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LETTER: Shutting down supervised consumption sites will solve nothing

‘There will be more needles on the ground that haven’t been properly disposed of. There will be more incidents of people being under the influence of drugs in public places,’ a reader writes

GuelphToday received the following letter about our article, Province orders Guelph’s supervised consumption site closed by March.

Guelph Today readers might know me from my articles in the Then and Now column about Guelph’s history. However, after seeing a protest that took place downtown concerning the provincial government’s ban on supervised drug consumption sites, I feel compelled to say something about a present-day issue that will certainly have future implications.

A few years ago, someone very close to my family died because of drugs. For privacy reasons I won’t use his real name, so let’s just call him John. The street drug that killed him was fentanyl. It was not injected, but John was nonetheless a victim of the opioid epidemic that has taken so many other lives. Personal problems had led to John’s drug use and eventual addiction. He tried to get free of it, but couldn’t. He needed professional help and he tried to get it.

Unfortunately for him, there was a waiting list of more than a year for the government sponsored program. Treatment at a private clinic was very expensive and beyond his financial means. And so one night, when he was alone in his room, the fentanyl took him away, forever. The pain of that loss is still with us, though.

At the time of John’s very untimely death, and quite often since, I have wondered if he might have been saved if only professional help had been more accessible. What if he’d been able to get into a program as readily as people access care for other health problems?

Some politicians – and many of their supporters – will say, well, there just isn’t any money for those programs. And yet, there are people who have argued that such programs not only save lives, but also taxpayers’ money because, among other financial benefits, over time they reduce the enormous costs of law enforcement by reducing drug-related crime. Meanwhile, governments apparently can afford to spend millions of dollars on populist policies like putting alcohol in corner stores.

One cannot help but wonder if the decision to ban supervised drug consumption sites has more to do with populist politics than anything else, because it seems to follow a pattern. During the Covid pandemic we saw politicians pander to anti-vaxxers in what was a flagrant abandonment of responsibility. That was a dangerous and disgraceful move that is still causing problems; note the resurgence of such vaccine-preventable illnesses as polio, measles and whooping cough. The same politicians now denounce the supervised consumption sites in rants that include such terms as “drug dens”, “woke” and “whacko,” as well as derogatory names for medical experts – a reckless and irresponsible use of loaded rhetoric that has come to be associated with the tactic called rage-farming. One would suspect that those politicians are more interested in saying whatever they think will resonate with their voter base than in doing the actual difficult job of dealing with a major health problem.

Shutting down the supervised consumption sites will solve nothing. There will be more needles on the ground that haven’t been properly disposed of. There will be more incidents of people being under the influence of drugs in public places. There will be fewer places where people in the grip of addiction can get help. And for those who overdose or fall victim to a lethal batch, there will be no help at hand, and they will die. Like John.