Canada: Don’t blame supervised consumption sites for gun crimes — they save lives

Relocating or closing these programs would not address gun violence or community safety and would only push hardship further from public view.

Ontario has launched a “critical incident review” of its supervised consumption sites (SCS), following the heartbreaking death of Karolina Huebner-Makurat in early July. The 44-year-old mother of two was killed by a stray bullet near the South Riverdale Community Health Centre (SRCHC) supervised consumption site.

As the public mourns and considers how to prevent such devastating incidents from occurring again, we must be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from this tragedy. One life has been lost and as the entire SCS system falls under attack, hundreds more now lie in the balance.

Opportunistic opponents of the principles underlying SCS — motivated by disproven punishment-oriented approaches to drug treatment — are trying to exploit the public’s grief to undermine the hard-won shift in support for SCS services. We cannot let this happen.