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community weblog
The Long Last Days of Toronto's First Safe Consumption Site
"The message is, 'You don't vote for me, so why do I care what happens to you?'"
(slTheLocal)
posted by Kitteh on Jun 04, 2026 at 7:05 AM
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Bet Doug Ford feels absolutely righteous about this. Because when that place is closed, Ontario will not be Sending The Wrong Message. Because The Message is way more important that the lives and deaths of actual people.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:00 AM
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How can my heart keep breaking
This is devastating.
There's a photo not quite halfway down where you can see a poster that says "Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist Keep Fighting".
Thank you for sharing this here, Kitteh. I am crushed and grateful to witness the lives of these people and to be reminded with both the numbers and the faces that harm reduction works.
posted by kristi at 8:01 AM
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I live near a safe consumption site and it is really awful to hear how people talk about the folks that go there. So dehumanizing. IIRC, this site will stay open because of aid from my city council.
posted by Kitteh at 8:23 AM
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And this coming from a family with such links to both selling and abusing substances.
posted by SNACKeR at 8:24 AM
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when we countenance the treatment of society's weakest this way, we know where we will all end up
Keep Fighting indeed, and I will take from today the reminder that every little thing that moves me away from compassion is a little wrong thing learned, and shake myself, and get back on track
posted by runsrealgood at 8:29 AM
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Lately I have been seeing a lot of commercials about Doug Ford making Ontario safer for Ontarians but clearly that only applies to certain Ontarians.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:56 AM
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So fucked up...
Addiction sucks, and then you are in it and just have to keep feeding it. These fucking assholes. They want these addicts to die.
posted by Windopaene at 11:01 AM
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I'm so fucking heartbroken about this. Friends of mine started Moss Park. And heartbroken by all the other sites that are being closed across Canada. People have already died and more will die because of this.
I've spent a solid chunk of my professional career working on supervised consumption/overdose prevention sites, mostly trying to get them opened in the US. Canada was the shining beacon, proving this could be done in North America. It's deeply discouraging to see even Canada backing away from science and public health. My own city is backing away hard from harm reduction and evidence-based services, with our own mini-Trump mayor who, like Doug Ford, doesn't give a fuck about human beings, only about "clean streets."
posted by gingerbeer at 12:21 PM
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lot of commercials about Doug Ford making Ontario safer for Ontarians
The one I see all the time is about how new prisons in some way make us safer. Even my teenager thought this was preposterous and labelled it as government propaganda. Which it is.
posted by Ashwagandha at 12:21 PM
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Oh for sure, I also disagree that things that the ads say will make us safer actually will. But in this case, we have something with safe literally in the name and they won't keep it operating.
posted by jacquilynne at 12:37 PM
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City people opposing supervised use and harm reduction is stupid! Like, it is literally trivially stupid! If you live in a big city, street level addiction is right there and visible. I see people doing hard drugs all the time! You don't even need to be some kind of moral superstar to recognize that people using drugs indoors with trash cans and sharps bins is better than using on random corners. In the suburbs or rural areas, where drug use is so much more concealed, opposing harm reduction in general is still wrong, but at least it doesn't contravene the most obvious common sense about what you literally witness in your daily life.
It drives me up the fucking wall that housed people cannot even see their own self-interest here. You'd literally rather spend millions of dollars on cop overtime and ER visits and fencing and still constantly witness human misery and walk through vast amounts of plastic trash than spend half that money to put people in housing and tend to their needs! Like, you can actually solve the fucking problem or fund Officer Boot-In's lake cabin, which seems better to you?
Of course this is all always a political ploy - a way to route money to the cops and justify a law and order agenda - but people still keep falling for it.
posted by Frowner at 2:04 AM
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I don't think Doug Ford is smart enough to understand the benefit to the community of safe injection sites, given that he thinks it's a good idea to build three levels of tunnel under Highway 401.
posted by tallmiddleagedgeek at 4:24 AM
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Doug Ford and his ilk are only possible because enough Canadians believe to their core that some people deserve to die.
posted by runsrealgood at 6:20 AM
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^ 100% ^
The way my fellow Kingstonians talk about addicts is horrible. Essentially they are not real people to them. You can bring facts about how the closure of these sites will impact our healthcare system and other supports, but somehow that is never the fault of our Conservative provincial government.
posted by Kitteh at 6:26 AM
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From harm reduction to harm production.
posted by storybored at 6:53 AM
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Doug Ford and his ilk are only possible because enough Canadians believe to their core that some people deserve to die.
There's that of course. But I also think it is a failure of the other parties to maintain a consistent set of policies that don't alienate 3/4 of the electorate when they come to power. Ford's grifting and callous "tough love" (as he perceives this) are there because the other parties have nothing that appeals to a wider electorate. I'm sure once the other parties get their act together we will "vote the bums" out but we will be left holding the bag.
posted by Ashwagandha at 6:57 AM
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Bet Doug Ford feels absolutely righteous about this.
Dig if u will the hypocrisy.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:59 AM
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