Police probing death at London drug consumption site

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London police are investigating a death at the city’s safe drug consumption site.

The death occurred Tuesday afternoon at Carepoint Consumption and Treatment Service, which provides a supervised space with clean equipment and medical staff for people who inject or smoke drugs.

The service is operated by Regional HIV/AIDS Connection, which is expected to provide a statement about the death later today.

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Between April 1 2020 and March 31, 2021, 171 drug overdoses were reversed at the site during 17,477 visits of clients, according to the latest statistics on the Connection’s website.

Drug consumption sites in Ontario, where users can legally take drugs under medical supervision, have come under fire by Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government, which is shifting focus from harm reduction in the face of the opioid drug crisis to addiction treatment.

The province plans to close 10 drug consumption sites by March because of new rules about their locations. London’s safe consumption site was spared closure because its location doesn’t contravene the new rules. The province has also announced the creation of 19 homeless addiction and recovery (HART) hubs, which will offer health care and addiction treatment.

Meanwhile, the Canadian Mental Health Association Thames Valley Addiction and Mental Health Services has applied to operate one of the HART hubs.

These provincial hubs aren’t the same as the homeless and health care hubs developed by London organizations as part of its new system to deal with homelessness.

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The London hubs are supposed to offer harm reduction measures and low barrier service, with fewer rules about drug use, to those with the most acute health care and addiction problems.

Though based in part on the work done in London, the provincial hubs won’t provide harm-reduction measures, such as safer supply drugs, supervised drug consumption or needle exchange programs.

Canada’s opioid crisis has claimed the lives of more than 44,000 people since 2016.

Conservative politicians say the deaths are the fault of Liberal government-supported harm-reduction measures that ignore addiction treatment and recovery programs.

Supporters of harm-reduction measures say the issue isn’t an either/or matter, and that treatment, recovery and har- reduction should work together. Statistics show a person dies every 2.5 hours from an opioid overdose outside of safe consumption sites, but few die within the sites, they say.

From March 2020 to May 2024, there were 41,722 non-fatal overdoses and no fatal overdoses at safe consumption sites across the country, according to Health Canada.

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