‘What does it mean to me? Everything’: One of Toronto’s busiest safe injection sites is being replaced by condos. Doug Ford says it can’t reopen

A few minutes after Anthony Williams injects drugs, his friendly banter stops, he slumps in the chair and his head sinks. Nurse Keren Elumir is immediately at his side, talking calmly to him, checking his pulse and sliding an oxygen mask on his face.
Williams survived the mild overdose Thursday at the Moss Park safe consumption site, but might not be alive had he shot up at home, as he has done in the past. He’s not alone. Staff at this site on Sherbourne Street near Queen Street East reversed 517 overdoses last year.
“What does it mean to me? Everything,” he says of the homey, friendly multi-room space with tables and lounge space, food, pictures drawn by visitors but also a wall of photos of some of the many — Hughie, Angie, Slim, Frenchie, Frank, and others — who died in alleys and other spots outside these walls amid an epidemic in opioid overdoses.
“If they didn’t have this here, you know how many people would be dead?,” says Williams, called “Uncle Tony” by the staff. “I’ve come since it opened, I love these guys. We all know each other, if there’s ever a problem, they’re here for you.”
On Wednesday, the Ford government said any safe injection site within 200 metres of a school or daycare must close, in addition to a moratorium it had previously imposed on any new site applications. Though Moss Park is closing because the building’s owners plan to redevelop it as condominiums, the ban on new sites means it will not be allowed to relocate.
Though his brother Rob publicly struggled with addiction before getting treatment at a private Muskoka facility, the premier said in April he was “dead set” against supervised consumption sites, believing they have been ineffective and that facilities’ focus should be on rehabilitation.
Elumir said the building’s owners have been “very kind” letting the safe consumption site extend its lease past a vacate date last March, now moved to next January or February. The developer had not responded to the Star’s messages by publication time.
Jessica Lyons, another nurse, notes the area’s gentrification will be boosted by a Moss Park subway station on the Ontario Line. Meanwhile health ministry officials, she says, “have been really clear to us that a new location for us requires a new (operating) application, as if we’re a new site, and they are not granting new sites,” under a moratorium announced by the Ford government earlier this year.
Site operator South Riverdale Community Health Centre will start the application process just in case but, barring something unforeseen, the busy Moss Park location will disappear.
Heather Mackay-Lams, a community health worker at the site, says: “People will die, there will be more opioid consumption everywhere, the police will be overburdened, paramedics will be overburdened — we’re the buffer,” that helps keep street-involved people out of police cruisers, ambulances and emergency rooms by giving them a safe place to inject and get many other services. 
“It’s going to be chaos and completely the opposite of what (government officials) think is going to happen, based on other places that have rolled back harm reduction,” which aims to, without judgment, offer drug users services and equipment to use as safely as possible, with avenues to treatment to get clean but not insisting on abstinence as a requirement.
Earlier this week, announcing the new restrictions that will close some sites, Ford promised $378 million in funding for new treatment hubs that he said will provide rehabilitation and other health services, including some residential beds, without any safe injection space or harm reduction services, such as needle exchanges to prevent people sharing and spreading disease. 
Elumir said that currently it is incredibly difficult to get somebody a detox bed and then a rehab bed. Even if they manage to kick the habit, she said, they are often returning to homelessness surrounded by old friends and temptations that can quickly kill them. “Dead people are not going to make it to rehab,” she said.
Moss Park Consumption Treatment Services started in the park as the unsanctioned volunteer initiative Toronto Overdose Prevention Society, formed in response to rising death rates due to fentanyl-laced supply, and in 2018 moved indoors with an exemption from Health Canada and provincial funding. 
As well as reversing overdoses, Moss Park staff provide primary care to close wounds, offer Hepatitis C and HIV treatments, help people apply for housing, accompany them on visits to specialists and hospitals, visit them in jail, secure their bags if they need to nap, provide cancer screenings and foot care, administer vaccines, offer volunteer opportunities, hold trauma-informed workshops and more.
Just as important, staff say, people accustomed to stigma find refuge and community, where others value and welcome them.
Councillor Chris Moise, the city’s public health chair, said losing the Moss Park site would result in massive and needless suffering. Toronto is joining many advocates and experts urging the Ford government to reconsider its aggressive move against harm reduction, a philosophy endorsed in March by Ontario’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. Kieran Moore.
“I don’t understand the government’s approach and frankly I don’t know anyone who does,” Moise told the Star on Thursday.
Staff at other sites marked for closure told the Star they haven’t yet worked out how to wind down operations. Some say they are holding out for a chance, however slim, to fight the province and stay open.
“The announcement is clearly intending to close us,” said Bill Sinclair, chief executive of the group that runs the Kensington Market Overdose Prevention Site, the only self-funded clinic on the chopping block.
“But I’d like to see what the legislation says. I’d like to see if it passes in the legislature. I’d like to see whether there’s an opportunity to appeal,” Sinclair said, adding drug users are not the “monsters” he said the province has made them out to be.
“We reversed 54 overdoses this year,” he said. “Fifty-four more people would be dead. So, we’ll explore all our options before closing. We’ll follow the law, but at the moment it’s not the law.”
Asked about Moss Park’s situation, Alexandra Adamo, a spokesperson for Ontario Health Minister Sylvia Jones, said in an email: “The federal exemption that these sites require is attached to a fixed address. The Moss Park site would have to reapply for this federal exemption, which our proposed legislation if passed, would prohibit.”
She also pointed to an earlier news release stating her government intends to prevent “any organization from standing up new consumption sites or participating in federal so-called ‘safer’ supply initiatives.”
Back in the Moss Park injection room Williams, who has used drugs for more than 40 years, shakes his head at the idea of this facility ceasing to exist.
“It’s like our home.”
With files from Ben Cohen.