Very few of Ford’s policies seem to be evidence-driven or respectful of reality, so why should this one be any different?
Cruelty is the point.
Supervised injection sites reduce overdose mortality by 67%. Supervised injection sites reduce local assault and robbery rates Supervised injection sites reduce healthcare costs
Supervised injection sites help addicts, the communities around them, and the taxpayer. Removing them is like taking your own eye out so that the people beneath you lose both eyes.
But don’t you understand, if we just let all the addicts die then there will be no more addicts. Its all part of the plan to save tax dollars in the long run.i
If we just restrict social housing so people don’t have a stable address to get a job, remove injection sites so people OD or get diseased, defund and remove public transit so they ca t access what resources exist, we can finally solve the homeless problem. Its simple evolution, the strong and successful survive, the weak and pathetic are eliminated.
/s, my god so much sarcasm, but its starting to feel like the opposition is thinking this.
It’s starting to feel like that because that’s exactly how a lot of them think. They’ve just been recently emboldened enough to start saying the quite part out loud.
The reason citizens feel this way is because they’ve seen the half-assed policy we have, where we don’t enforce drug laws, but don’t support addicts either, and the result is serious harm to just about any city of size in most of Canada.
The correct solution would be a) housing and comprehensive supports for addicts, so they have a roof over their head and can get clean, b) safe-supply, and c) actual enforcement of laws and bylaws so that the only place you can use your safe, free supply is the home from a) or the treatment centre in b).
All of this would cost money and political capital. The cheap solution was to just do a half-assed job enforcing laws about drug use, and a similarly half-assed approach to the crime caused by drug use, with a token few bucks thrown at safe-consumption. This looked wonderfully progressive, and it had the benefit of being cheap and keeping the riff-raff out of nice suburban spaces. Basically, we looked at Portugal’s solution, and did maybe 30-50% of it, and looked all shocked when it didn’t work.
Now we’re dealing with a situation where we didn’t address the causes of addiction, and piled on not addressing the impacts, either. And people–voters, people who live and work in downtowns scorched by addiction–are unhappy about it. And now it’s a more expensive problem then it was 10-15 years ago.
This is painfully typical of Canada: ignore a problem when it’s cheap to fix, half-ass a solution, and then cry poverty and powerlessness when the problem metastasizes into a crisis. See: healthcare, education or immigration
I wonder if anyone who is in favour of shutting down these sites have ever been to the point of desparation of using intravenous drugs to escape their life for a few fleeting moments.
Do they realize that its not “oh, a safe injection site? Well, I guess now is a good time to start doing smack”.
