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“To save a life is a real and beautiful thing. To make a home for the homeless, yes, it is a thing that must be good; whatever the world may say, it cannot be wrong.” – Vincent Van Gogh
A recent visit to Toronto’s Kensington Market revealed yet another layer to the debate over the plight of the homeless and supervised consumption.
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THE MACRO
In the midst of a bitter battle over the establishment of a supervised consumption site in downtown Winnipeg, I decided it would be interesting to see how similar sites had impacted other neighborhoods in other cities.
Enter the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, known to locals in this densely populated neighborhood of downtown Toronto as KMOPS.
Operated by The Neighborhood Group Community Services (TNGCS), a coalition of social and health-services agencies serving the area’s homeless population, KMOPS has been the focus of intense scrutiny because of efforts by the Ontario government to effectively shut it down.
Undeterred by a decision to cut KMOPS off from provincial funding, it has continued to operate thanks to the support of other agencies and benefactors. It has also challenged the government’s decision in court; a decision is expected later this year.
Given the attention that the proposed Winnipeg harm-reduction site — currently slated for Henry Avenue west of Main Street — has garnered from nearby residents and businesses, KMOPS was a perfect example to study.
How effective had it been in saving lives?
How had it been integrated into a dense, vibrant community in Kensington Market?
What kinds of problems could be attributed to the presence of a supervised consumption site?
How do local residents feel about the presence of KMOPS?
Here are the lessons I learned while researching and writing this feature.
Separate desks where people can use pre-obtained substances in a safe space at the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site (KMOPS) in Toronto.
What do people do when they visit KMOPs? And has it been effective at saving lives? According to TNGCS, there has not been a single overdose death at KMOPS, which typically sees about 30 visitors a day. Not all of them use drugs; some come in to have their drugs tested, while others access primary health care. Only a handful of clients — two to three daily — will actually use some form of drug in a supervised setting.
Has KMOPS been integrated into the neighborhood? For the most part, KMOPS had become accepted as one of a broad array of services for the homeless provided at the TNGCS building on Augusta Avenue. Supervised drug consumption takes place in a single, 400-square-foot suite within a much larger building and its clients are not easily distinguished from other homeless people accessing other services.
Are there specific problems that can be attributed to the existence of a supervised consumption site? KMOPS, in and of itself, has not been the source of any specific problems.
The concerns expressed by nearby residents and businesses were all related to the presence of homeless people at the TNGCS building, which is visited by more than 300 people each day to access social and health services. According to staff, the homeless population that comes to the building on Augusta Avenue can be, at times, a bit rowdy and unkempt.
Given that a high proportion of the homeless suffer from mental health and addiction problems, that’s not surprising.
As for KMOPs, staff say they tend to be the quietest and calmest of all the people who visit TNGCS. Drug consumption, they say, remains a very intimate act and those who want to do so in a supervised setting are exceedingly well behaved.
How do local residents and businesses feel about the harm reduction site? This is always the toughest question to answer, whether you’re looking at Toronto or Winnipeg.
How does the surrounding community feel about the presence of a supervised consumption site? There are some vocal opponents who position themselves as the tip of a more-silent-than-vocal majority in the area.
Many of those people are business owners. At the same time, there is no shortage of supporters, many of whom point out that crime of all kinds in Kensington Market has gone down during the period when KMOPS has been up and running.
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Here’s the rub: when you talk to opponents, you quickly find out the things they are most concerned about are connected to homelessness and not supervised consumption: public disturbances, property and random violent crime, vandalism, open drug use and aggressive panhandling. These are not problems created by, or exacerbated by, KMOPS.
What this means is that if you remove supervised consumption, you still have all of the other problems associated with homelessness, augmented by more open drug use and overdose deaths.
One can only hope Winnipeggers working to stop a supervised consumption site realize the real source of their concerns is homelessness, not supervised consumption. And that homelessness will not be solved by denying life-saving support to the homeless.
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