Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
I've lived in neighbourhoods like this - some of them far worse so put your violin away.
There is nothing wrong with community members seeking to work with the facility, police, and the street-entrenched community to find solutions that help everyone. In fact, that is what often leads to success.
Unfortunately, for a lot of people, those solutions are untenable unless the facility is moved or put under such inconvenient restrictions that it would be impossible for staff to fulfill the facility's mandate.
As reports from both Edmonton and Calgary demonstrate, local impacts are minimal and still remain below historical trends. There may be some increased impact in Calgary within the 250 m zone around the Safe Injection Site, but almost none within the surrounding area.
Lethbridge seems to be facing an entirely different type of problem and I am not equipped with enough information to make any kind of judgement.
But when it comes to Calgary and Edmonton, the complaints are not worth the overall successful impact of the safe injection sites and complaintants would be better off working with city and provincial officials to mitigate impacts.
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People with your attitude are exactly what escalate tension between facilities like a SIS and the surrounding community. Dismissing obvious impact not only belittles the people who live and work there, but also the people that respond and help keep the area as safe as possible. As I said, the Police data is absolutely irrelevant in these cases as they are making a heavy presence felt in order to curb the absolute madness that would otherwise be going on. Even so, I can assure you there is nothing minimal about the impact of these sites.
I have friends and co-workers that live in the areas that now come home to buildings with users naked in lobbies, pleasuring themselves in parking lots, being aggressively accosted and generally making life scary. Would you tell you family members to take a stroll through these areas by themselves in the evening? These people certainly rarely, if ever, had to deal with this kind of thing before the SIS opened. I guess everyone who lives there are just nonsensical NIMBY's though.
There is no benefit for anyone in pretending these sites are some sort of clean, glowing success as they are certainly not a long term solution and merely a band-aid on a bullet wound. It really is great that they have a 100% OD recovery rate and are saving lives, but what about the stories from EMS on how certain individuals have been recorded overdosing 50, 60, 70 times since some of the clinics opened in AB? Often multiple times on the same day/night? This is not a success in any measurable fashion.
I find it horrifying that we as a society accept that with no identifiable pathway for recovery, counselling and ultimately healing. Everyone can feel great that we have a safe place for it to all go down though, but properly building these programs out to include a pathway to recovery as part of the deal is the only real solution. Right now these people are merely suffering a death by 1000 cuts while the rest of society sits at a computer and applauds how successful it is.