Needles. Prescription bottles. Crack pipes and cookers. These are just some of the pieces of drug paraphernalia that have been found littering Wellington Street West over the last five months.
The arrival of the regalia came after Northwood Recovery, an addictions treatment clinic, opened in Hintonburg last September. The clinic advertises safer supply services for methadone, suboxone, and sublocade. Its operation began in 2017 and has since opened 17 locations spanning the province.
Pharmacology has played an increasingly important role in the treatment of addictions since the 1950s when methadone was first used in substance misuse treatment.
Safer supply and opioid agonist therapy are founded on the premise that people won’t die taking a controlled and regulated prescription. They will still experience a degree of the relief they felt from street drugs but will have the support systems in place to prioritize their recovery.
Kitchissippi citizens, politicians, and drug experts, however, say Northwood’s model has only brought harm to its patients and to the community.
“Clearly, we’ve seen that they are in harm’s way here,” said Cheryl Parrott of the Hintonburg Community Association. “Some are selling their drugs and some are being robbed of their drugs.”
She says patients are in the clinic for minutes before they pick up their prescription, just steps away at the Victoria Pharmacy. Immediately after, a wholesale diversion of the prescribed opioids takes place outside the pharmacy.
Its impact reverberates for at least a four-block radius in each direction of the clinic.
“What we’re seeing is [that] around 10 in the morning, there’s a big crowd. Now that it’s cold, a lot of them go to the clinic and then to the pharmacy and get back on the bus going east or west. Sometimes there’s cars that drop four or five people off. When Northwood is closed and the pharmacy is closed, there’s no activity around here. So they seem to come and go.”
Though the sidewalks clear up by late morning, a path of littered drug paraphernalia remains. Parrott says she first learned the clinic was prescribing hydromorphone rather than the drugs it advertises from the empty prescription pill bottles along the sidewalks in early September.
In an online statement regarding Northwood, Coun. Jeff Leiper emphasized the necessity of protocols around prescribed alternatives in addiction treatment.
“The fundamental precondition of treatment is that the patient is alive to be treated: prescribed alternatives fulfills that requirement,” he wrote. “If hydromorphone is being sold into a secondary market – or being violently stolen in brazen daytime incidents as has happened on at least a couple of occasions – then the expected public benefit of prescribed alternatives won’t be fully achieved.”
Parrott says the ideal treatment centre is one that does not negatively impact the community. To achieve this outcome, experts say wraparound supports are absolutely necessary. What’s more, when implemented correctly, the community should benefit too.
Instead of benefits, community members reported increased safety concerns at a public meeting held Jan. 15. Parents said that kids’ routes to after-school programs at the community centre and a math tutoring program have been rerouted. Others said the nearby bus stop was regularly being used for drug consumption and a bench had to be taken away to prevent loitering.
It appears the public outcry has worked. Parrott, who was one of the main speakers at the meeting, said she learned it was Northwood’s intention to leave Wellington West for a more permanent location in Centretown. A document later shared by the Hintonburg Community confirmed this and said the move would occur in about four weeks after renovations to its new building were complete.
The Kitchissippi Times tried to contact Northwood multiple times for an interview but did not hear back ahead of publication. It also did not confirm whether or not these reports were true.
In January, Northwood hired a private security company to monitor for illegal incidents. The community reported a decrease in open drug dealing and anti-social behaviour within the first few days. Even so, the Hintonburg Community Association says it plans to lobby the provincial government to implement regulations around the prescribing and dispensing of Safer Supply medications.
“You want to help people but you can’t completely derail an entire community by having no controls,” Parrott said.
“We support addiction treatment but it has to be addiction treatment that is actually helping the patients and not impacting the community. Addiction treatment done right, we support completely.”