Left-progressive media react to the closure of controlled consumption sites in Ontario

In the wake of the Ontario government’s decision to impose strict new restrictions on supervised drug consumption facilities – which, as iPolitics reported at the time that it will no longer be allowed to operate within 200 metres of a school or daycare, a change that is expected to result in the closure of 10 locations across the province — crisis worker from downtown Toronto Lorraine Lam warns violation She gives her readers a grim prognosis about what the exact consequences of this step will be: she predicts “more drug use in public, greater strain on the health system and more deaths”.

“I will never forget the first person I found unconscious: blue-lipped and slumped over,” she recalls.

“The first person who died despite my attempts to resuscitate them because it was too late. The first time I called a mother to tell her her son had died and the wails I heard on the other end of the line. Over the past decade, as I worked in social work in downtown Toronto – one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods, marked by poverty and displacement – those first cases turned into hundreds. Hundreds of drug poisonings that could not be reversed. Hundreds of calls my colleagues and I made to families while their sons and daughters lay in the morgues. Hundreds – if not more – of preventable deaths.”