Pubdate: Fri, 04 Aug 2017
Source: Toronto Sun (CN ON)
Copyright: 2017 Canoe Limited Partnership
Contact: http://www.torontosun.com/letter-to-editor
Website: http://torontosun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/457
Author: Sue-Ann Levy
Page: 5

OVERDOSE ACTION PLAN IS A WASTE OF TIME, MONEY

Wrong-headed!

Coun. Joe Cressy must have been licking his lips with glee Thursday.

The recent spike in opioid overdoses in the city would garner him more
media - and the NDPer just loves media attention especially when he
can blather on about the fact that more public money is needed for
(insert affordable housing, bike lanes here), or, as he claimed
Thursday, the "escalating drug crisis."

Since he'd already informed us before he guilted the mayor and council
into approving three new harm reduction (aka feed addicts their
poisons, but safely) sites last summer that there'd been a drug crisis
in the city for the last 10 years, Cressy had to insert "escalating"
to make the crisis seem, well, really crisis-like.

Mayor John Tory, always keen to allow the left to embrace their
permissive, hug-an-illegal drug user/thug schemes on some mistaken
premise that will buy loyalty, was only too happy to convene another
meeting/ photo opp/serious confab with a team of emergency responders
and Cressy to show he is indeed a man of action, not just talk.

The city's three new safe injection sites - which will cost taxpayers
about $1 million each to operate yearly - will open earlier, according
to Tory, although public health officials claim that still means this
fall sometime.

There's also talk of having Toronto police distributing naloxone, a
drug which is said to counteract opioid overdoses.

Oy vey. So now instead of arresting people using illegal drugs and
perhaps giving them the injection of tough love they need to
rehabilitate themselves, police officers will be expected to act as
social workers.

Is there any end to the permissive, politically correct, give a
handout instead of handup schemes that are born and bred at City Hall
and are abusing our tax dollars?

Let's be clear. No one wants to see deaths occur due to drug
overdoses, although like any addictive drug, there is a significant
amount of personal responsibility and personal choice involved with
their misuse.

And in an era of scarce public resources, how are these deaths any
more tragic than say, mentally ill and alcohol-addicted homeless
people wandering our streets being used as pawns by the poverty
industry and virtually ignored by City Hall's well-resourced Streets
to Homes program?

Heck, if Tory is so concerned about "unimaginable tragedies" why
doesn't he sit down with the city's overpaid and certainly not highly
taxed Shelter, Support and Housing staff and ask why it took this
journalist to expose the fact that 1: The shelters (at $75 per bed per
night) are hellholes; 2: Ontario Works caseworkers are not doing their
jobs; and 3: The city's team of street people and 129 Peter St. folk
are useless.

Now that's an emergency meeting I'd like to attend.

Cressy reminds me of Jack Layton of yesteryear, who trotted out
hundreds of homeless people to the council chamber at Metro Hall in
1998 to declare homelessness a national disaster along the lines of an
ice storm or a tsunami.

Like Layton before him, Cressy has been downright evangelical in his
efforts to convince the mayor and his council colleagues to create the
city's Overdose Action Plan, its 49 recommendations and 10 strategies,
all put together by a cast of thousands.

Like with the homeless portfolio, the only result from these efforts,
as I see it, are more useless bureaucrats making six-figure salaries
wringing their hands in despair but not helping those who truly need
it.

You want to talk drug abuse? I say our city council is addicted to
crazy schemes that have very little to do with the basics of running
the city. And Tory has given them free rein.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt