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EDITOR’S NOTE: This article appeared on The Trillium, a Village Media online page dedicated to covering provincial politics in Queen’s Park.
Ontario will close 10 intake and treatment sites and ban long-term ones, which experts say will lead to more deaths and drug use among the public.
CTS sites, as they are called, allow other people to use drugs indoors without fear of arrest. Workers oppose overdoses and want to link users to intellectual fitness and treatment options. Most sites are controlled through network fitness centers or local public fitness units.
Sites within two hundred meters of a school or daycare center will have to close or become “treatment centers for homeless and addiction people (HART),” Health Minister Sylvia Jones told a crowd of mayors, councilors and municipal staff of the Association. Association of Ontario Municipalities (AMO) in Ottawa on Tuesday.
The centers will have a total of 375 “high-support housing units,” according to a government statement, and will aim to link other people to services, adding intellectual fitness treatment, primary care, employment assistance and other supports.
They will not offer origination, supervised intake or needle exchange programs, the government said.
It is spending $378 million to create 19 HART centers. Priority will be given to applications for existing CTS sites scheduled to close, Jones said.
In the fall, the government also plans to ban municipalities from the federal safer sources program and ask the federal government to decriminalize drugs in their cities, as Toronto has done.
The following CTS sites will have to do so by March 31, 2025. So far, all Kensington Markets are provincially funded.
Ontario will end up with nine intake and treatment sites, adding one in Kingston, London, Peterborough and St. Louis. John’s. Catharines, two in Ottawa and three in Toronto. No I’ll be in Northern Ontario.
Marie Mayor Matthew Shoemaker has been pushing for a supervised intake site to be built in the city (and made it a key component of his election platform), but today’s announcement means that may not happen. carried out under the leadership of Doug Ford.
Jones addressed his considerations on crime in his speech.
“Parents are concerned about the discarded needles their children may pick up. Some parents are no longer comfortable sending their children to the local number one school or have taken them out of the local daycare,” he told a silent crowd at the AMO. .
The government promised that the remaining CTS sites “will be subject to stricter liability requirements,” adding a mandate to report all court cases to the province “to allow the ministry to better monitor any safety and security issues. “
Venues must also report the number of visitors to the province; create anti-loitering and “restriction of service” policies; and work with police to conduct a safety assessment every three years.
Applications for HART centers will open in August and October, Jones said. The goal is for the centers to be open at the time when the CTS is forced to Array, he said.
It is unclear if there will be more than 19 centers. Jones said the government would start with that number before reassessing it.
Earlier this month, Premier Doug Ford said there was “no sale” at CTS sites and that nearby neighborhoods contained “all the discarded syringes” and were a “haven for drug dealers. ” drug. “
Ford introduced a review of supervised admissions last year after a fatal shooting near a in Toronto. While awaiting approval, some businesses in Barrie, Timmins and Sudbury that had been approved by local leaders and the federal government were forced to close. Sault Ste. Marie’s mayor also hoped to open one.
“My workplace overlooks this site,” Timmins Mayor Michelle Boileau told an AMO panel on opioids on Tuesday. She said she saw other people “in gigantic numbers” entering and leaving the center.
“And I still can’t help but wonder, every time someone approaches the door and looks in, and I see the look on their face, wondering why no one is running in, I can’t help but wonder where. ” he is, I’m going,’ she says.
On average, another 10 people in Ontario die each day from infected medications, according to the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO).
“Nurses are furious to see more preventable deaths. These numbers will increase because the Ford government has made it clear that other people who use ingredients are disposable,” Lhamo Dolkar, RNAO president and nurse practitioner, said in a statement.
Experts who study and analyze the issue of addictions say that the province wants more relief from the damage and more treatment.
This is creating a “false antagonism” between the two options, said Gillian Kolla, a professor of population fitness at Memorial University.
“I think that instead of making public policies based on the most productive evidence you can have, we are making them based on slogans, and that is very dangerous,” he said.
Without supervised intake sites, drug users could simply be “forced” to use drugs in public, making the challenge more visible, Kolla said.
“What happens when those sites are closed and other people are forced to return to alleys and parks?How does this strengthen public protection or lessen public nuisance problems?”she said.
Northern Ontario, which will soon be home to CTS sites, has an overdose death rate twice that of southern Ontario, Kolla said.
Kolla and Zoë Dodd, a researcher and damage relief employee in Toronto, said they would welcome an increase in treatments, which have been difficult to access lately and have gotten worse under the Ford government, according to Kolla.
“It has a tendency to be one of those things that gets announced in the smart news and then never turns into anything on the ground,” Kolla said.
Dodd said he has helped several other people in their treatment.
To access residential treatment, you must have completed drug rehabilitation, he said. Someone in Toronto can simply do it at CAMH, one of the few drug rehab sites in the province that has medical staff, she said. But after 10 to 12 days, this user will be discharged and will wait six to 12 months to get a remedy bed.
At that point, without any other support, most people go back to drugs, he said.
And it’s in Toronto.
The healing adventure of a person in Timmins, which still has a residential healing center and a hospital, can be 1,500 kilometers, its mayor said. It’s even more complicated in rural Ontario.
“It’s a very system,” Dodd said.
“It’s not like there’s someone who talks to you and has something for you. That doesn’t exist anywhere,” he said.
“Every day, other people are voluntarily looking to get what they want, whether it’s through the medical system, hospitals, CAMH or anywhere else, and they can’t,” Dodd said.
The quality of the remedy also varies by province, Mavens said. You could “skip the lines” with a $30,000 rehab center, but it might not have medical staff, Dodd said. Otherwise, a flexible 12-step program might be his only option, she said.
“And then other people are told they’re a disaster because they’re not doing well in those systems. But in reality, the systems haven’t changed. They’re archaic and built from a style created in the 1950s. ” Dodd said.
Although treatment beds are important, clinical rules imply that the “first line” of treatment is treatment with opioid agonists, that is, medications that add suboxone and methadone, preferably combined with counseling, said Lisa Simon, deputy chief medical officer of health. of Simcoe Muskoka. Health unit.
“In my opinion, all Ontarians with opioid use disorder deserve to have access to this type of treatment,” he said at an opioid panel discussion.
Toronto’s The Works has suffered more than 2,300 overdoses since opening; Ottawa’s Somerset West has arrested 1,700 of them, Kolla said.
CTS has been studied around the world, Simon added.
“At the end of the day, there is no clinical debate. It works,” he said, adding that it reduces rates of overdose, death and bloodborne infections.
“And most importantly, we know that it increases the likelihood that they will connect to other facilities when needed. “
Outside the conference, a handful of people gathered to protest Jones’ announcement before it took place.
Jones thanked “the many municipal leaders who have engaged with us over the past few months, advocating for exactly this community-centered solution. “
AMO itself is in favor of the sites. The organization, which advocates on behalf of Ontario’s 444 municipalities, noted in July that an article in the medical journal The Lancet attributed a 42 per cent relief in overdose mortality in Toronto to the sites.
AMO President Colin Best welcomed the investment for the center but said in a statement that CTS sites “are a critical component of the fight against the opioid crisis. “
“Evidence that damage repair saves lives, saves money and reduces crime. This relieves the strain on our police officers, paramedics and hospitals,” added Best.
Asked if the AMO had been consulted, Boileau, who is a member of the board of directors, replied “no. “
The Ontario NDP and Greens criticized the decision, while the provincial Liberal leader took a more hesitant approach.
In a statement, Lisa Gretzky, a critic of the NDP on intellectual fitness and addictions, called it “a foolish resolution to take away an important life-saving tool. ”
“Not a single network in our province is asking the government to cut existing resources and systems,” Nickel Belt NDP MP France Gélinas said in the same press release. “This government is cynically attacking fitness infrastructure and putting ideology ahead of evidence. It’s time to fund the remedies and systems we want to prevent loss of life.
Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie said STCs are not close to schools, but lamented the premier’s lack of “smart, compassionate solutions” and noted he dismantled the Emergency Opioid Task Force the previous Liberal government created when he took office. the charge.
“And now Doug Ford is cutting more services,” Crombie said in a statement. “There will have to be clarity on how they will have the capacity to provide remedy to those who want it. “
Environmental leader Mike Schreiner called for a swift reversal, echoing his advocates’ sentiments that remediation, rather than repairing the damage, is an “either-or scenario. “
“Make no mistake: Ontario will lose more lives due to this government’s attack on the damage relief system,” Schreiner said in a statement. to unbiased social and drug treatment.
Some have suggested the government go further, such as the mayor of Cambridge, who called for involuntary treatment for other people with drug addiction. Two-thirds of respondents to a city-funded survey agreed that “Ontario’s legislation should be updated to allow families and physicians to provide intellectual fitness and addiction treatment to involuntary patients. “
Jones has thrown cold water on the concept in the past, but on Tuesday it took on a different tone.
“I am convinced that an unintended solution will not produce the effects we want,” she said last month.
When asked about it after her speech, she said she was “willing to consider all options. “
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