By March of 2025, 10 of Ontario’s 23 Consumption and Treatment Services (CTS) sites will be forced to close their doors following  recent policy from Premier Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative government. These sites offer a safe environment where people can use drugs such as fentanyl and other opioids under the supervision of medical professionals. 

While especially horrific in the context of today’s opioid crisis, the forceful closure of these programs and the rhetoric behind it is ultimately a perpetuation of at least a century of prior Canadian hostility towards drug users. The lives of these people are being treated as expendable, and beliefs that have already claimed thousands of lives are ingraining themselves in the brains of our legislators.

Canada’s first instance of drug criminalization was the Opium Act of 1908, a policy explicitly targeting Chinese immigrant workers who used opium. The passing of this law was largely driven by Sinophobic sentiments, particularly the fear that Chinese immigrants’ drug usage would spread to the white population. 

Prime Minister Mackenzie King was especially outraged by this prospect, framing the use of Opium as against Canada’s “principles of morality” as a “Christian nation”. It bears mentioning that the explicitly Christian East India company played a significant role in the popularization of opium in China, and even went to war over their monopoly on the Chinese opium trade.

The Prime Minister’s sentiment was shared by anti-immigrant factions such as the “Asiatic Exclusion League”, a White Supremacist organization that led Sinophobic riots in Vancouver’s Chinatown, driven by fear of the “Yellow Peril.” King saw the passing of the Opium Act as a way to get “some good out of this riot”. Whether this constitutes a capitulation to White Supremacist terrorism or a flat-out endorsement is up for interpretation.

Some efforts were made to gradually decriminalize narcotics throughout the 1960s and 70s, but by then, Canadian politicians had absorbed so much anti-drug propaganda that the policy of drug criminalization was left largely unscathed. Films like the National Film Board’s Drug Addict (1948) were shown as a kind of public service announcement, seeking to scare the youth out of consuming drugs by associating them with a racialized and criminalized ‘other’. This stigmatization led to widespread ignorance about drug safety. When one had failed to follow the omnipresent call to total abstinence, they were essentially left in the dark.

Where repressive drug legislation came, drug-related deaths soon followed; the 1970s saw spikes in youth drug overdoses, and in the 90s in Alberta, deaths involving evidence of alcohol or drug misuse as the primary cause were five times more likely for Indigenous peoples than non-Indigenous people. 5,546 Canadians were reported to have died from AIDS from 1987 to 1992, and approximately half of those infected in 1996 & 1997 had contracted the virus from intravenous drug use.

As the opioid crisis continued to ravage Ontario, Doug Ford shared on August 21^st 2024 that he felt hosting a CTS site was “the worst thing that could happen to a community.” 

Ford’s notion of “community” is telling—why does it automatically exclude the people accessing a safe use site? Beyond being drug users, are those people not neighbours, friends, relatives, and so on? In other words, are they not community members?

The isolation of drug users is another risk factor associated with higher death rates, one which is amplified by racism faced by racialized drug users. It is the direct result of decades of stigmatizing imagery and racial stereotyping about drug users put out by the Canadian government through films such as Drug Addict.

Beyond his stigmatizing messaging, the material harm that Ford’s policy will bring about is nothing if not tangible. From 2017 to 2023, Canadian CTS sites attended to over 49 000 overdoses and drug-related medical emergencies, resulting in zero deaths. Today, the Toronto neighborhoods within 500 meters of CTS sites which saw a 67% decrease in drug overdoses are being left in the dark, while the opioid crisis rages on. This crisis has disproportionately affected Indigenous populations, leading to a rate of hospitalization up to 3.2 times higher than that of non-Indigenous populations (5.6 times for Indigenous peoples living on reserves). Once again, repressive policies directly endanger the lives of Canadian drug users, especially racialized ones.

Peterborough’s own CTS program, 360 Clinic, has already seen promising results, with large drops in overdoses and narcotics usage among their participants. Despite the program’s successes, the city as a whole saw a 32% increase in drug-related deaths from 2022 to 2023, indicating an escalation of the opioid crisis.

While 360 Clinic was not shut down by the Ford government, Peterborough will certainly be affected by this new policy. With the announcement of the 10 CTS closures, the Ford administration also announced their intention to prevent municipalities from building new safe use sites or decriminalizing narcotics in order to expand harm reduction services to drug users. 

Given the Peterborough Police Department’s often hostile attitude towards drug users, as well as the rising death rates associated with the opioid crisis, an expansion of our local CTS program could soon become a necessity in order to keep this crisis from claiming more lives. The Ford administration has decided that these lives do not matter.