The downtown Guelph overdose prevention site has been approved for an expansion.
The City of Guelph was one of eight cities across Ontario approved on Friday for a consumption and services treatment site. It will be one of fifteen locations across the province and continue to be opened permanently.
Guelph resident Dorothy Bakker has supported the current site since it opened in May.
“Withdrawal is a really tough thing,” she said.
Bakker’s 25-year-old son was drug free for several years. In October 2017 he submitted his grant proposal for his PhD in environmental engineering.
The next day he was found dead from an opioid overdose after consuming what he thought was cocaine.
“If I knew he was using, and this site was open, I would have driven him down here,” said Bakker.
Raechelle Devereaux of the Guelph Community Health Centre says they’ve had 45 overdoses to date that have been reversed at the site.
“We couldn’t wait to ask lots of questions and wonder…about whether this was the right thing for our community,” she said. “We looked down the track and saw the train coming. We needed to act.”
In other municipalities, the sites are controversial.
Earlier this week, Cambridge extended a bylaw banning safe consumption sites from its downtown core for another year.
Waterloo Region’s Public Health Unit will be coming out with proposed sites in roughly a week, but it will still be up to the city to approve them.
“Whether there’s a site in Kitchener or a site in Cambridge, it will have to have the agreement of that council to go forward,” said regional chair Karen Redman.
Bakker says she believes the sites save lives and may have made a difference in her son’s life.
“Knowing him, he really would have wanted to change his trajectory,” she said. “He would have sought out help. It could have saved his life. I know he would have been very supportive of this.”
Officials in Guelph say they have not seen a spike in crime in the downtown area.
