Trailer - A place to heal: saving lives in Toronto’s toxic drug crisis

In 2017 synthetic opioid fentanyl hit the Canadian city of Toronto and people using drugs started dropping. Drug deaths hit record levels - across the state of Ontario there were 1,270 that year.

Health professionals, activists and drug users called for an emergency response to the toxic drug death crisis facing them. And when authorities failed to set up a safer drug consumption facility activists in the Moss Park neighbourhood of the city took matters into their own hands.

They gathered supplies and nurses and set up an unsanctioned overdose prevention site in the park where they ran it illegally for a year before being granted permission to operate by the health authority and moving inside with funding.

With the UK’s first safer drug consumption facility due to open in Glasgow this summer The Ferret visited the Mosspark Treatment and Consumption Service in Toronto, Canada to find out what difference the community-focussed approach it takes can make.

We heard from those struggling to cope with the realities of super-strength drug fentanyl as well as those whose lives had been saved by the Moss Park team. We heard stories of love and loss, of systemic failure and of the limitations of a service like this.

The toxic drug crisis is ongoing with deaths in the state more than doubling to 2,857 in 2021 and continued alerts about the contaminated drug supply causing multiple deaths.

But we heard stories of hope and healing and the impact that being part of a community that cares can have.

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