Toronto’s Moss Park safe consumption site gets temporary reprieve after lease extension

Temporary relief has washed over users of Toronto’s original supervised consumption site after learning the place will not close when the building’s lease expires in the spring, though its long-term prospects are bleak.

The Moss Park Consumption and Treatment Service will remain open on a month-to-month basis until the building’s owner, a developer, tells its staff otherwise.

It’s a small victory for the site’s users, most of whom are part of the city’s homeless population, as five similar centres in Toronto are set to close at the end of March after the provincial government enacted a new law banning sites deemed too close to schools and daycares.

The reprieve is temporary since there’s no long-term lease and the province has also banned the opening of new consumption sites.

“I’m ecstatic right now,” said James Desmond, who goes by the name Scotian and regularly visits the Moss Park site. “But it won’t last.” 

Dash Developments owns the property and plans to build a 448-unit condominium. But with an ongoing affordability crisis and a soft condo market, the company said there’s no timeline for when its tenants will have to leave. Dash said it values the clinic and understands the role it plays in the community. 

The provincial government is undergoing a fundamental shift in its approach to the opioid crisis, which claimed more than 2,600 lives across the province in 2023.

The province is moving away from harm reduction to an abstinence-based model as it launches 19 new “homelessness and addiction recovery treatment hubs” — or HART hubs, as it calls them — plus 375 highly supportive housing units at a planned cost of $378 million.

Toronto’s medical officer of health said earlier this week the closures of supervised consumption sites will spur an increase in overdoses and emergency calls. Dr. Na-Koshie Lamptey urged the province to consider increasing access to the service. 

The province will not consider that and is forging ahead with its planned restrictions, citing safety concerns raised by families near the sites as the driving force in its decision.

The government ordered reviews of 17 consumption sites across the province following the killing of a Toronto woman who was hit by a stray bullet in a shooting near one of the sites.

Karolina Huebner-Makurat had been walking through her southeast Toronto neighbourhood of Leslieville shortly after noon on July 7, 2023, when she was shot as a fight broke out between three alleged drug dealers outside the South Riverdale Community Health Centre.

South Riverdale also runs the Moss Park site. 

The pending closures of other sites and the unknown future of Moss Park have left Desmond, 59, feeling down. He’s been living on the streets for decades and feels safe and welcome at the site

“I feel as though we’re being exterminated or trying to be exterminated,” he said.

Desmond started visiting the site when it was just a tent in Moss Park, before it became a government-funded outfit. 

It now sits in what many consider to be the epicentre of Ontario’s opioid crisis, with a number of shelters and corresponding services nearby. 

A project by the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions and The Local online magazine found that residents of the area had the shortest life expectancy of any neighbourhood in Toronto at an average of 74.8 years, well below the city’s average of 80.9 years. The difference is largely driven by homelessness and the ongoing opioid epidemic.

On a recent visit to the Moss Park site, a few dozen people hang out. Several take part in a weekly writing class. Others dive into food made by students at George Brown College’s nearby culinary school. 

In one room, paramedics receive training on overdoses. In the safe consumption room, several people take fentanyl. One woman struggles after an injection and a staffer tends to her with an oxygen mask. She revives slowly.

Like other consumption sites across the province, Moss Park offers a wide variety of services, including primary care, detox referrals, crisis intervention and a whole host of physical and mental health supports.

Several site users huddle together and tell The Canadian Press about their lives and thoughts on the coming changes. Fear and anxiety are common, though those worries have abated somewhat with the lease extension.

“It’s a great place to come and stay out of the eye of the public and keep cool and not get busted by the cops and have access to safe equipment and supervision while you get high,” said Jeff Butcher.

He’s also able to get food, clothes and warmth. 

“It feels like a family, like a club,” he said. 

Mike Graham is worried about the public perception when the site, and the others, close.

“As soon as they’re gone we’re going to be out there again and they’re going to be complaining all the time that people are doing drugs everywhere,” he said. “People are going to use whether these sites are here or not.”

Graham has also been at the site since it launched and he remembers being saved by Sarah Greig, now the director of substance use and mental health at Moss Park Consumption and Treatment Service.

“She literally saved my life,” Graham said.

Greig is worried about the future. The site is bracing for a surge in April due to spillover from the closures of five other sites in Toronto. 

She’s thankful to the developer, who has gone out of its way to help. Like others, she has mixed emotions.

“There’s a bit of relief in the short term, but there’s still a big sense of precarity.”

Greig is working with her clients to help set goals for their drug use, treatment plans and life ambitions. That work is always ongoing, but it’s now being accelerated given the site’s unknown future.

“We want to nurture people so that they feel good enough and worthy enough about themselves to be able to make further positive changes,” she said.