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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 service 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 must inform users about 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 “highly supported housing units,” according to a government statement, and will aim to link others to add intellectual fitness treatment, primary care, employment assistance and other supports.
They will not offer origination, supervised admission or needle exchange programs, the government said.
It is spending $378 million to create 19 HART centers. Priority will be given to applications from 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 are scheduled to close by March 31, 2025. All Kensington Markets receive provincial funding.
Ontario will end with nine intake and treatment sites, adding one in Kingston, London, Peterborough and St. John’s. Catharines, two in Ottawa and three in Toronto. I won’t be in Northern Ontario.
Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Matthew Shoemaker has pushed for the construction of a manned entrance into the city (and made it a key component of his election platform), but today’s announcement means that won’t happen under directed by Doug Ford.
Jones addressed his considerations on crime in his speech.
“Parents are concerned about discarded needles that their children may pick up. Some parents no longer feel comfortable sending their children to the local number one school or have withdrawn them from the local daycare,” he told a silent crowd at the AMO .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. “
The sites will also have to report the number of customers to the province; create anti-loitering and “restriction of service” policies; and working with the police to carry out a safeguarding 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 by the time CTS is forced to Array, she said.
It is unclear if there will be more than 19 centers. Jones said the government would start with that figure 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 Toronto. Pending approval, Barrie, Timmins and Sudbury that had been approved through local leaders and the federal government were forced to close. Sault Ste. The mayor of Marie also hoped to open one.
“My view is this site,” Timmins Mayor Michelle Baileau said at an AMO panel on opioids on Tuesday. He said he 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 they are. I’m leaving,” says.
On average, another 10 people in Ontario die each day from infected drugs, according to the Ontario Registered Nurses Association (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 addiction picture say the province wants more harm relief 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 close and other people are forced to return to alleys and parks? How does this fare for anyone? How does it increase public protection or decrease public nuisance problems?” she said.
Northern Ontario, which will soon host CTS sites, has an overdose death rate twice that of southern Ontario, Kolla noted.
Kolla and Zoë Dodd, a researcher and damage relief worker in Toronto, have said they would welcome an increase in treatments, which have been difficult to access lately and have worsened under Ford’s government, according to Kolla.
“It has a tendency to be one of those things that gets announced in the smart news and then never becomes anything on the ground,” Kolla said.
Dodd said he has helped several other people in their treatment.
To access residential treatment, you need to have completed drug rehab, 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, he said. But after 10 to 12 days, this user will be discharged and 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.
A person’s therapeutic journey in Timmins, which still has a residential treatment center and 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 across the province, Mavens said. One could “skip the lines” with a $30,000 remedy 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 don’t do well in those programs. But in reality, the curricula haven’t changed. They’re pretty archaic and built on a style created in the 1990s. 1950,” Dodd said. . saying.
While 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 for health at Simcoe Muskoka. Health unit.
“In my opinion, each and every Ontarian who suffers from opioid use disorder deserves to have access to this type of treatment,” he said in a discussion before the AMO panel on opioid use. opioids.
Toronto’s The Works has suffered more than 2,300 overdoses since it opened; Somerset West in Ottawa arrested 1,700 people, Kolla said.
CTS have 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 city leaders who have supported us over the past few months, advocating for exactly this community-driven solution. “
The AMO itself is in favor of sites. The organization, which advocates on behalf of Ontario’s 444 municipalities, noted in July that an article in the medical journal The Lancet credited the sites with a 42 per cent relief in overdose mortality in Toronto.
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. “
“The evidence that repairing damages saves lives, saves money and reduces crime. This relieves the strain on our police officers, paramedics and hospitals,” Best added.
Asked if the AMO had been consulted, Boileau, who is a member of the board of directors, replied “no. “
The NDP and Ontario Greens criticized the move, 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 news release. “This government is cynically attacking fitness infrastructure and putting ideology before evidence. It is time to fund the remedies and systems we want to prevent the loss of life.
Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie said STCs are not close to schools, but lamented the prime minister’s lack of “smart and compassionate solutions” and noted that he dismantled the Emergency Task Force on Opioids that the previous Liberal government set up when it took office.
“And now Doug Ford is cutting more services,” Crombie said in a statement. “He wants to be transparent about how they will maintain the capacity necessary to provide medicine to those who want it. “
Greens leader Mike Schreiner called for a swift reversal, echoing his advocates’ sentiment that treatment rather than damage relief is not an “either-or scenario. “
“Make no mistake: Ontario will lose more lives because of this government’s attack on harm relief,” Schreiner said in a statement. Non-Judgemental Social and Detox Treatment.
Some have suggested that the government press ahead, such as the mayor of Cambridge, who has called for involuntary remedies for other people with drug addiction. Two-thirds of respondents to a city-funded survey agreed that “Ontario legislation wants to replace it to allow families and doctors to provide mental fitness and addiction remedy 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 involuntary 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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