Councillor says safe-injection sites ‘enable dangerous behaviour’

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti speaks with the media across from Toronto Board of Health.

A Toronto city councillor is speaking out against an overdose prevention site in Moss Park, saying the operation will “enable very dangerous and disruptive behaviour.”

Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti issued a statement Monday morning saying he would be hosting a news conference accross the street from Toronto Public Health to “bring attention to the disaster the area has become.”

“My prediction is that like a cartel that thrives in Third World countries, the areas around the safe injections sites will start to resemble Third World conditions like in Vancouver’s now infamous Downtown Eastside,” Mammoliti said in a statement.

The unsanctioned overdose prevention site at Moss Park was launched in August 2017 by a group of volunteers from the Toronto Harm Reduction Alliance and the Overdose Prevention Society. The organization operated makeshift white tents, and later a trailer, to provide access to trained nurses and the overdose-reversing drug naloxone.

The volunteers say they have helped reverse more than 200 overdoses in the last nine months.

On May 11, the Ontario Ministry of Health granted the group permission to operate the site in a nearby vacant building for the next six months. The federal government also granted the site a formal exemption.

This new funding and partnership with the South Riverdale Community Health Centre means the overdose prevention site will now be operating legally in the City of Toronto.

Mammoliti says the Board of Health and Toronto’s City Council should be offering “real help” to those suffering from addictions rather than allowing “rogue groups” to take over neighbourhood parks.

“They ignore the role which organized crime plays in supplying illegal drugs and the fact that many addicts themselves commit crimes to get the money they need to acquire drugs; they turn a blind eye to the fact that drug use is not a victimless crime,” he said.

At a news conference on Monday afternoon, Mammoliti said overdose prevention sites will encourage people to use drugs. He also claimed that addicts are vandalizing business properties and assaulting owners of establishments.

“The addicts are at risk and so are those in the community,” Mammoliti said. “All this is going to do is bring addicts on to the sidewalks. They are going to feel comfortable taking drugs on the sidewalks they will be comfortable using these facilities to shoot the heroin or any other drug they are using.”

Mammoliti said the provincial and federal governments need to offer more treatment options instead of focusing on safe-injection sites.

Councillor Joe Cressy, chair of the Toronto Drug Strategy Implementation Panel, tweeted a response to Mammoliti’s press conference, saying “you can’t provide treatment to someone who is already dead.”

“Supervised injection is an evidence-based healthcare response to an overdose crisis that is killing Torontonians,” he said on social media.

According to city data, 187 people died of opioid-related overdoses between May and October 2017 in Toronto. This number is roughly double the rate of the previous year.

Across Canada, more than 4,000 people died of opioid-related overdoses in 2017.