The Ben Mulroney Show - Pro-drug injection site activists were dangerously wrong on closures

Episode Date: June 10, 2025

Guests and Topics: -Pro-drug injection site activists were dangerously wrong on closures with Guest: Derek Finkle, Journalist If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! https://globalnews.ca/national/program/the-ben-mulroney-show Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Enjoy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At Desjardins Insurance, we put the care in taking care of business. Your business to be exact. Our agents take the time to understand your company so you get the right coverage at the right price. Whether you rent out your building, represent a condo corporation, or own a cleaning company, we make insurance easy to understand so you can focus on the big stuff, like your small business. Get insurance that's really big on care.

Find an agent today at Desjardins.com slash business coverage. Welcome back to the Ben Mulroney show. There has been a battle in places like Toronto over the issue of safe injection sites. Are they in fact safe? And when the when the Doug Ford government came into power, they said, look, some of them are too close to schools, and they took steps to close a number of these safe injection sites, to which the army of people on the other side said,

quote unquote, people are going to die. Doug Ford doesn't care about human life, and people are going to die. Well, enough time has gone by that we can ask the question, have more people died? And somebody who dug into the numbers is our next guest, Derek Finkel, a journalist who wrote, pro-drug injection site activists were dangerously wrong on closures.

Derek, welcome to the show. Hey, good morning, Ben. Nice to be with you. Okay, so give us a little bit of the timeline. What's the data set we're looking at here? So the Toronto paramedics are going to be doing Okay, so give us a little bit of the timeline. What sort of what's the data set we're looking at here? So the Toronto paramedics or the EMS essentially of Toronto started tracking overdose data. I want to say about four or five years ago, and they do it in conjunction with Toronto Public Health. And there's been a sort of an online dashboard that people can access and get,

and there's been a sort of an online dashboard that people can access and get, you know, figures that are sort of determined by the number of calls that go out for ambulances. And so they track overdoses in two main categories, one being fatal overdoses and the other one being non-fatal overdoses. And so the point of my, you know, column is that I sat through the back in March, there was a litigation

that was reported on pretty heavily. A site in the Kensington, neighbour of Toronto filed a court application to challenge the legislation you were just referring to prohibiting sites from being within 200 meters of schools and daycare, saying it was a violation of the charter rights of drug users. Right. That was that. That was what a wonderful application of the of the charter. But go on. Yeah. And so, you know, there were, I think, 10 different intervenors, nine of which supported the site's position. And, you know, there was sort of like this long line of people who kept coming up with great confidence saying that, you know, the, the, the, the number of

dead bodies in the streets were going to extrapolate and, and that, uh, you know, there was one lawyer who got up and said that the one, one site that wasn't closing was preparing for the worst and they were expecting the deaths to be so bad that they were hiring grief counselors for the staff to deal with. I mean, the bleeding hearts, the bleeding hearts. I mean, I'm realizing the reason we call them bleeding hearts is because the blood's coming out of their hearts, it should be pumping

towards their brains because they're saying nonsense. Yeah. And I mean, now the backdrop, like that's kind of a, you know, a little bit of a micro thing talking about Toronto, but you know, they're saying this, I think what I'm seeing in the column isn't that, you know, that the number of overdoses went down significantly because the site's closed. That's not my point. My point is that, you know, all these people got up and the experts, you know, testifying on behalf of the Kensington site, got up with great confidence and said in front of a judge with great certainty that the next was going to happen. People were going to die. It was going to, you know, the judge even cited the grief counselor comment at one point as

being something that swayed him. And, you know, Well, it's like, I'm glad you mentioned that because I think you're right. We don't know whether it's causation correlation or coincidence, but people with lots of letters behind their names got up and with great certainty said, this is a fact, this is an absolute certainty, you can take it to the bank. And when you realize that they actually in this moment, didn't, were agenda driven, they weren't data driven, then you ask yourself, how many other times

in the city of Toronto or across the province and indeed across the country, have we been sold a bill of goods by people who intimidated, shouted down, and decided, wanted you to shut up because they knew better? Yeah. And, and, and, you know, even more to the point, they said all, they made all these promises and guarantees to the judge knowing that overdose rates had gone down this year. Like they were, you know, starting late last year, early this year, overdose rates went gone down this year. Like they were you know starting late last year, early this year, overdose rates went down. Now the chief coroner made some

comments in the media last week. I mean nobody really knows why. I mean people speculate that it's the drug supply has become less toxic or you know there's yeah but the truth is nobody knows. Yeah and and you know so knowing that overdoses had gone down and I knew back in March when I was sitting through this that there was a really good chance that the overdose rates were going to possibly even go lower because as I've written before, I mean, people say these sites save lives, but the truth is there's actually no empirical data. And this has been written about in the Stanford-Lancet Commission report from 2022. There's no evidence that over the long term, these sites actually save lives.

There was a report written by about South Riverdale site, which I happen to live across the street from. And the six-month supervisor of the site that was put in place by the province wrote on multiple occasions about how many clients were dying at the site and that it was so bad. It affected staff morale and these kinds of things. We've got to get those grief counselors in there for them. And I'm not trying to make light of people losing their lives, but there's one side of the equation that decide to pick, the act of not dying is not saving a life,

because what's the quality of the life that you are allowing a drug user to live when you are lying to them saying there is dignity in the life that you are leading and the claim that the drugs have not taken complete control over that individual and that person has agency and that person has chosen this life is nonsense. And it flies in the face of every single thing that we know with every fiber of our being. And I don't need letters behind my name to justify

that. Yeah. And I think that the other thing that activists, where I think they're misleading people in particular with this, the current opioid crisis, as opposed to what was going on decades ago, is that fentanyl, we know there was a study done by the UBC, University of British Columbia, psychiatry department between 2008 and 2018. It was a 10-year study that involved 400 people living in what we would now call, I guess,

drug encampments in the downtown east side of Vancouver. And you know, they gave them all MRIs and they were able to determine that about, I think it was about 45% of them had verifiable brain damage. Yeah. And the drug supply since 2018 has only gotten, you know, worse. Yeah. It's stronger. And so, you know, you're looking at people who use street fentanyl for any period of time. It's very likely at this juncture that more than half of them have brain damage. And so you have activists running around saying things like, the only way we can solve these drugging cameras is to build more homes. And the inconvenient truth is that, and this came out in a piece that the Globe and Mail published about Pandora Avenue

in Victoria, BC a couple of weeks ago, is that, you know, even people who run shelters in Victoria say that involuntary care is long overdue. Yeah, there's a portion of the street fentanyl using population that will never be able to care for themselves. Of course not matter whether we build them houses or not. Well, Derek, I want to thank you for writing this piece and coming on to the show because it is a reminder that there are people who will position themselves as speaking from a position of authority on medical issues or legal issues. But the fact is in a lot of cases, and in this case, they are speaking from an ideologically driven position, devoid of actual real law or real science, and it has hurt real people. But thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Ben. Take care. To celebrate the Days of Our Lives 60th anniversary, W Network and Stack TV invite you to enter for a chance to win the ultimate fan experience. By watching new episodes of Days of Our Lives, you and a guest could win a three-night stay in Los Angeles, a VIP Days of Our Lives set tour, a helicopter ride over LA, and so much more. Watch Weekdays at One and look for the weekly code word to enter. Days of Our Lives, all new Weekdays at One, only on W. Stream on StackTV.