It took less than 24 hours last week for the drug pushers, enablers and activists to claim Premier Doug Ford’s decision to close injection sites near schools would lead to the death and destruction of addicts.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow and Chris Moise issued a joint statement declaring the sky would fall if the sites are shut:
Mere hours before, Ford’s health minister Sylvia Jones announced new rules forcing injection sites located within 200 metres of schools and day care facilities to close no later than next March.
They would be replaced by new treatment hubs and more supports for addiction recovery.
Jones cited repeated incidents of stabbings, shootings, assaults, robberies and a tragic murder of an innocent mom that occurred mere steps from a site in Toronto’s Riverdale last summer.
The five impacted are those that have caused the most chaos and mayhem in Toronto’s residential neighbourhoods including the one where the shooting occurred, another on Victoria St. near a Catholic school and yet another on south Bathurst recently featured in a True North video.
At long last and to his credit, Ford was doing the right thing and listening to parents instead of the drug industry which has wreaked havoc in cities where these injection sites are located.
I have never been a fan.
“Harm reduction” has completely destroyed Vancouver’s east side.
During a trip there 1.5 years ago, I toured East Hastings where the sites are located. Tent upon tent occupied the sidewalks and many an addict stood in the classic fentanyl pose oblivious to anyone around them.
There was a pervasive smell of urine and vomit all around.
It was truly a horror.
Nevertheless, the drug activists who make their living from the drug industry were livid with Ford’s plan.
They have forever claimed that more people will die if these drug pushing sites are closed. Their fear-mongering narrative is always the same.
But people have died from overdoses despite their tiresome rhetoric.
Last year there were 523 opioid overdose deaths in Toronto, a 74% increase from 2019.
Considering there are 10 “harm reduction” sites in Toronto and the service has been in place since 2017, one would figure the deaths would go down.
But they have not.
I have always felt that the left and the drug activists don’t really give a damn about addicts. If they did, they wouldn’t be supporting policies that will eventually kill addicts — unless they get treatment.
It is absurd to me that there is support for feeding addicts their poisons, but with clean needles in a more sterilized environment.
I’ve written many stories since 2017 about the impact of the so-called “safe” injection sites on the neighbourhoods around them — the violence, the drug dealing and the fact that the operators of these sites have no concern about being good members of the communities where they are located.
They refuse to “own” the problem.
Instead they just churn out the addicts to the streets leaving them to dump used needles wherever they land and urinate and defecate in public.
I’m not kidding.
The most tragic example was the case of Karolina Huebner-Makurat, a mom of two, who was shot dead by a stray bullet during a gun fight between two drug dealers outside the Riverdale Community Health Centre last summer.
During a standing-room only community meeting two weeks after the shooting, the drug enablers and assorted activists hijacked the proceedings to lecture the crowd on the benefits of “harm reduction” and the human rights of addicts.
The most egregious comments came from a very out-of-touch deputy minister of health Catherine Zahn, who completely ignored the shooting, repeating more than once that people with “mental disorders and drug addiction have a right to care.”
The concerns of the community over safety and rampant drug dealing and open drug use within metres of a school were completely ignored. The poor residents were guilted into submission.
The Victoria St. injection site — The Works — is close to both St. MIchael’s Choir School and Toronto Metropolitan University.
The Catholic school was forced to double the fence and put a black tarp on the school yard perimeter to keep drug addicts from loitering and dropping dirty needles in their schoolyard.
TMU students daily pass by the site where addicts loiter in front often screaming obscenities.
As I’ve said, if the activists truly cared about the addicts, they wouldn’t shoot them full of their poisons and leave them to wander around downtown Toronto in a drug-induced haze.
If Mayor Chow truly meant what she said about caring for all of her constituents she wouldn’t allow this Dante’s Inferno to play out on our downtown streets, especially in front of children.
I pray that Ford sticks to his guns and means what he says about shutting these disastrous drug dens.
