Advocates and community members open pop-up overdose prevention site in Parkdale

Thestar.com
August 21, 2018
Clare Floody

The Toronto Overdose Prevention Society opened a pop-up overdose prevention site Monday in Parkdale as a response to the province scrapping a legally sanctioned site that was expected to open last week in the neighbourhood.

“We are in the midst of a public health crisis and we will not allow life-saving services to be paused while Parkdale community members are dying,” Molly Bannerman, a Parkdale resident and member of the prevention society, said in a media release.

Volunteers with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society carry supplies last November to the Moss Park safe injection site, which operated out of tents for more than nine months before securing a permanent home.

Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott announced on Aug. 13 that the provincial government will hold off on opening three new overdose prevention sites that were planned for Toronto, Thunder Bay and St. Catharines.

None of them will get the green light until the province conducts a review of harm-reduction practices and determines if the sites “have merit,” she said.

Toronto’s site was approved in June, according to the release, and was supposed to open at the Parkdale Queen West Community Health Centre on the same day the province made the announcement to shelve it.

The group said in the release that overdose prevention sites alone will not solve the current crisis, but they are a necessary and proven step to keeping people who use drugs safe. The sites are also a low-barrier entry point into the health system, including access to treatment programs, it said.

“We are opening the Parkdale OPS to make services available in one of the areas of highest need in the city,” the release said, noting the pop-up was organized with members of the community and people who use drugs.

The media release said the site will be operated out of tents in “a Parkdale park.”

Mayor John Tory’s office stated that while the mayor supports supervised injection sites, it disagreed with the site being located in a public park, saying it is “not a suitable place for this type of facility.”

“The mayor supports supervised injection sites and overdose prevention sites operating in approved locations because he knows they save lives,” said Don Peat, a spokesperson for Tory.

“He has been focused on doing everything possible to get approvals in place for these sites from federal and provincial governments,” Peat said. “Last week, he called on the provincial government to expedite its review of these facilities so sites can be opened as planned.”

Zoë Dodd, a representative for the Toronto OPS, said Parkdale has been supportive of the initiative, bringing pizza and water to organizers.

“(There are) people who live across the street who have come and said that they support it. Community members are the ones who wanted the site here. ... They felt there was a great need for that to happen,” she said.

Dodd said it’s too early to predict exactly how many people will utilize the safe injection site, but noted that a similar project in Moss Park saw people come through regularly after the site was established.

“We just spent the year organizing and running a site in Moss Park with over 150 volunteers,” she said. Since many of the volunteers at that site were Parkdale community members, Dodd said it was not difficult to organize in Parkdale, as the structure of the site already existed.

Data from Toronto Public Health shows that over the course of the summer, from June 4 to Aug. 6, paramedics responded to 32 fatal overdoses and 671 non-fatal overdoses.