The day she was due to open the doors to Kitchener’s supervised drug consumption site, Violet Umanetz went into the supply cupboard and had a little cry.
Like so many places, her Southwestern Ontario city was being swept by a wave of drug overdoses caused by the potent synthetic opioid fentanyl. The aim of the site was to give people a place to use their drugs in safety, with clean needles available to prevent infections and watchful attendants to come to their aid in case the drugs overwhelmed them.
Months of preparation and paperwork had gone into the opening. Would the idea, pioneered in Vancouver, work in Kitchener? Would anyone even show up?
As it turned out, people started arriving within minutes to use their drugs in the site’s two consumption booths. They have been coming ever since. More than 60,000 people have passed through the doors since opening day in October, 2019. The staff have reversed more than 1,000 overdoses. Some visitors drop in several times a week, not just to use their drugs but to get warm, chat with the staff and enjoy a few minutes of calm in their chaotic lives.
All that is coming to an end. New Ontario rules require the closing of 10 of the province’s consumption sites. A court injunction has put those rules on hold. But for now, the closing in Kitchener is going ahead.
The white board in the reception area warns users about harmful additives that might be in the local drug supply. Xylazine, also called tranq, is an animal tranquilizer that can cause memory loss and necrotic limbs.
After a fatal shooting outside a Toronto site in 2023, the Progressive Conservative government led by Premier Doug Ford introduced a law that required sites within 200 metres of schools or daycares to cease operating by April 1. (Kitchener’s site stands at 150 Duke Street West, just across from its modern City Hall, which houses a daycare centre.)
For the moment, though, that April deadline has been extended. The Neighbourhood Group, a social agency that runs a site in Toronto that is slated to close, is challenging the constitutionality of the Ontario law. On Friday, the judge hearing the case granted a temporary injunction to delay all of the closings until after he rules on the constitutional challenge; it’s unclear when that will happen or if the sites will stay open.
The government insists it is not abandoning people with addictions. If it wins the legal challenge, half of the province’s consumption sites would stay open. Those slated to be shut down would be replaced by Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment (HART) centres, offering clients an array of health and housing services but not a place to use their drugs. The government says it will spend half a billion dollars to create 27 of these HART hubs in communities around the province, including Kitchener, a city of a quarter-million people 100 kilometres outside Toronto.
Mr. Ford said in December that they will “take care of people – not just feed them drugs, but make sure they have shelter, they have employment, make sure we have detox beds for them. You can’t feed people drugs and expect everything is going to turn around.”
But there is opposition to that approach from many medical experts, who say the evidence shows the current sites improve the health of those who use drugs. Ontario’s Auditor-General found the decision to close some sites, which went against expert opinions the government sought, was made without proper planning or public consultation.
Ms. Umanetz says the Kitchener site doesn’t have the necessary funding or approvals to stay open past April 1. She says closing consumption sites like Kitchener’s will put drug users in extreme danger. Many will use their drugs in washrooms, alleys and private apartments instead, with no one around to help if they collapse from an overdose.
The site and its partner groups also offer drug testing, wound care, HIV testing, addiction-medicine prescriptions and community needle cleanup. Though she hopes to find a new home for many of those services, she says losing Duke Street will be hard on those who live on the city’s margins. For many of them, it has been a haven from the daily struggle of living with addiction, a place where they could always expect a kind word no matter what was happening in their lives.
Earlier this month, The Globe and Mail spent a day talking to visitors and staff about how they were feeling as the deadline for the anticipated closing drew near.
Drew Zekai, 29, Michelle Hannay, 39
Drew Zekai is preparing a “speedball,” a one-two punch of upper and downer preferred by some people who use drugs. His girlfriend, Michelle Hannay, is by his side.
Mr. Zekai lays out his gear on the top of a stainless-steel table in the Duke Street supervised-consumption site. He takes a tiny piece of crystal methamphetamine and another of fentanyl, cuts them into crumbs with a pair of blunt-nosed children’s scissors and sweeps them into a neat mound with the edge of a Tim Hortons card. Then he puts them in a plastic disposable cooker the size of a bottle cap, adds sterile water, heats the mix with a flame from his lighter and expertly draws the resulting liquid into a syringe.
Ms. Hannay pulls off one of the sleeves of her sweater to expose a pale arm. Mr. Zekai finds a vein and carefully injects her dose, then, using a second syringe, does the same to himself through a vein in his hand.
'I like coming here and talking to the girls here for advice,' Ms. Hannay says.
Mr. Zekai started coming in after his release from prison in 2022 and now visits nearly every day. He says that with so many people in the community looking down on people like him, it is the one place “you don’t have to worry about being judged.”
Because of Premier Doug Ford’s decision to close the site, he says “a lot of people are going to start dying again.” The closing, he adds, is “Ford’s idea of making our way of living illegal.”
Ms. Hannay says she finds comfort in the chats she has with the site’s staff. “I like coming here and talking to the girls here for advice. They are nice, nice people. I learned a lot of things.”
Three attendants, one of them a veteran nurse, look on as the couple finish taking their dose. Hovering a step or two away, they offer them water and remind them to keep their breathing steady.
As the drugs take hold, the couple relax in their chairs at the consumption booths. They decide to do a crossword puzzle.
Mr. Zekai takes folded-up copies of the daily newspaper from his backpack and the two get to work, teasing each other about who is faster and better. “I know one you probably won’t know,” says Ms. Hannay. “Nine across.” The clue is “a craze” and the word must be three letters. “A fad,” says Mr. Zekai, triumphant.
Mr. Zekai says closing consumption sites is ill-considered, and 'Ford’s idea of making our way of living illegal.'
'I feel we’re taking a step back, right?' Mr. Murphy says of the planned closing of the Kitchener site, where he got a job helping homeless people.
Brendan Murphy, 47
Brendan Murphy became addicted to painkillers after injuring his hand, then moved on to street drugs. He spent seven years in jail for dealing 17 grams of fentanyl. By the time his sentence ended a couple of years ago, his brother and father had died. “So I literally came out of prison and had nobody.”
He came into the site and got a job picking up discarded needles and handing out aid to the homeless. He always gets his drugs tested, using the site’s analysis machine, in case they contain dangerous additives like benzodiazepines, sedatives that can make it harder to revive those who suffer overdoses. “I’m not a reckless user anymore.”
He isn’t sure what he will do when the site closes. “I’m shook about it. I’m disappointed. I feel we’re taking a step back, right?”
He says returning to a war on drugs will not work. “What they think they know, they don’t know. They’re not winning the war. They never were.”
Regulars know Margo Wherry as the Ice Queen for her use of cooling packs to help users manage a strong dose.
Margo Wherry, 67
Margo Wherry came to work at the site after her adult son died of an overdose. She found him dead in his bedroom one morning.
She knows most of the people who come through the door. She greets them warmly, but tolerates no nonsense. “I’m the one who hugs them and I’m the one who yells at them,” as she puts it.
If someone is passing out from a dose of drugs that is too strong, she often wakes them up by applying an ice pack to their neck or belly, earning her the nickname the Ice Queen.
As the daughter of an abusive, alcoholic mother, she was exposed to the pain of addiction at an early age. She was once in its grip herself. Her drug was crack cocaine.
She has lost count of how many overdoses she has reversed at the site and wonders what will happen when it closes. “I’m so scared for the clients. We’re going to lose a lot of good people.”
Ms. Wherry is comforting a client in distress, but she says she will not hesitate to talk tough if that helps a person in need. 'I’m the one who hugs them and I’m the one who yells at them.'
Ryan Rousom, known also as Ry-ro at the site, says the staff treat him like a human being.
Ryan Rousom, 40
Ryan Rousom says that closing the Kitchener site will mean more needles in the street and more open drug use. Those who use their drugs at the site now will start using elsewhere.
In other words, he says, “it’ll be the opposite of what the government’s telling you to believe.”
He says he had a career as a landlord and real estate manager but became homeless after a divorce and a drunk-driving conviction.
He comes into the site most mornings to use his drugs. Though he is on methadone and other prescribed opioids designed to control his addiction, he still needs more to keep the pain of withdrawal at bay.
He likes the welcome he gets at the site, where the staff call him Ry-ro, a contraction of his first and last names. “They treat us as people, not just drug addicts or losers.”
The drugs that Mr. Rousom take help him control withdrawal pains, he says. He is also prescribed methadone and some other opioids.
Ralph Schmidt, the site's first client, credits it with saving his life several times.
Ralph Schmidt, 46
Ralph Schmidt – everyone knows him as Ralphy – was the very first person to use the site to take his drugs.
An early trauma, the murder of his stepfather, put him on the road to addiction. He became an alcoholic and then, about 10 years ago, turned to drugs injected with a needle. The site took him on as a helper because he was well known in the community for rescuing friends from overdoses. Now he runs the drug-testing machine, which tells visitors to the site what is in the drugs they buy.
Those drugs include xylazine, a painkiller, sometimes known as “tranq,” that is used in veterinary medicine. Pictures of the ugly sores that repeated use of the drug can cause are posted on the wall above the desk where Mr. Schmidt works, tapping away at a laptop to process results.
He has tried all sorts of methods for overcoming his addiction, from medication to treatment programs to just going cold turkey, but nothing seems to stick. “Something bad happens, and I’m back to square one.” So he still takes drugs every day. Otherwise he will plunge into withdrawal, a feeling he compares to being hit by a truck.
The closing of the site, he says, “is putting an expiration date on my life.” Without a place to use safely, “it’s only a matter of time till I mess up.”
The drugs are so powerful that even miniscule amounts can kill. “I mean, a grain of sand is whether I live or die, right?”
Records showed that Randy Bentley-Dasilva had visited the site 389 times.
Randy Bentley-Dasilva, 49
“I can’t believe it’s closing down,” says Randy Bentley-Dasilva, who visits the consumption site two to three times a week to use his drugs in a safe environment, surrounded by people who know him.
He says he has spent a total of 23 years in jail, nearly half of his life.
His troubles have left him with a long list of visible injuries, including bullet wounds in his knee and elbow and a blind eye from the time someone hit him in the face with a steel rod.
The staff have rescued him several times, when his drugs were too strong and he passed out. Checking their computer, they find he has paid 389 visits to the site over the years.
Grinning, he calls them “my own personal guardian angels.”
The larger picture: Inside two supervised-consumption sites at the heart of Ontario’s drug debate
Toronto was where Ontario opened its first supervised consumption sites, and where, in more recent years, the Ford government has been working to phase them out. So in February, The Globe visited two Toronto locations that were targets for closing. Unlike Kitchener, whose supervised consumption site is the only one in town, Toronto would still have six sites in operation if closings take effect.
KMOPS
The Kensington Market facility known as KMOPS is not like the other places targeted for closing. Its organizers, The Neighbourhood Group, are privately run and supported by donations. When the province made it illegal to have a supervised consumption site within 200 metres of a child-care centre – like the one that operates next door to KMOPS – the group sued.
keepSIX
One of the catalysts for the political backlash against harm reduction in Ontario was a 2023 shooting near the South Riverdale Community Health Centre in Leslieville, where the keepSIX site had been operating since 2017. The Globe went to its final open house in February, before it closed on March 21.
