Harm reduction close to home

Part of the motivation for this blog is that historically when I've been motivated to write it ends up being tucked away in an email thread, a WhatsApp group, or, even worse, the replies on a social media site. One recent such occasion was in the comments of a Reddit post regarding the tragic death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat, which had devolved into the now-standard hue and cry of "safe consumption sites have made things soooo unsafe!!" and much applauding of the provincial government's reckless decision to shut down safe consumption sites like the one at South Riverdale. Much hay was made of a National Post article which ostensibly illustrated how the safe consumption program had imperilled the neighbourhood.

I try not to engage with these discussions, since they're rarely fruitful and there's only so much barely-concealed lust for the death of addicts that you can be exposed to without losing all faith in humanity, but in this case several commenters were talking about how the residents of the neighbourhood would be so much happier and safer with the SCS shut down. I happen to be a neighbourhood resident, and couldn't help myself. What follows is that effort-post, lightly edited to be intelligible divorced from its original threaded-reply structure.

To be clear, Karolina's death is tragic, and the SCS employee who abetted the killers is despicable. It is precisely because I value community safety that I am concerned about the SCS being shut down. The SCS's users are other people in the neighbourhood, many of whom either live in the community housing or make use of the shelters that are within a couple of blocks of the SCS. These people are not going to get on the streetcar and travel 5km+ to make use of one of the handful of sites not being shut down; they are going to use in the same ways they used before the SCS opened, unsupervised in their homes or in the park leaving used needles around where kids like mine or Karolina's will encounter them while trying to play outdoors.

To the question of whether I 'actively advocate for...a centre that protects clients that are actively stealing from residents and businesses in your community, and allows them to fence stolen goods on the premises?', the short answer is "yes", but I understand why you feel the way you do and I probably would feel similarly in your position.

The issues you're describing, of drug dealers dealing inside the health centre and clients "fencing" good on the premises, are actually a great illustration of the missing piece in the narrative that has been constructed around safe consumption sites. The author of the National Post article places these events in 2016, before the introduction of the safe consumption program at South Riverdale in late 2017 (this isn't a gotcha, the writer describes the sequence of events this way in the article). That is to say, the various social ills being attributed to the introduction of the safe consumption site that is now being shut down pre-date said safe consumption site opening.

This is why I completely understand why you wouldn't want this facility near your neighbourhood. Presumably your neighbourhood doesn't struggle with these sorts of issues currently, so the introduction of a facility that is so tightly associated with such issues feels perilous, and fairly so. The difference is that these issues were not introduced to my neighbourhood by the safe consumption site, or by SRCHC more broadly. Rather, both SRCHC and the safe consumption program are here because the issues were already here.

I suspect most Torontonians at this point think of Leslieville as being the land of 30-something yuppies with dogs and/or Uppababy strollers, and with good reason, but that's a relatively new phenomenon and hasn't fully displaced the previous nature of the area. SRCHC is one example of that, but it's not the only one. Just a block away from where the shooting happened is one of the oldest shelters in the city, hidden away in the back of a new condo building; go another block west and there's a 100 unit community housing building; the other side of the semi-detached house I live in is rent-geared-to-income public housing. (Note: I don't in any way mean to suggest that all or even most people using shelters or public housing suffer from drug addiction, it's purely illustrative of the historical demographics of the neighbourhood). Hell, a year ago a family member was chatting to someone in Vancouver about Leslieville and mentioned the street I live on, and they remarked "oh I used to smoke crack in a house on that street in the 90s".

I do not advocate for us establishing safe consumption sites arbitrarily by throwing darts at a map. I do welcome a safe consumption site in my backyard (I literally walked by this one with my daughter while running errands between replies here) because I understand that it is not creating the challenges that my community faces, but rather is emblematic of a serious attempt to ameliorate a long-standing challenge my community is already facing.