By now, just about everyone has seen or heard Doug Ford’s ad campaign claiming that the current premier seeks to Protect Ontario. It’s crystal clear that Ford’s version of “safety” only applies to a fraction of his constituents.
We are a concerned group of women who live in Toronto and who have all used supervised consumption sites. Some of us are currently homeless and some of us are housed. Most of us currently use drugs. Some of us are abstinent but have long and colourful histories of drug use. Some of us are cisgender and some are trans. Our stories are all unique, but a commonality that we share is that Ford’s Ontario is not designed to protect us.
The Ontario government introduced legislation in 2025 to close some supervised consumption sites. That first round of closures in April 2025 led to increased calls for ambulances and hospitalizations for overdose across the province. This past March, the Ford government announced another wave of supervised consumption site closures despite decades of evidence demonstrating the critical value of these services. The numbers are there; the research is there; and the proof is there that these sites save lives and connect people to care. The decision, however, was made without meaningfully listening to the people most affected: those of us who rely on these spaces for health care, community and survival.
On June 13, the second round of closures took effect province-wide, and we are now witnessing a catastrophe unfolding before our eyes. Preventable deaths are happening in our communities and the government’s priorities lie in spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money on advertisements about “protecting our neighbourhoods.” But we are Ontarians, too. We are members of these neighbourhoods, too.
So, who exactly is being protected? And who is protecting us?
Supervised consumption sites are not abstract policy debates to us. We are alive today because supervised injection sites were there to help us when we overdosed. They are also places where we and many others accessed health care, housing support, harm reduction supplies, food and connection. For many, these sites are among the few places where they are treated with dignity rather than shame.
Pushing drug users into parks, stairwells and public washrooms doesn’t stop them from using, but it does force people to use either more publicly or while completely alone. This also results in more pressure on EMS services and hospital emergency departments. For women, the risks we face from overdosing in uncontrolled environments include the danger of being physically or sexually assaulted while unable to defend ourselves.
We know the consequences of these policy choices because we are living them. We are out in our neighbourhoods with Naloxone, reviving people in the streets. We are inviting our friends into our homes to offer them respite and temporary shelter. We are responding to public health emergencies that we did not create while the government abandons us.
The government claims that HART (Homeless and Addiction Recovery Treatment) Hubs have replaced the need for these services. But many in our communities do not even understand what HART Hubs are supposed to offer, and many cannot access the services they need there. Since the closures, some cannot get sterile needles or basic harm reduction supplies anymore. HART Hubs have made it harder for us to continue to access the same basic health-care services that we were already receiving.
HART Hubs claim to be built around abstinence and sobriety. But recovery is not linear, and it cannot be forced. People do not stop or change their drug use simply because services disappear. They make those changes if and when they are ready – and they are far more likely to survive long enough to reach that point when they have support, safety and stability.
We have seen too many friends and loved ones die shortly after a period of voluntary abstinence, or forced abstinence through jail, hospitalization or displacement. Most return to using in increasingly unsafe conditions, to find that their tolerance has decreased and the toxic drug supply has only gotten worse.
Instead of offering care, our systems continue to punish people who use drugs through criminalization, police harassment, ticketing and incarceration. These approaches do not prevent substance use; they only deepen the harms surrounding it. People are pushed further to the margins, losing housing, employment, community and stability. We cannot arrest our way out of a public health crisis.
Among our small group of women, we could tell stories of trauma and hardship that would make the average person’s blood run cold. We could tell stories of being newly displaced as girls on the streets of Toronto and being introduced to drug use as one of many things that people used as a form of control over us. We could tell stories of living through horrific violence and loss of those closest to us; of using drugs to cope with profound trauma. However, it shouldn’t require our traumatic stories to argue that drug users have basic human rights, regardless of what their reasons are for using.
Health care and policy seem to keep moving backward while the death toll continues to rise. We are being blamed for the fallout from dangerous and violent policy choices, as poverty and homelessness grows at an unprecedented rate in Ford’s Ontario. The message behind the “Protect Ontario” ads is impossible to ignore. They suggest that people who use drugs and people forced to live in encampments are dangerous. Unwanted. Disposable.
We are sick of being used as political talking points. Drug users are human beings, and human rights are not contingent on abstinence. We are parents, siblings, daughters, partners and friends. We deserve safety, health care and compassion, not stigma and public campaigns designed to make communities fear us.
If the government truly wants safer communities, it should invest in what actually keeps people alive and safe: housing, health care, shelter, harm reduction and evidence-based voluntary treatment.
Instead of spending millions attacking harm reduction, Ontario should be funding the services that save lives.
Written collectively by a group of women in Toronto who have used drugs
