The Last Days of Moss Park Consumption Site

He's just gonna burn one, then he'll come talk to me. This is always how it is with Nick. I sit at the site for hours, having told him I'll be there every Thursday and Friday night in March and April. Then, when I finally start packing up to leave, Nick bursts through the front door. He doesn't sit down or stop to talk, but he makes one sly comment on his way through, like, "You look like you're in need of an intelligent conversation," and strolls through to the back door.

He's just gonna burn one, or do a quick shot, then he'll come talk to me. It never takes less than two hours. "Somehow," Nick tells me in a text message, "time seems to slow down" in that room.

Nick is 36, Ojibwe, and wears his long, black hair pulled back under a backwards snapback. The room in question is the injection room or I.R., the place with oxygen tanks where staff reverse overdoses at Moss Park Consumption and Treatment Service. That room is where thousands of people have injected fentanyl, meth, and crack-cocaine—but mostly fentanyl—since the site opened its indoor location in 2018.

Outside, in the neighbourhood, many of the same people smoke the same drugs out of glass pipes and off little squares of tin foil. On the site's back patio, the community gathers to smoke cigarettes and hang out. At nighttime, one bright fluorescent light illuminates the narrow patio, which is filled with graffiti: "Moss Park is FAMILY! Saving & Changing Lives on the DAILY! Thank You!"

The site is scheduled to close on June 13, having been defunded by Premier Doug Ford's government. Ford has been opposed to the sites since his very first campaign for premier in 2018, when he told reporters he was "dead against" them. Now, he's pulling funding for all seven publicly funded sites in Ontario, including Moss Park. Three sites with private funding will remain open.

But it's the end of a nine-year era of broad access to safe consumption in Toronto, an era that began when harm reduction activists pitched a tent in Moss Park in 2017 and started reversing overdoses on their own.

Since then, a lot has changed. Moss Park the park has been closed off for construction of a new subway station. Moss Park the neighbourhood has become a hot-spot for new condo developments. And the public health catastrophe that sparked the creation of the site—when fentanyl took over the heroin supply—has been eclipsed by a series of newer catastrophes: COVID-19, surging homelessness, and a drug supply that becomes more dangerous by the month.

In May, Toronto's Drug Checking Service found that 80 percent of drugs expected to be fentanyl contained the animal tranquilizer medetomidine, which is associated with intensive care unit (ICU) admissions upon withdrawal.

Moss Park's staff is still "exploring options to keep services in the neighbourhood," says Sarah Greig, manager of the site and director of substance use and mental health at the site's parent organization South Riverdale Community Health Centre. The defunding announcement, she says, came as a shock. "It's been an uncertain environment in the sector, but the speed at which it came, that part was a surprise."

The government gave Greig and her team three months' notice and less than one month to submit a "wind-down plan" for their hundreds of monthly clients. It's a short timeline for people addicted to a drug that makes you lethargic and slows down time.

At Moss Park, a friend can go out with your house keys to grab coffee and come back three days later. Staff know this. They work with it. They don't judge it. That's what harm reduction looks like in practice—not asking people to change before they can access help, but meeting them where they are.

When the site closes, those hundreds of people will have nowhere to go.

The closure marks the end of an experiment in public health that proved, over and over, that people with addiction deserve dignity and care. It also marks the beginning of something darker: a return to a time when Toronto's most vulnerable drug users had no safe place to exist.

Nick will still be in the city. He'll still be using. The only difference is where—and whether anyone will be there to reverse an overdose.