Group holds OD prevention training as Ontario moves to ban supervised drug consumption sites

Volunteers conduct drug overdose prevention training at Yonge-Dundas Square on Oct. 2. (Supplied photo)

Overdose prevention training sessions are being held across Ontario as the province moves to ban supervised drug consumption services and limit other harm reduction measures.

On Wednesday, volunteers in Toronto, Ottawa, Sudbury, Timmins, Hamilton, and Kitchener-Waterloo taught members of the public how to recognize the signs of a drug overdose, give CPR, and administer naloxone, the opioid overdose-reversing drug. People could also ask questions about the drug poisoning crisis and learn more about SCSs.

The Toronto Overdose Prevention Society (TOPS) and allies organized the emergency outreach effort as they “brace for the worst outcome: the closing of lifesaving services that intervene in overdoses every day.” The group plans to hold training sessions across the province in the coming months.

“So essentially, with the Ford government’s decisions to close supervised consumption sites, we’re recognizing and naming that there’s going to be a lot more people who are using substances publicly, which means that there’s a higher risk of people overdosing in public spaces, like where I’m standing right now (in Yonge-Dundas Square),” Lorraine Lam, a frontline worker who is helping organize with TOPS, told CP24 late Wednesday afternoon.

Frontline worker Lorraine Lam volunteers with the Toronto Overdose Prevention Society.

Long-time harm reduction worker and advocate Zoe Dodd, also with TOPS, said they made the decision to take “matters into our own hands because our provincial government continues to fail us.”

“We will be out in our communities, teaching our neighbours how to respond to the toxic drug overdose emergency so they can save a life that might otherwise be lost due to the province’s deadly and callous policy change,” she said in a news release.

In late August, the province announced significant changes to its drug policy.

Citing safety concerns precipitated by the shooting death of an innocent bystander outside a Leslieville SCS in June 2023, it announced a ban on these sites within 200 metres of school and/or childcare centre.

This proposed plan will affect 10 programs that offer supervised drug consumption sites in the province, five of which are in Toronto. These locations must close their doors no later than March 31, 2025.

The Ford government also wants to mandate additional safety and security measures at Ontario’s remaining sites and plans to introduce new legislation this fall that would prohibit municipalities or any organization from opening new ones or participating in safer supply programs. This soon-to-be proposed legislation also calls for the prohibition of municipalities from applying for drug decriminalization exemptions from the federal government.

“This announcement claims to be about public safety, and is anything but,” Dr, Nanky Rai, a family physician, said in a release.

“Communities will now be forced to contend with the extremely distressing task of responding to overdoses. By removing some of the only spaces where people are able to use safely, Premier Ford and Minister Jones are not only abandoning people who use drugs, but downloading this grave responsibility onto neighbours and bystanders,” she charged.

In place of SCSs, the province intends to open 19 Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) hubs, which it previously said would offer a “comprehensive system of care that prioritizes community safety and focuses on giving people their lives back through treatment and recovery, as well as upstream investments in prevention.” These transitional hubs, however, will not offer safer supply, supervised drug consumption, sterile injection equipment, or needle exchange programs.

Service provider Sarah Ovens said that no one “disagrees with increasing access to treatment – we’ve been calling on the Ford Government to adequately fund detox, scale up treatment, and address the waitlists for the six years they’ve been in power.”

“But it is not clear how the proposed hubs will meet this need, and these services shouldn’t come at the expense of other vital services. Closing these sites in the middle of record high levels of overdose death … will lead to deaths that can and should be prevented,” she said in a release.

TOPS, which opened Ontario’s first SCS in 2017 in Moss Park, is calling on Premier Doug Ford and Minister of Health Sylva Jones to immediately reverse course and keep SCSs open, and immediately fund and re-open them in Timmins, Sudbury and Windsor and scale them up in northern communities. The group also wants supervised inhalation at SCSs, voluntary and evidence-based detox and treatment on demand, and the abolition of waitlists.

Currently in Ontario, one person dies every 2.5 hours of a suspected drug overdose.

According to the latest data from the Office of the Chief Coroner for Ontario, there were 2,645 opioid toxicity deaths in 2023. 

“Across the province, here (in Toronto), in Sudbury, Hamilton, people are gathered to offer overdose response training to people just who are walking by, people who might live in the neighbourhood, work in the neighbourhood, or just the general public so that they are aware of what it might look like to spot an overdose and how people can respond. We are trying to equip people with the practical tools that are needed because the Ford government’s decision to close these sites is actually going to be downloading responsibility again onto the general public, to people who are not necessarily equipped to do so.”