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Bell: Good riddance! Smith government closing Calgary's hated drug site June 30

The day has come. Calgary's drug consumption site is headed into the dustbin of history

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The drug consumption site in Calgary and a mobile drug unit in Lethbridge will be closed down June 30.

An announcement is in Calgary on Friday, very near the much-hated drug site at the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre.

The Alberta government will put taxpayer money into other services.

Among those services are added detox beds in Calgary.

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There will be teams operating in the city’s core responding to overdoses and connecting people directly to treatment and medical care.

A recovery community opened up recently in Calgary.

Added supports are also heading to Lethbridge.

The UCP government of Premier Danielle Smith says its focus is to get addicts off the street and into treatment rather than providing them a place to do drugs.

For several years, many souls tried to get provincial politicians to shut down the drug site.

It was rolled out with little fanfare by the former NDP government led by Rachel Notley and from the get-go faced major pushback. Those living and working near the site were not happy.

Friday’s news will be welcomed by many of these individuals and businesses in the neighbourhood where increased crime and social disorder was an in-your-face reality foisted upon them by a pie-in-the-sky scheme cooked up by politicians.

Did I hear former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s name?

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For the record, Calgary city hall was asked to back the drug site closing and a past city council heard the catalogue of concerns and list of horrors from local citizens but, right to the end, they refused to take a stand.

Rick Wilson is Smith’s point man on drug addiction. He has no doubts. The drug site will close, though activists thought it was a salvation for addicts.

“It’s not a salvation. It’s just another place for them to stay an addict. If you keep giving addicts a place to do drugs, they will just continue to do them. They’re addicts,” says Wilson.

What was praised as harm reduction looked more like harm production to those around the site.

You don’t have to talk to Wilson for more than a few minutes before he says his favourite word. He repeats it many times.

“We want to help people. Keeping people in a continual cycle of crisis and illness is not helping them.”

Wilson says at one end of the scale is recovery, where addicts can get out of their hell. The other end is death.

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He has a message for addicts.

“There’s hope out there. Recovery is possible for everybody. Let us give you that hand up you need to start down that trail,” says Wilson.

“We want to give you back your life and give you hope and get you back to your families.

“I don’t think as a little kid you think: Boy, when I grow up, I want to be a drug addict. It’s something that happens. Somebody has got to give them that hand up to break the cycle.

The Alberta government’s main man on mental health and addiction is confident working with other groups, like Calgary’s Alpha House, more addicts will go for treatment and begin recovery.

He also believes the neighbourhood and businesses near the drug site in the highly populated Beltline will see an improvement in their quality of life.

Wilson points to what happened after the Red Deer drug site was shuttered.

There were no significant increases in deaths, emergency room visits or ambulance calls among the drug site users and more of them went into addiction treatment.

Wilson expects some of the biggest backers of the drug site closing will be those who face addiction up close and personal.

“When I go into recovery centres and you can see people starting to get their lives back. I think those are the ones who are really going to support us because they have seen what is possible.

“I have talked to guys who thought it was never going to be possible to get out of this. They were going to just end up dying. Now they have their lives back.”

The man believes he is on the right track.

“It really does feel right. You can actually wake up every morning thinking you are going to save people’s lives,” says Wilson.

“What could be a better job?”

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