TORONTO – A harm reduction advocate and a registered nurse light candles at a makeshift memorial at Moss Park.
Cards and flowers mark the spot where they honour a woman named Gypsy, who died recently of a drug overdose.
“Sadly we’re adding to the list of people we’ve lost, I mean we can add to that memorial weekly now,” Leigh Chapman, a nurse who volunteers at the Moss Park Overdose Prevention Site (OPS), said. Chapman lost her own brother Brad to an overdose less than three years ago.
READ MORE: Interim supervised injection site opens in downtown Toronto
Data collected during the site’s first 12 weeks show 85 overdoses were stopped or reversed, 1,976 injections were witnessed and 1246 Naloxone kits, designed to stop an opioid overdose, were distributed.
The Moss Park OPS operates daily from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. thanks to a crew of volunteers who set up and stock three tents with essential lifesaving services but Chapman’s worried about the site’s future given the falling temperatures as fall becomes winter.
“We need indoor space immediately — we cannot wait,” Chapman said.
The hope was that the nearby Fred Victor Centre would allow the existing Moss Park OPS to move into the basement and to continue without a federal exemption, which would mean neither clients nor staff would be at risk of criminal prosecution for drug possession.
City Councillor Joe Cressy who chairs the city’s drug strategy implementation panel said, “We have front-line health providers, activists, who are breaking the law to provide a much-needed health service and I have to tell you if the federal government doesn’t give us the indoor exemption, I think the city should just go ahead and ignore the federal law.”
READ MORE: 3 safe injection sites approved for Toronto
That is exactly what Leigh Chapman is hoping.
“We need them to break the law when the laws are causing the deaths of people and they’re preventable. We need them to do that,” she said.
One piece of positive news came late Wednesday evening when Toronto Councillor Joe Mihevc announced on Twitter that the Ministry of Health will set up a heated tent in the park on Thursday.
Comments