Editorial: Owen Sound Needs a Safe Consumption Site — With One Non‑Negotiable Condition
When recovery means walking past open drug use, we’ve failed as a community. Owen Sound must do better for everyone involved.
EDITORIAL OPINION
I’m not an addiction expert. I’m not a social worker, a front-line outreach worker, or a healthcare provider. I’m a community member, a mother, a writer, and now a news editor. And I’ve lived in and around Owen Sound for more than 40 years — long enough to know what this city once felt like, and to see how it’s changed.
Open drug use in public spaces and the fallout from it — on sidewalks, outside local businesses, by the entrances to grocery stores and medical clinics — has become a visible, daily reality in Owen Sound.
TL;DR: What This Is About
Public drug use in Owen Sound is harming everyone, including people who use drugs. What’s happening now isn’t compassion. It’s chaos.
We urgently need a safe consumption site (SCS), not as an optional add-on, but as a first step to get drug use out of public spaces and connect people to real help.
But an SCS alone won’t fix this. It will only succeed if backed by a clear commitment that once we have a designated space with medical care, support staff, and pathways to treatment, public spaces are no longer an acceptable place for drug use.
We can’t move forward by clinging to extremes. Neither full permissiveness nor rigid moralism is working. Real progress requires honesty, structure, and shared responsibility.
It’s become routine to see people smoking, snorting, or injecting drugs in broad daylight, in full view of families, business patrons, or children walking home from school.
What’s happening on our streets, particularly downtown, is not working for anyone. Allowing open drug use isn’t compassion, nor is it a necessary side effect of helping people with addictions.
It’s actively undermining their recovery.
This isn’t just criticism. It’s a call for infrastructure, strategy, and political will, because what we have now isn’t helping people recover. It’s making it harder.
Social service agencies, charities, and emergency responders are doing essential work every day. But they’re operating in crisis mode, without the full support they need to actually change outcomes.
Too often, calls for dialogue or suggestions for doing things differently are taken as personal criticism of those working hard on the front lines. The truth is, you can work tirelessly and still make little progress if that effort is focused on the wrong places.
Good intentions are not the same as an effective strategy, and without broader coordination and support, even the best efforts can fall short.
Without meaningful municipal investment in housing, public infrastructure like 24/7 washrooms and storage, and long-term planning, front-line supports and their funders are left plugging holes in a sinking ship.
Without provincial funding for inpatient treatment or effective mental health supports, even the best outreach efforts can only lead people back to square one.
Without coordinated leadership across all levels of government, our police, fire, and paramedics are stuck reviving, arresting, and responding to the same individuals over and over, with no real exit ramp in sight.
And when it comes to local leadership — the very tier of government best positioned to bring everyone to the table — we’re still hearing “These issues are not our job.”
That has to change.
It’s important to remember: many people struggling with opioids didn’t start out seeking a high. They were prescribed painkillers after surgery or injury. They were told it was safe. Some got hooked on legal drugs marketed as non-addictive. When that supply dried up, they turned to street alternatives — and what’s on the street now is far more dangerous.
Today’s drug supply is intentionally laced with substances that are more toxic, more addictive, and more likely to kill. People aren’t just overdosing; they’re being chemically trapped. These are not, as some still claim, people who get up every morning and choose to be “degenerates.”
They are human beings. They’re our neighbours, coworkers, and family members. Many of them want a different life, but right now, we are not offering them that opportunity.
We’ve created a city where doing nothing has become the default. We can’t even bring ourselves to model what “better” could look like, and it’s hurting everyone.
This is not compassion. This is not dignity. This is not a functional community environment.
We hear often, and rightly, that we cannot criminalize addiction. I agree with that. Addiction is a complex health issue, and the war on drugs failed everyone, especially the people who needed help the most.
But what we are doing now cannot continue, either.
Allowing our public spaces to serve as de facto safe consumption sites (SCSs) is not helping downtown business owners, many of whom are barely hanging on.
It’s not helping community members who want to shop, dine, or attend events downtown but increasingly feel unsafe or unwelcome.
And it is absolutely not helping people who are struggling with addiction, who deserve access to care and recovery in an environment that fosters healing — not constant exposure to the same cycles and triggers that are keeping them sick.
Owen Sound’s police chief has explained that officers have limited options when it comes to open drug use, due to direction from federal prosecutors and the protections under the Charter.
But he’s also acknowledged what many of us feel: the pendulum has swung too far. What we’re witnessing isn’t a functioning balance between public safety and public health. It's not policy. It’s paralysis.
Let me be blunt: I cannot imagine trying to recover from addiction in today’s Owen Sound.
Where could you go without being confronted by the thing you’re trying to escape?
The bank? The food bank? A grocery store? A bus stop? A doctor’s office? Getting to each of these places — essential to rebuilding a stable, healthy life — now requires encountering substance abuse in some form, more often than not.
It’s not fair to anyone trying to get back on their feet. And that includes people who are unhoused but not actively using substances, who also deserve safe access to services without having to navigate the trauma of being surrounded by open drug use.
I believe it’s long past time for a designated space with harm reduction, healthcare access, and trained staff. That’s right, I believe Owen Sound needs a safe consumption site. It’s a loaded phrase, isn’t it? Politically charged, even.
But let’s talk about the reality of not having one. Take a look around. It feels like the entire downtown has become an unofficial SCS, without the structure or support that make such programs effective.
That’s not policy. It’s neglect.
This isn’t just a local concern. It’s happening across the country, and people love to march out, “It’s not just Owen Sound; it’s like this everywhere,” as though that somehow justifies doing nothing.
The opioid crisis is happening across Canada. The difference is that many other places are (thankfully) trying out collaborative, community-wide solutions and sharing what’s working, and what isn’t.
A recent analysis from The Hub’s DeepDive series shows that pushback against supervised consumption sites is no longer coming just from conservative politicians or media outliers. It now includes physicians, public policy experts, and even some site operators who believe the current model lacks balance, accountability, and clear results.
Across the country, provinces like Ontario and Alberta are redirecting funding away from open-ended harm reduction and toward treatment-focused recovery hubs, because they’ve seen that an unstructured approach isn’t helping communities or the people who need help the most.
Still, evidence shows that properly run safe consumption sites reduce public drug use, prevent overdose deaths, and connect people to treatment, especially in smaller communities like ours.
But what Owen Sound is missing isn’t just evidence. It’s urgency, structure, and the will to budge from deeply entrenched positions — on all sides — and act.
Owen Sound is behind the curve on all of this.
We’ve become a city of band-aid solutions. We hand out tents, jackets, and socks, then we watch them pile up along the riverbanks, abandoned, soaked through, or stolen. Why? Because we can’t bring ourselves to offer even the most basic infrastructure, like a locker or storage bin, to the people we claim to be helping.
Organizations hand out needles and Naloxone, and the City of Owen Sound posts tips on their website for residents to dispose of them when they’re inevitably left wherever they happened to be dropped.
We lecture about empathy while shaming those who hesitate to give more. But the givers in this community — downtown shops, tourism businesses, and local taxpayers — are watching their livelihoods erode under the weight of lost income, declining property values, and the rising cost of endless cleanup.
This isn’t generosity. It’s futility masquerading as compassion delivered under duress.
We’ve created something insidious here: a culture where the very people holding the community together — neighbours, business owners, volunteers, even frontline staff — are shut out of the conversation.
Speak up about the need for boundaries or structure, and you’re called cold. Raise concerns about downtown safety, and you’re labelled out of touch or privileged. You cannot possibly understand. Even those working inside the system are being vilified — by some for doing too much, by others for not doing enough.
And so instead of coming together around the table to find real solutions, we retreat into corners. We start treating compassion and accountability as opposing forces when, in reality, we need both.
The people who should be leading that conversation — our municipal leaders — refuse to do so. There’s a leadership vacuum at the local level, and that silence leaves room for resentment, misinformation, and polarization to grow.
Case in point: the City of Owen Sound hosted one public safety meeting last year, and apparently, this was such a terrifying prospect that they needed to hire a moderator, restrict media access, limit business participants to one per business, and then didn’t record it for the public record.
When did our community become allergic to open dialogue?
How can we move toward solutions when the people elected to guide the community through this have insulated themselves behind layers of bureaucracy and teams of staff members, separating themselves from the people they are there to represent?
If we’re serious about building something better, we need to stop treating “ordinary” community members — the people who are raising families, running businesses, paying taxes, and yes, trying to help — like they don’t deserve to have a voice. These people aren’t obstacles. They’re allies. They’re the fabric of a healthy community, and they need to be welcomed into the conversation, not pushed out of it.
We’re stuck in debates that other communities moved through years ago, and while they’ve evolved their approaches, we’re still arguing over whether to act at all. In Owen Sound, we can’t even get 24/7 washrooms to allow folks the dignity of doing their business in private.
We finally have a comprehensive recovery centre, and that matters a great deal. But what happens when people walk back out into the community?
What kind of environment are we offering to support their recovery and reintegration?
Right now, we’re meeting them with sidewalks where people are using openly, forced to urinate and defecate in the open, bus stops and parks littered with paraphernalia, and doorways where people are passed out.
That’s not supporting recovery. It’s a relapse waiting to happen.
I hope the newly announced year-round shelter will be a drug-free space, and I don’t say this from a place of moral superiority. I say this as a person who has, in the past, accessed shelter services. I say this from a place of frustration and sorrow for those who need that support today and are literally being left out in the cold, and concern for those who may be afraid to access what’s available due to the risks inherent to open and accepted substance abuse.
Risks like assault and violence. Like their own relapse. Like contamination and disease.
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Public drug use is not inevitable. It doesn’t have to be “the new normal.” It’s a sign of failure — not of individuals, but of policy, planning, and political will.
Yes, it’s happening in many communities, but it hasn’t taken them over. Many towns and cities around us are thriving and growing while we wallow. Owen Sound, as a community, has to decide whether we are willing to be one of those who keep failing.
If the answer is no, we need a coherent local strategy.
We need to meet people where they’re at, and that starts with a safe, non-judgmental consumption site that can connect them to other resources. But if one group builds it while others stand back, pointing fingers instead of supporting its success through planning, policy, funding, and wraparound services, it will fail.
If we introduce an SCS but continue turning a blind eye to open drug use in public spaces, treating it as a “nice-to-have” rather than a necessary intervention, it will fail.
Once people take those next steps — into shelter, meal programs, or counselling — we need clear expectations of sobriety. We need substance-free spaces where people can begin the long, hard work of recovery and feel reconnected with this community.
We need to acknowledge that people with addictions are not the only ones who rely on these services, particularly in this economic climate. Everyone deserves access to safe, stable, accessible social supports when they need a hand back up.
We need residential treatment options and mental health care, and we already have excellent community resources coming together on that front. Now, we need to support them by giving people a real chance to stay clean, find meaningful work, and live in safe, affordable housing when they exit these programs.
We need leadership — across the spectrum of municipalities, social services, policing, and funding agencies — who see both compassion and boundaries as part of the same solution.
We need to stop confusing crisis response with a long-term plan. We need to stop leaving real solutions off the table because they’re politically uncomfortable.
Carrying on the way we are, the way we have been, isn’t compassion. It’s abandonment. It’s the abandonment of our public spaces, of the people we claim to be helping, and of the shared responsibility that holds a community together.
It’s the abandonment of all reason and hope that we could ever recover — as individuals, and as a community.
It’s time we said so. And it’s time we worked together toward something better.
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