Ottawa parents and a local community association are calling on the provincial government to regulate “safer supply drugs” to stop them from being resold into their neighbourhood.
Northwood Recovery Centre, an addiction clinic on a strip mall on Wellington Street West and Merton Street in Ottawa, has been the source of concern for the Hintonburg Community Association and parents of children from neighbouring schools.
Along with the addiction clinic and pharmacy, the neighbourhood is home to two elementary schools – St. Francois d’Assise and Sainte-Marie Mère de Dieu – plus a shared public park and a community centre 70 metres away from the strip mall.
Parents and community advocates say the presence of the addiction centre has created an unsafe environment around the school communities where theft, trafficking, discarded pill bottles – allegedly from patients of the clinic – and drug use have become regular occurrences.
Cheryl Parrott from the Hintonburg Community Association said she was assured by the owner of the facility in June that the “safe supply” site would have no impact on the neighbouring community. This hasn’t been the case, she said.
“They opened Sept. 9, and by Sept. 11, we saw people openly injecting nearby, and then we started finding empty prescription bottles, and it just escalated daily from that point on,” Parrott told True North in an interview. “We started finding empty prescription pill bottles discarded in the community with the labels on them, so we knew what they were prescribing and the quantities.”
Parrott claimed doctor from Northwood Recovery is prescribing opiate drugs such as Dilaudid to patients after assessing them over the phone. The clients are then allegedly directed a couple of doors down to Victoria Pharmacy, where they get their drugs and leave the premises. The clinic did not respond to a request for comment from True North.
“They’re not adequately monitoring or controlling the patients, so what we’re seeing is diversion of these drugs and drug dealers being drawn to the community to buy, trade or steal these medications from the patients,” Parrott said. “It’s creating a lot of social disorder. And real unsafe conditions.”
Though Northwood Recovery did not respond to True North’s requests to comment, the manager of Victoria Pharmacy, Kim Stewart, said she was aware that patients from Northwood use the pharmacy.
She said it’s the prescribing doctor’s responsibility to decide if the patients have to stay on-premises to ingest their drugs. Stewart said pharmacists just follow what the prescriptions call for.
The Ottawa Police Service declined to comment specifically on reports of illegal activity around the site, but a spokesperson did speak out about diversion.
Acting Sgt. Paul Stam with Ottawa Police Service’s neighbourhood policing directorate acknowledged an uptick in reports of “pop-up pharmacies” that distribute “safer supply drugs.”
“From a policing standpoint, we don’t want prescription drugs being diverted into the general community. You know, they should be using used by the people that they’re intended to be used by,” he told True North in an interview.
“The current structure of the safer supply program, given the government regulations, allows for these drugs to be prescribed very freely by doctors,” Stam said. “That’s what these ‘pop-up clinics’ are taking advantage of, and that is increasing the amount of diverted drugs in the community in general.”
He said the diversion of prescription drugs into communities is harmful and not something that police want to see continue.
Ruth Lobo, a concerned parent at the Sainte-Marie Mère de Dieu school, echoed the community association’s concerns in an interview with True North.
She said that the community started to see an increase in safety concerns related to drug paraphernalia and “street-looking people hanging around” in September when Northwood Recovery became more known to the public.
Lobo said children and families have had to change the routes they take to get home as Hintonburg Park, across the street from the recovery center, has become dangerous due to loitering drug users. She said a bus stop outside of the school has become a “haven for drug dealing” and “unsafe-looking people.”
“Those people will talk to our kids and say hi to them. If they’re on drugs, then they’re not safe people for our children to be around,” she said. “Our school is experiencing unease and unrest of sending our kids outside for recess because there’s added risk that’s present once you have people on drugs in an area where there’s school.”
Lobo said the school has had to create additional safety measures, such as installing security cameras and education to make sure the kids, some as young as five years old, aren’t picking up drug paraphernalia.
Adam Zivo, the founder of the Centre for Responsible Drug Policy, told True North that the federal and provincial governments must mandate witness consumption of safer supply drugs to stem the diversion crisis.
“This is something which we already do for many addiction medications such as methadone and Suboxone,” he said. “If you use those medications to manage your withdrawals, it is required that you consume these drugs under supervised consumption, at least until you show, you know, significant signs of stability and you build a relationship with your with your prescriber”
He said there is “basically no requirement” under the current “safer supply” models for addicts to take the drugs under supervision.
“We give drug addicts bottles and bottles and bottles of opioids, and we just say we trust you to use them as intended, which is insane. So, witness consumption would be very important. That would immediately cut out most of the diversion, almost all of it,” he said.
Public Health Ontario did not respond to True North’s requests for comment.
