The other day Toronto residents learned about the latest misguided overstep happening at a drug injection site. A facility in the East End Toronto neighbourhood of Leslieville posted a sign on their front door offering candy to people who bring them a full pack of discarded needles.
“Got Sharps? Want Chocolate?” the poster reads. “For every full sharps container you return to COUNTERfit, we’ll give you a chocolate bar.” COUNTERfit is the name of the injection site contained within the health centre building.
“If you live in Leslieville and you’re concerned about your kids picking up needles that surround the drug consumption site, you don’t have to worry. In fact, if your kids collect enough they can trade them in for chocolate!” That’s what Ginny Roth, political strategist and writer, wrote to accompany the picture she posted to social media of the offending sign.
It was unbelievable, so I drove down to the facility over the weekend to see for myself. When I arrived, the poster was taped to the front door of the building. And the building is on Queen Street East, which has a busy sidewalk regularly packed with pedestrians. There is nothing on the sign that clarifies the target audience of the sign. And, given the colourful nature of it, there’s no reason that a candy-starved kid would doubt that it applied to them.
As I posted to social media and said on talk radio, the facility needed to take the sign down and apologize to the community. To their credit, that’s what they then did.
“In an exuberance to get used needles off the street one of our staff posted a sign that was never meant for the public. In no way, shape, or form was that communication meant for children,” said Jason Alternberg, CEO of the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, in a statement to the National Post. “We apologize for any miscommunication.”
It was a miscommunication in more ways than one, though. If they were so exuberant about getting needles off the street, why haven’t they done a better job? Why are they outsourcing the task to others? Why aren’t they more strongly communicating to drug users that they need to pick up after themselves? And what’s with blaming a single staff member when senior staff no doubt walked in and out of that front door many times themselves?
There’s also the inconvenient question about why these needles are outside of the facility in the first place. One of the supposed benefits of drug injection sites is that all of the negatives that come from them stay within the facility. The users are supposed to use in the site, and their needles stay there. That’s clearly long gone. The staff of drug sites now seem to accept it as normal that their collateral damage will spill over into the community at large.
You would think this one site in particular would be much more sensitive to their community. That’s because it’s right near this facility that a mother of two small girls was recently shot and killed by a stray bullet as criminals went after each other in broad daylight. It’s well-established that drug dealers, many of them armed, gravitate towards the drug sites because that’s where they find their customers.
The shooting should have been a wake up moment for advocates of drug sites and their political allies. The talking points that are used to defend the status quo around these sites are clearly incorrect. Yet this sign fiasco shows they still haven’t evolved in their thinking.
The more drug sites we have, the more we get both drug-related deaths and crime in the communities. It’s time to pivot to a fresh approach.
The advocates sadly won’t acknowledge this, though. They are too stuck in ideological thinking.
Regular folks are growing tired of this, as they should. More community members are speaking out. Politicians are feeling the pressure to do better.
“The public demands the complete and immediate shutdown of these injection sites now,” wrote Dana McKiel, of the Downtown Concerned Citizens Organization, in a press release. “Utilize these facilities for drug rehabilitation and quit endangering, poisoning and eroding neighbourhoods.”
It’s time to reject the enabling culture and start believing that a better way is indeed possible. Those who argue that all we can do is continue down the same path are giving up on both addicts and our communities.
For now, the drug injection site culture keeps getting worse. Let’s hope we can work together to turn it around.
