Derek Finkle: Pro-drug injection site activists were dangerously wrong on closures
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This was the dire prediction oft-repeated back in March by a busload of lawyers who supported a legal challenge filed by an injection site in Toronto that claimed recent Ontario legislation forcing the closure of sites within 200 metres of schools and daycare facilities violates the Charter rights of drug users.
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The two expert witnesses for that site, in the Kensington neighbourhood of Toronto, are employed by the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions, a hospital-run research centre. MAP had played a key role in the establishment of the city's first injection sites in 2017. Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi and Dr. Dan Werb both submitted evidence that overdose deaths in Toronto would increase sharply if half of the city's ten injection sites closed at the end of March because of the legislation.
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Fred Fischer, a lawyer representing Toronto's Board of Health, one of the intervenor groups in the case, also told Justice John Callaghan of the Ontario Superior Court that reducing harm reduction services in Toronto during the ongoing opioid crisis would have severe consequences — more people will overdose and die.
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A lawyer for another intervenor, a harm reduction coalition, put an even finer point on it. He said that one of the Toronto injection sites not affected by the legislation was anticipating such an immediate and overwhelming increase in overdose deaths in April, after the closures, that the site was in the process of hiring grief counsellors for its staff.
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More than two months have passed since then, and now that we're in June, you might be wondering: How many more people ended up dying because of the closure of these sites?
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According to data that's compiled by Toronto Paramedic Services and Toronto Public Health, the answer, so far, is none. In fact, the number of overdoses in Toronto for the month of April, the first month after the sites had closed, dropped notably.
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Toronto had 13 fatal overdose calls in April, one less than in March, when the now-closed injection sites were still open. Thirteen is less than half the number of fatal overdoses across the city in April of last year, and significantly below the monthly average for all of 2024 (19).
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Thirteen fatal overdoses are far lower than the average monthly number during the period of Covid-19 emergency between April 2020 and May 2023 (25). The last time 13 was the norm for monthly fatal overdoses was prior to the pandemic.
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The number of calls for non-fatal overdoses in April was 161. This may sound like a lot but it's the lowest monthly total so far this year in Toronto. And 161 non-fatal overdoses are 55 per cent less than the 359 that occurred in April of 2024.
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Remarkably, in the third week of April, there were zero fatal overdose calls, something that hasn't happened in Toronto in months.
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