Is this the MOST DEPRESSING city in Canada？ Exploring London, Ontario
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Summary
London, Ontario is ground zero for Canada s so-called "Safe Supply" program, a program that provides addicts with a safer, non-toxic drug to take in exchange for hydromorphone. But is it working?
Transcript
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And I started seeing very severe infections from injecting pills, primarily diverted, but even from people that were in the program.
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A guy died right here underneath my window. I watched him over a period of days.
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The people on the streets aren't getting the help they need. The businesses are barely surviving and the community is in despair.
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London, Ontario, a city decimated by homelessness and drug addiction.
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In 2016, the Intercommunity Health Centre here in London became Canada's very first safe supply facility.
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So I guess you could call this city ground zero for Canada's so-called safe supply experiment.
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Well, is anything about safe supply really that safe?
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Safe supply is when addicts will go to a facility like the one behind me and receive a prescription to take hydromorphone tablets.
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These are a more potent heroin alternative opiate designed to provide addicts with a safer, non-toxic drug to take.
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Addicts will receive their prescription for hydromorphone from a doctor inside this building
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and walk across the street to Chapman's Pharmacy right here and they will receive their hydromorphone.
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But in reality, things are not working out as we were promised they would.
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In fact, ER visits due to toxic drug overdoses have risen here in London and Ontario since 2016,
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since the federal government began funding safe supply here in this city.
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Diversion, the flipping of hydromorphone on the street for as little as $1 in exchange for fentanyl,
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is also pervasive in this city, despite what activists and believers of this program like to say to the media.
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Furthermore, there are people strung out here on every street corner, living in tents and in desperate need of shelter and assistance.
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Every other store here in London's historical district is either boarded up or abandoned.
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It is easily one of the most depressing places I've ever been to in Canada.
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We're here to talk with politicians, doctors and locals about whether or not London's embrace of safe supply drug policies
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has helped this city or made things much worse.
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So we are here with London Ward 4 City Councilor Susan Stevenson.
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Susan, why don't you tell us just where we're standing right now in your city?
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Yeah, so we're standing in front of the London Intercommunity Health Centre.
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And this is in Old East Village in London, Ontario.
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This is the, I believe, the first safer supply program started here.
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And how has this, this organization in this building here changed the makeup of your community and your city?
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Has it, how has it, how has it impacted life here?
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Well, there's a lot of people who live in this area that attribute the decline that we've seen in this area to the start of that program.
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So particularly the expansion of that program, because it started as a very small pilot and then it was expanded.
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And at that point, if you talk to the residents around here, many of them are very upset about what happens
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and the amount of diversion that happens behind Chapman's here in the parking lot.
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And it's very distressing to a lot of people that live here.
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Does the mayor in City Hall, obviously you're not a fan of this program, but what does the city think of this program?
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You know, to my knowledge, it hasn't come before City Council, not as long as I've been a councillor, at least.
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So it's something that's talked about here, but I don't know what role the city plays, if any.
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It's definitely something I'm going to be raising, because as we've heard about three more virtual safer supply programs starting up in London,
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I'm going to be booking an appointment with our MP and asking Health Canada,
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what say does the city have in what is being brought to our city?
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How many of them, you know, we've got three within sight, three within sight.
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And I think if it's having a negative impact on our city, we get to have a say.
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Right, and just for clarification, this is where they will prescribe or they will write the prescriptions for hydromorphone
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and for, you know, Dilaudid pills, the alternative, the opiate alternative.
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But now there are virtual pharmacists writing virtual prescriptions?
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Yeah, and my understanding is they're doing it at Chapman's Pharmacy.
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They're also doing it at 528 Dundas, which is directly across from a high school.
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And then in our downtown, like right at City Plaza.
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And how can doctors, if it's a virtual meeting, how can they gauge whether or not this person is going to actually use these drugs
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or just divert them like we've seen so much, so many people use these hydromorphone pills too?
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Yeah, these are great questions that I definitely want to know.
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London Intercommunity Health Centre has 278 safer supply patients.
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We've got an elementary school only a block away.
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And this is the main street of a business improvement association.
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On the corner here is a shelter for female sex workers that is causing a huge problem for this neighbourhood.
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And there's tents lined up all down the outside of it.
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And there doesn't seem to be a commitment to the community that is here.
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So what is this building here that we're coming up to?
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So this is, it used to be a TD building, but it's vacant now.
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It just, it seems to me that if the idea behind Safer Supply is that it will, it will,
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it will eventually be able to get people off of these drugs by giving them a slower, not
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a slower, but a smaller dose of a, of, of a drug and it'd be safer, then these things
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And if this program started in 2016 and it's, it's 2024 now, I mean, I don't, I don't know
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what it was like before, but this seems like it's having the opposite effect.
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Well, this area was really, um, on the upswing until about 2018 and then things have gone
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But, uh, the truth is we're spending a lot of time and money in this city and we're not
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The people on the streets aren't getting the help they need.
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The businesses are barely surviving and the community is in despair.
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We talk about walkable neighborhoods and mental health, but, but where are we in terms of
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creating a safe environment for people to go for a walk, go for a stroll, get outside,
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People are concerned about what they're breathing in and the safer supply program is one of
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the things that this neighborhood will tell you is a key problem.
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I, uh, came to this neighborhood right before COVID in hopes of, uh, you know, turning it
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around and regenerating it in London's historic artistic district.
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What do you make of the situation that it's, uh, that it's facing right now?
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A lot of people are hurting and a lot of the support is being misdirected.
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Um, I just feel like we're not doing what has to be done.
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Why do you think there's been such an ideological commitment in this city to a, a policy of safer
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supply when it looks as though it's clearly not working?
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There's been, I mean, I'm not an expert, but from my view, the problem with safe supply
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So they provided the harm reduction, they're providing the drugs, but they're not providing
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So they're left on the street to deal with their addictions.
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Yes, they have the drugs to keep the pangs away, but none of the other supports.
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Why that has become the status quo and acceptable to some people, and I don't understand that.
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And this particular shelter, there's no open door to it.
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And it says right on their website that their goal is to empower females who identify as
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female, who provide sexual service, to empower them and to do it with dignity and safety.
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And their donation list includes lingerie, heels, makeup.
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And it's not about not helping these vulnerable women who are homeless, addicted, and on our
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streets, in all likelihood, not doing sex work by choice.
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I want to help them, but is empowering them with those kinds of donation items and with sex
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work is real work and people should be able to do it.
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Is that really what the taxpayers of London are going to prioritize?
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So there is no other place for women to just go to be safe and just be with women.
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Do you feel like living in this city is making your life more difficult?
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Some of the shelters are making my life more difficult, that's for sure.
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They're not trained properly in doing the things that they need to be doing, and they don't
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Have you seen London change a lot over the past few years?
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I got four different reasons why I got kicked out of there.
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But the last one was when I went and complained about my male roommate walking in while I was
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changing, and there's even people that said that that was true, right?
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And they kicked me out because they said that I complained about my roommate too much.
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But did you say you were put into one of the tiny homes there with a man that you didn't know?
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Yeah, so I was put in there with a man that I'd never seen before.
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I'd never seen him down here before ever, or around here.
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I'd never met him before or nothing, and he goes by three different names.
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We can't make a comment, especially to True North Media and our city council.
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I will be because she was sharing a pretty impassionate story there.
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So it's a homeless shelter system here in London, and if you recall, we just spoke with a woman who said she had been kicked out of this facility because she complained about being paired up with a male roommate who walked in on her while she was getting dressed.
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So she complained about that, and then she was kicked out.
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We wanted to go to this shelter here and ask someone what their side of the story was.
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And sure enough, there was a manager here who told us that he wouldn't be speaking specifically to True North Media or Councillor Stevenson here.
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And then he eventually just abruptly walked off after refusing to answer whether or not this shelter, which is receiving city funding, is in fact pairing up females with males.
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Something I don't think the city of London or London residents would be too happy to hear about.
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There's been an addiction problem before they had the safe supply.
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And inner community does help a lot of people, people with HIV and Hep C they have programs for.
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And just things to do, like they have a lot of art programs and programs for Native people.
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People can see nurses, see doctors that normally wouldn't go to a hospital.
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Regardless of what's going on with the safe supply, there's always going to be addiction.
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What are the things that you would like to see the city provide to people who are using a program like this?
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And I don't think they're addressing the issue.
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Like there are some programs like where I live, it's called Indwell.
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And they just made a whole bunch of apartments down here.
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And so they are making places for a lot of people to go.
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But a lot of people don't qualify for what they want.
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Sometimes it's for mental health, addiction, stuff like that.
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But I see a lot of people out here, and I've known them for years, who are still homeless.
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You don't feel like the city is taking the situation seriously?
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What's interesting is actually, we didn't capture this on camera because this woman said she doesn't want to be on camera.
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She came up to us and asked us if we had received consent to interview people on the street when they knew they were being interviewed.
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She asked us why we were interviewing right in front of her facility and what we were trying to interview people about, what we were discussing.
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Well, who could have thought we're discussing the state of the city because everywhere around this shelter seems to be destruction, decay, and addiction.
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She doesn't even want us to report in this area.
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She felt like she could, you know, control the media narrative about the situation going on in this city, that she didn't want us to be interviewing people outside of her facility.
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I don't know what she's trying to hide or why she feels as though she can control what the media says in her city, but that's actually the attitude we've seen between activists who believe in safer supply, between activists who believe in harm reduction.
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They take the attitude that they can actually control the media and control the political dialogue over these issues.
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Where all of that came from, that attitude, I'm really not quite sure because the evidence says that none of it is actually working.
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What do you make of how the city has been handling the homelessness and drug addiction crisis here?
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Well, it's been haphazard from the looks of it.
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The current situation seems to be that they're looking for kind of experimental ways to deal with it that haven't been really tried anywhere else.
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And my perception is it's going to be very expensive and I'm doubtful as to the cost-effectiveness of some of the programs that they're looking at.
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Currently, the city staff is putting forward an idea for an organized tent encampment.
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To be established, we don't know, it's to be announced.
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But what that seems to me is that they're out of ideas and that they're just throwing up their hands and putting forward the absolute worst case scenario.
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We know that London was the first city in Canada, I believe, to have a safe supply facility, the London Intercommunity Health Centre, starting in 2016.
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How has the introduction of safe supply in this city changed the city?
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I don't really see, I mean, it's hard for me to know who actually is on the program and who's not.
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All I can tell you is that this neighborhood has a high level of drug use.
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And just to point something out, right here, just about a year and a half ago, a guy died right here underneath my window.
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I'd look out my living room window, I'd see him out here.
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He hadn't moved for days and then eventually it was a coroner taking him away.
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We had the opportunity to speak with London-based addictions doctor Sharon Koivu,
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who told us that many doctors don't want to speak out about the issue
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and also that the hydromorphone pills, Dilaudid, that are used in the safe supply program
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can actually cause spinal infections and other infections.
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So not only is the strategy not safe, the drugs that are being prescribed in safe supply,
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according to Sharon Koivu, are not even safe themselves.
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What I've seen since diversion happened, I guess a few things.
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One is I first started seeing people developing infections from injecting the tablets.
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And I started seeing very severe infections from injecting pills,
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primarily diverted, but even from people that were in the program.
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And the infections that I've spoken out the most about are infections of the spine.
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And they are, I've been doing palliative care and addiction work for years,
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but infections of the spine are probably the worst suffering I see because they're so painful.
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If you think about a spine getting infected, that's your nerve center is being infected.
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They're extremely painful, but I've also seen people develop permanent paraplegia,
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so they can't walk, and even quadriplegia, so they're affected from the neck down.
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And when I first started seeing this, people could really tell me that the only pill that they were injecting was Dilaudid.
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So the risk of an infection has been something that I've taken very, very seriously.
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The other thing that I've seen living in this neighborhood, living within a kilometer of intercommunity health,
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where the main program started, when I first moved in in 2015,
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I moved in knowing this might be an area where there was a supervised injection site.
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I support harm reduction, and I have supported the concept of supervised injection sites.
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But what I saw after the Safe Supply program started was I literally had patients tell me
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they were leaving their houses, leaving apartments that they had to live in tents behind the pharmacy
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When I moved in, there were no encampments in that parking lot area behind that pharmacy.
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And encampments have with them so many harms, not just for the neighborhood,
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but certainly for the people that were living there.
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There's no ability for cleanliness or ability to use washrooms.
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So it became a very unsafe place that probably even contributed more to the infections that I was seeing.
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It's true that from the people we've spoken to here in London, from the doctors, the politicians, the locals,
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and even the homeless people who are addicted to drugs, in many cases perhaps using Safe Supply,
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the Safe Supply program is not working like we were told it would by activists and believers in the program.
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We've been told that Safe Supply saves lives, but the data just does not back up that claim.
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ER visits due to drug overdoses have actually increased in London since Safe Supply began.
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London's overdose death rate is now above the provincial average here in Ontario.
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Before 2016, before Safe Supply began here, it was below the provincial average.
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The combination of these facts makes for a very bad equation.
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And that is that this program here in London is not working as advertised.
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Another strange fact about the Safe Supply and drug strategy here in London
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is that there is a very tight control over the messaging.
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A lot of people are afraid to speak out about this issue.
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We've asked several business owners here if they would be willing to speak to us
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about how London is tackling this issue, and they don't want to speak to us at all.
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They seem afraid, and that was actually what they told us off camera.
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The federal government believes in this policy.
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Whenever they're questioned about Safe Supply by the Conservatives,
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they just chant the slogan that Safe Supply saves lives.
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We are pretty fed up with this fight against evidence-based programs
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I wonder how many of them have come to London here
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to see how their policy plays out every day on the ground affecting real people.
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