Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones announced the decision to ban Safe Consumption Sites within 200 metres of schools and child-care centres in August. Due to these rule changes, nine facilities will be forced to close in the province by March 2025.
The provincial government is not only risking the safety of these communities by closing almost half of all Supervised Injection Facilities (SIFs) in Ontario, they are putting lives at risk.
The SIFs that are forced to shut down will be given the option to transition into “treatment hubs.” However, these facilities will not offer needle exchange programs, or supervised drug consumption – what most look for when visiting SIFs. Instead, they will offer alternative forms of support: employment help, addiction care and housing assistance.
These simply feel like a Band-Aid solution to the ongoing opioid crisis in Ontario.
The opioid crisis is not new to our province. According to the Registered Nurses Association of Ontario (RNAO), Between January 2016 and March 2023, over 40 thousand people died from an opioid-related overdose in Canada. Ontario counted for 35 per cent of those according to RNAO . During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, RNAO reported more than seven people died every day from an opioid overdose. They also reported that in the first three months of this year alone, an average of 21 people died every day due to an overdose, with an average of 17 hospitalizations each day. Over 19 thousand people have died from an opioid overdose between January and March of 2024. From the hospitalizations between January 2016 and March 2024, 64 per cent were accidental. These could have been prevented if SIFs were easier to access. SIFs are able to test the drugs brought within the facility for more dangerous substances.
The Health Minister must also understand the need for these sites – right?
Both international and Canadian evidence shows that safe consumption sites provide several services outside of providing clean needles. SIFs help to reduce public drug use and discarded drug equipment, reduce the spread of infectious diseases (HIV), reduce strain on emergency services, and also connect people to social services such as housing, employment assistance and food banks. SIFs are also able to test drugs to see if there are more dangerous substances in them, test for infectious diseases such as HIV, Hepatitis C, and sexually transmitted infections (STIs,), offer access to healthcare workers and support staff, and provide referrals to drug treatment and rehabilitation.
SIFs are a crucial aspect to a person’s addiction, allowing them the grace and dignity to be able to use substances in a clean environment, surrounded by trained staff and medical professionals, not alone, somewhere where the risk of infection could rise.
By forcing almost half of these facilities in Ontario to close, we are putting at risk a large number of people in our communities; not only of contracting very preventable diseases, but dying. It begs the question; how many deaths will it take for the Health Minister to realize her mistake?