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.
For the record, supervised consumption sites aren’t the solution to drug abuse. They’re the solution to people dying of drug poisonings before they can get help with their addictions.
What causes drug addiction? Hopelessness. Homelessness. Mental illness. Abuse.
What’s the government doing to solve those problems? Sweet. Fuck. All.
This is what conservative governments bring you – cruelty and making existing problems worse.
The worldwide conservative playbook. Gut a service, criticize it for being inefficient, shut down/privatize. Rinse, repeat, ad nauseam.
But if they solve hopelessness, homelessness, mental illness, and abuse, then how is Ford going to justify his wE nEeD mOrE pRiSoNs rant?
This is our modern day Prohibition Era … it’s our point in history where we try to ban a substance that is negatively affecting people, even killing them and we try to control the problem by pretending that we can just wish it away and do nothing to help those who are affected by it.
They did the same in the 1920s with alcohol.
We are doing the same now in 2020s with street drugs.
Give it a few decades and we’ll look back on this current period in the same way we look at how dumb people were in the 1920s in trying to ban alcohol.
Personally, I’m a recovering alcoholic … I’m over 30 years sober now … I know the devastation of what alcohol does to a person. I’ve had it happen to me, I saw it happen to my family and friends. I’m also Indigenous and I have family all throughout northern Ontario in remote, semi-remote and in urban and suburban areas in Native and non-Native communities. I know lots of people who are still dealing with alcohol addiction and now more than ever drug addiction. I know way too many people who have been affected from drug overdoses … I know people who are still alive but are severely affected or generally vegetables because of drug over doses … I know women who have miscarried and those who gave birth to severely affected children … I know old men and women who died from it and people who died way too young.
The same problem plagued the Prohibition Era of the 1920s … if you ban the substance that everyone is addicted to - they’ll find other illegal ways of getting it. The black market will soar with profits from the dead and dying addicted masses and the problem will just explode even further. The same thing that happened in the 1920s. Our modern day ‘Blind Pigs’ and ‘Speak Easy’ are now just alley ways and abandoned houses.
From a financial point of view, the costs are the same.
- Either be conservative, ban everything and pay for more policing, security, health care, emergency care and surveillance
- Be liberal and legalize control of everything and pay to run the service and manage the health care of people and prevent them from taking part in terrible, illegal and dangerous situations.
Either pay up front to prevent people from falling into a deep dark hole … or pay later to try to rescue those people who did fall into that deep dark hole.
In my opinion, its far easier to stop someone from falling in rather than in working much more to get them out again.
