proximity hypothesis: those nearest a controversial development are most likely to reject it, since they bear a disproportionate burden of any negative consequences from it. Individuals further from the area, and thus largely removed from most or all negative impacts, are more likely to be supportive of it in theory. Thus, while the rest of the city benefits from localizing a social issue into a single neighbourhood, the area around the site disproportionately bears the burden of improvements seen elsewhere in the city.” I asked Bayoumi if he was aware of the Lethbridge study. He said he wasn’t. Given that Bayoumi has been involved in many studies related to harm reduction, including a 2015 study that tried to examine why communities such as mine might be “ambivalent” about having a supervised injection site, I found this admission surprising. I implored him and his team, for the sake of transparency, to be honest in their forthcoming report for the ministry about Unity Health’s bias and pro-supervised injection activism... My neighbourhood had made repeated attempts for years to get the centre to address the rampant drug selling and use on the perimeter of its building, only to be ignored. We had also begged them for just as long to hire security. We were told there was no budget for security. South Riverdale finally found the money to hire security within a few hours of Karolina Huebner-Makurat being shot... The open houses were part of a damage control campaign that has been going on for more than seven months. The centre invited certain media outlets. One of these — the CBC — declared in its report on the open houses that there was “no confirmed link” between the health centre and the shooting. When it was pointed out to its reporters that Khalila Mohammed, an employee at South Riverdale’s supervised injection site, had been charged with allegedly being an accessory after the fact, in addition to obstruction of justice, the CBC added that detail to its online news item. Nevertheless, the CBC continued to insist that these charges against an employee of the supervised injection site did not constitute the police making a link between the centre and the shooting... Our most ardent “local” harm reduction activists, who live nowhere near as close to the supervised injection site as those who participated in the Unity Health sessions — the most vocal activists live kilometers away, in fact — feel parents’ concerns about needles at a daycare are overblown (“it’s not uranium!”). None of them acknowledged in their Facebook comments that there have been well-documented incidents involving toddlers and kindergarten students who have accidentally pricked themselves with discarded syringes here in Toronto, in Ottawa at an Andrew Fleck daycare and, just last weekend, a park where where a two-year old put a syringe in her mouth, not to mention plenty of other places. These incidents usually involve the children having to undergo blood transfusions to protect from Hepatitis B and lengthy and traumatic HIV prophylaxis treatment. It is far from a theoretical or faux concern. Last September, a daycare in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill neighbourhood, where there is also a supervised injection site, shuttered permanently, citing concerns about drug use and violence in the area. The neighbourhood no longer has a daycare facility... Jason Altenberg, the CEO of the health centre, released a statement about Riley’s whistleblowing expose, which quickly circulated around Parliament Hill, the very next day. Altenberg didn’t deny anything in Riley’s story. Instead, he insisted his community health centre didn’t “permit stolen goods to be purchased and sold on the property.” Nor did they permit drug dealers to set up shop inside the centre or allow staff to use drugs while at work. I pointed out to Campbell that saying something isn’t permitted is not the same as saying it didn’t happen. It was a curious position to take."
Is this what the left mean when they promote walkable cities and densification?
What the study praising Toronto safe-injection sites doesn't tell you - "the Toronto Star published a feel-good harm-reduction story. The Star article had an intriguing headline: “Here’s what happened to overdose deaths in Toronto neighbourhoods with safe consumption sites.” The story was about a study published this month in The Lancet. The key finding trumpeted by the Star is that neighbourhoods within 500 metres of Toronto’s supervised injection sites experienced a 67 per cent decrease in the number of overdose mortalities after the sites opened. On its face, this would be good news indeed, and perhaps it is. But one of several things the three bylined reporters of the Star story — two of whom are with the paper’s Investigative Journalism Bureau — didn’t mention was that this study acknowledges “several important limitations.” For starters, the data the study relies on for its measurement of pre-supervised injection site overdose mortality figures was based on just three months — May 1 to July 31, 2017. The first supervised consumption site in Toronto opened in August of 2017. As a result, the study concedes that it cannot account for trends that pre-date the existence of supervised consumption sites in Toronto, which is a significant limitation... The study is based on data collected from May 2017 to December 2019. In the years that followed 2019, due to various factors, including the increased toxicity of street drugs such as fentanyl, supervised injection sites have not been an effective tool in lowering the number of overdose deaths across the country — or even in the Toronto area of South Riverdale, which has a supervised injection site I happen to live across the street from. In the years following this now dated study, those numbers exploded. For 2018, the first full year of operation for the supervised consumption site at the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, the Lancet study ranked South Riverdale as the tenth worst “hot spot” neighbourhood in the city for overdose mortality deaths... In 2021, for example, the number of confirmed overdoses in South Riverdale practically tripled to 32 (from 11 in 2019), according to the same police data. In 2022, that number grew again to 36. Last fall, we were on track for that number to be in the thirties again for 2023. Obviously, the supervised injection site at South Riverdale was operational during all these years, so I’m not sure it’s accurate for the Star to report our neighbourhood has seen “dramatic decreases in drug fatalities” when, in fact, it hasn’t. Is it possible that, since 2019, South Riverdale has had lower overdose deaths than other neighbourhoods that do not have supervised consumption sites? Maybe. But the study chose not to analyze the data from those years. Plus, after last summer’s shooting, those in charge of the South Riverdale site conceded that the number of local drug users choosing not to inject (mostly fentanyl) inside their supervised injection site far exceeded those who did. The other thing the Star neglected to point out is that this study was co-authored by drug policy evaluators at Unity Health Toronto, which is the same health network Ontario’s Ministry of Health has contracted to conduct a review of the troubled South Riverdale supervised injection site... What remains to be seen is whether Unity Health, whose research and activism is so embedded in the establishment of supervised consumption sites, can conduct a neutral review that could possibly undermine its latest finding – namely, that we need more supervised consumption sites."
Left wingers hate the National Post because it reports facts that challenges their prejudices
