Jason Miles just celebrated his 43rd birthday, a milestone he says he would not have seen without Toronto’s safe consumption sites.
After numerous overdoses over the years, Miles says a consumption site worker saved his life every time from the effects of a toxic street drug supply.
“It scares me deeply that the last few remnants of these places that we had, our last vestiges of hope, are now being taken away from us.”
Miles spoke about his experiences Saturday afternoon to a crowd gathered at a downtown rally to protest the closures of Moss Park Consumption & Treatment Services and the Fred Victor safe consumption site in the face of provincial funding cuts.
Doug Ford’s government last month announced an end to funding, effective June 13, for the province’s supervised consumption sites. The Moss Park location is one of two in the city that will lose its funding.
“These places save lives and they save lives everyday,” said Miles, who is now three years sober, as he recounted an overdose episode where he couldn’t be resuscitated by paramedics.
“There was a staff member that said ‘No,’ and jumped back on top of me and continued giving me CPR and it was her voice saying my name that woke me up,” Miles told the crowd.
Opioid-related toxicity, often from the presence of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, continues to be a pervasive issue in Canada. In Toronto, latest data shows that there were 458 opioid-related toxicity deaths in 2024.
Last Christmas, a Toronto Public Health news release confirmed that 122 calls related to overdoses were made to paramedics in just an eight day period, from Dec. 20 to 28.
With funding cuts forcing safe consumption sites to close, experts and community members fear that those numbers will continue to climb with fewer resources to save lives, even with Ford’s new Homeless and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) Hubs.
HART hubs were introduced by the province as the better alternative to supervised consumption sites with a focus on rehabilitation over harm reduction. But now a year later, HART Hub representatives agree that their services are not comprehensive enough without safe consumption services.
Phoenix Babiak, a health care worker at a HART Hub in the city, has seen first hand the gap in care without safe consumption.
“The services that we provide at HART Hubs are important services,” she said. “But none of those services mean anything at the end of the day if somebody dies alone in a bathroom before I can get them the resources they need. Nothing I can do within the limitations of a HART Hub job prevents that death from happening.”
With HART Hubs unable to provide safe supply and equipment, the province is pushing an abstinence-only approach to substance abuse, an approach that doesn’t account for a variety of experiences of users.
It was her time volunteering as a youth ambassador at the Egale Canada Human Rights Trust, a charity that works with 2SLGBTQIA+ people, where rally attendee Isabella Fang came to realize the complexity of harm reduction.
Many of the clients she encountered, ranging from 12 to 29 years old, turned to substance use as a coping mechanism for complex post-traumatic stress disorder. It was those clients who opened her eyes to the harm that abstinence-based harm reduction can cause.
Quitting drug use cold turkey after the user has developed a dependence on the substance can cause life-threatening withdrawal symptoms according to the American National Institute on Drug Abuse.
“It’s a case-by-case basis,” she said. “But the bottom line is no one deserves to overdose.”
