‘Has anyone lost a child?’ Mom pleads to council for safe consumption sites

Mom who lost daughter to opioids calls for action From CTV Kitchener’s Nicole Lampa: Jenny Devoe told council that her daughter would be alive today if Cambridge had a safe consumption site.

A Cambridge mother made a tearful plea at regional council over safe consumption treatment sites.

Jenny Devoe bashed how long the decision process for a site has taken.

She believes that if a treatment site had been up and running in Cambridge this past summer, her daughter Lindsay would still be alive.

“If you had any idea what it feels like to have lost a child, I can tell you that it’s like someone took your heart and just threw it on the ground,” she says tearfully.

Devoe went before regional council today before council continued to discuss proposed locations.

“Has anyone lost a child?” Jenny Devoe asked regional council members.

Lindsay Devoe was a high school graduate and a dancer who took care of her grandparents.

She also battled a drug addiction from a young age after her father died.

“She went to 12 different centres in 10 or 11 years, so it was really hard for her to beat,” her mother says.

Lindsay Devoe died of a drug overdose, one of 50 people who died in 2018. The heroine she was using was laced with fentanyl.

Her mother found her body at her apartment building, which is right across from one of the proposed safe consumption and treatment sites.

“Had there been a safe consumption for her to use at that time, she’d be alive today. There’s no doubt,” Jenny Devoe says.

Regional Chair Karen Redman says that it is important that the process move quickly.

“People are losing their lives. These are our neighbours, these are people who live down the street,” Redman said. “It’s very important that we act and that we act expeditiously now, because it has taken a while.”

The region suspended talks on safe consumption sites in the summer pending a provincial review.

Late in the fall, the Conservative government decided to funding going under a new model.

Four proposed sites remain up for discussion.