Ontario Premier Doug Ford speaks in Ottawa, on April 5.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Ontario Premier Doug Ford was not wrong to request that Ottawa stop approving new safe supply sites where people can get safer alternatives to street drugs, as well as launch a review of existing sites, in a letter he wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week.
Effective harm-reduction measures require a multi-pronged approach to tackling addiction, as evidenced by their successes and failures in various jurisdictions around the world.
It’s not enough to just decriminalize the possession and consumption of small amounts of drugs; you have to offer treatment beds, counselling, detox programs, rehabilitation, and so on, or else you end up with people openly smoking crack in hospital corridors in B.C.
It’s not enough to simply open safe consumption sites to prevent overdose deaths; you also have to ensure proper sharps collection, cleanup and disposal, adequate security, community surveillance and more, or else you end up with needles in nearby playgrounds and, in the worst case scenarios, violence that engulfs the surrounding community. Last summer, a mother of two was killed by a stray bullet near a safe consumption site in Toronto during an altercation between two men over drugs.
And it’s not enough to simply open safe supply sites to ensure that drug users are getting “clean” drugs, mitigating harm from tainted substances that may increase the likelihood of overdose and death. You have to simultaneously implement measures to stem the diversion of safe supply into the black market – such as by using specific identifiers for drugs distributed through safe supply programs – to try to quell the illegal resale of free safe supply substances. Or else you end up with a situation like that in B.C., where, according to recent committee testimony from Vancouver’s deputy chief of police, half of hydromorphone seizures were diverted from safe supply programs.
So yes, Mr. Ford was right to request a federal moratorium on the approval of new safe supply sites, but not because these programs are inherently flawed as harm-reduction concepts. Rather, it’s because treating addiction as a health care epidemic, rather than a criminal one, requires comprehensive and continuing community care and treatment options, and clearly the province isn’t ready, or willing, to offer them.
But to be fair, other provinces, and other cities – including Portland, which recently rolled back its decriminalization experiment after less than four years – have failed to deliver on the “follow-up” portion of harm reduction as well. Last week, the federal government rejected Toronto’s request to decriminalize hard drugs, citing “concerns with feasibility and ability for law enforcement to implement the proposed model, protection of youth, and lack of support from key players including the province of Ontario.” The federal government also approved B.C.’s request to recriminalize the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs in public spaces in response to problems with its decriminalization gambit there.
Mr. Ford’s letter to the Prime Minister requesting an end to new safe supply sites was a political document, not a procedural one, as most Doug Ford documents are. The nominally conservative Premier, who spends like a teen with his first credit card, will use any easy opportunity to show off his conservative bona fides, and resurrecting an old “war-on-drugs” mentality is perhaps the easiest way to do so.
But it’s an archaic outlook, one that shrugs off the seriousness of the addictions epidemic plaguing Ontario and elsewhere, without offering meaningful solutions. According to a recent report by Dr. Kieran Moore, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, more than 2,500 people in the province have died annually as a result of toxicity alone in recent years, and opioid deaths among teens and young adults have tripled. He writes that prescribing drugs through safe supply programs will help mitigate toxicity-related deaths, and he observes, as many harm-reduction advocates do, “that the system must take urgent steps to keep people alive” first in order to offer them treatment.
But he also notes that “substance use cannot be addressed by the health sector alone,” and calls for “collaboration between communities, all levels of government, health and social services, organizations at all levels, the public health sector, the health care system, and Ontario residents.” That is, to be frank, wishful thinking. When Ontario’s Premier – who has seen the effects of addiction in his own family – appears interested only in dismissing harm-reduction measures, even as addiction infiltrates more and more regular Ontario families, it is unlikely that Dr. Moore’s wish for a whole-of-community approach will be realized.
Mr. Ford can be part of the solution if he wants to be, but that takes more effort than a two-page letter.