The City of Victoria wants to see supervised drug-injection sites in the city by the end of the year. A lot of work will have to go into making sure their benefits don鈥檛 come with a lot of unwanted side-effects.
Leaving aside the contentious question of whether the city should have such sites, if a site or sites get approval, how do we prevent the areas around them from becoming black holes?
Society has largely got past the idea that it is acceptable to kick street people to the curb, and is putting resources into trying to help those who need it.
However, we cannot ignore the fact that facilities such as shelters, needle exchanges and injection sites come with baggage. Regardless of what happens inside the building, problems tend to congregate outside.
Few people in the area can forget what happened around the needle exchange on Cormorant Street, which was plagued with fights, garbage, discarded needles and excrement. Businesses suffered and anyone who could avoid the area stayed away.
It was open for six years, until complaints finally forced its closure in May 2008.
Since then, the number of needle exchange sites in the city has expanded to 22, according to Victoria Mayor Lisa Helps. Spreading them out has reduced the number of complaints. Helps sees that as an important lesson to learn, and it鈥檚 the reason she wants to see more than one supervised injection site.
Island Health and other agencies involved in the discussions seem to agree that multiple sites are the way to serve the estimated 2,000 people who would use them. Multiple sites would both disperse any problems and reach more potential clients. For the sake of both the clients and the community, any injection sites should provide a range of services.
Whether it is one site or several, the concerns and needs of neighbours must factor into the planning.
Accusations of NIMBYism are not helpful. The epithet is usually thrown by those who live far away from the affected neighbourhood. It鈥檚 using guilt to pressure residents into accepting someone else鈥檚 priorities.
Those who live near the tent city and the planned shelter at Mount Edwards Court have been called hard-hearted and un-Christian for voicing opposition to what they see around them, but to dismiss those neighbours鈥� legitimate concerns is itself an example of simplistic, hard-hearted self-righteousness.
While some NIMBY fears are groundless and some public projects must go ahead for the greater benefit, the problems around facilities such as Cormorant Street are real. It鈥檚 not good enough to say that some residents will just have to put up with those problems because the well-being of the street people and drug addicts is more important.
To those who live next door, it appears we have gone from discarding street people to treating them as being more deserving than other Victorians. We cannot serve their needs to the detriment of the rest of the community.
The city and Island Health have many hurdles to jump before getting federal government approval for injection sites, especially if the new federal government does not change the regulations it inherited from its Conservative predecessor. However, they should not think the federal Liberals are the only people whose approval they need.
They will have to show neighbouring residents and businesses that there is an effective plan to both serve the drug users and minimize the collateral damage that such facilities tend to create.
