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Take a stand for supervised consumption.

Join us in voicing your support for a humane, responsible, and proven approach to drug treatment. Ottawa needs supervised consumption sites now!

Date: Sunday, March 23, 2014 at 1 PM
Place: Parliament Hill

Speakers include Dr. Mark Tyndall, members of the Drug Users Advocacy League (DUAL) and CSCS Ottawa.

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Don't let silence speak for you!

The world’s nations have begun talks ahead of the United Nations General Assembly Special Session on Drugs in 2016. This is a time of increasing high-level calls for drug policy reform and a sense that policies long dominated by prohibition and law enforcement in many parts of the world have failed miserably. Countries may be better served with a public health policy approach instead.

Canada has long been a world leader in implementing harm reduction policy when it comes to drug use at home.

So it was almost shocking to see it aligning itself to countries such as Russia and China in vocally opposing the inclusion of “harm reduction” in a new a new set of UN principles that will guide talks at the special session in 2016.

Tough love didn’t work with Donna May’s daughter. At 34, May’s daughter, a mother of three, was a hardcore IV drug user who died of flesh-eating disease she got through a dirty needle in July 2012.

“Her addiction took her away from me,” said May, one of the guest speakers at the Campaign for Safer Consumption Sites in Ottawa rally at 216 Murray St. on Monday. “Tough love didn’t work. It made her vulnerable, alone with her addiction. A supervised injection site would have rehumanized her.”

The model version of a supervised drug injection site proposed for Ottawa's Lowertown neighbourhood was open to the public Monday.

Organizers wanted to use the opportunity to address community concerns and answer questions to win support.

More than 100 people crammed into a small building at 216 Murray St. Monday morning for a tour of the mock site.