Halifax-area parents are voicing concerns, saying children have been finding drug paraphernalia and that, in one case, a child was pricked by a discarded needle.
Five months ago, Emily Medford wouldn’t have batted an eye at her seven-year-old son playing in a pile of leaves. That’s all changed after he was pricked by a needle at a bus stop on Gottingen Street in the city’s north end.
“You’re scared because you don’t know, was the person clean? What kind of drugs was it? And you’re not thinking, ‘Oh my god, I need to bag up this needle and take it to the hospital,'” she said.
“It was just grab your child and let’s go.”
Across the harbour in Dartmouth’s Highfield Park neighbourhood, residents say they’re used to seeing drug paraphernalia scattered on the streets, especially at bus stops.
“My two-year-old picks up everything, so he’s constantly picking stuff up off the ground,” area resient Karissa Duffy said. “Maybe there should be a sharps container at every bus stop. Maybe there should be one outside of every apartment building.”
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Medford told Global News she agrees with the idea of supervised consumption sites and believes such sites could help with the situation.
Duffy isn’t convinced.
“We should be working towards more detox centres, and not voluntary. Drugs take over everything. The addiction takes over that willingness to go get help,” she said. “We have people who have no shelter and have no food, so we’re going to see more addictions because there’s more people who have nothing.”
Some clinics in Nova Scotia — including Highfield Park’s Open Door Clinic — offer low-threshold opioid-assisted treatment as a means of harm reduction. Program participants receive prescriptions and can pick them up at their local pharmacy.
“People with addictive disorders never choose for that to be their life,” said Dr. David Saunders, an addiction physician at the clinic. “I believe that people are born genetically predisposed to addiction and that social factors and traumas can contribute to that.”
Saunders said although the number of people struggling with addiction hasn’t increased, the use of opioids has.
“Eight years ago, doing this work, it would be unusual to have had people under 20,” he said. “Now it’s usual for there to be an increasing number of people in late adolescence who have become opioid addicted.”
— with a file from Global News’ Rebecca Lau
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