Toronto and Ottawa would benefit from drug injection sites: study

Both Toronto and Ottawa would benefit from designating places for the most extreme addicts to inject drugs safely.

That’s the conclusion of the Toronto and Ottawa Supervised Consumption Assessment, an extensive study from Ahmed Bayoumi, from the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael’s Hospital, and Carol Strike, at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health.

Toronto needs three supervised injection facilities, the study suggests; Ottawa, which has one of the highest levels of new HIV infection rates due to injection-drug use, needs two, the study finds.

And, the study suggests, the sites should be in places where the addicts already are.

The study has been years in the making: It was born out of a 2005 request from the city of Toronto’s drug use research group to look into whether a supervised consumption site would make sense for Canada’s largest urban area, and was later expanded to include Ottawa.

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