Pubdate: Tue, 07 Feb 2006
Source: Toronto Sun (CN ON)
Copyright: 2006, Canoe Limited Partnership.
Contact:  http://torontosun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/457
Author: Mark Bonokoski
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/rehab.htm (Treatment)

DRUG ABUSE IN THE BACKYARD OF CITY DWELLERS

Claiming that only one side of the story had been told, they wanted to
expose the "reality" of the methadone clinic that today sits next door
to the lobby of their upscale condominium near the St. Lawrence Market
- -- including video surveillance that supposedly documents the drug
dealing and the prostitution that the clinic attracted.

And then, one hour before yesterday's scheduled meeting was to take
place, it was called off.

The show-all, in fact, was supposed to have taken place last Friday,
arranged by condo resident Aurie Hensman, who claimed over the last
three years to have personally witnessed "loitering, abusive language,
prostitution, urination, defecation, and even ear piercing with dirty
needles" outside the pharmacy and methadone clinic that abuts her
condo complex at the corner of Front and Frederick.

But that meeting, "necessary to set the record straight," got
postponed at the last minute -- because, according to Hensman, condo
board president Alex Waugh was in Ottawa on business and insisted on
being present.

So why yesterday's cancellation?

Well, according to Hensman, an "emergency meeting" of the condo
board's directors was held Sunday night and it was decided that the
best approach was to back off.

Alex Waugh, who chaired that meeting, put it this way.

"We decided not to make it a bigger issue of it than it is," Waugh
said. "Besides, the clinic is moving -- and that's all that matters."

In other words, in the NIMBY world of "not in my backyard," the
methadone clinic that was seen as a blight on their immediate
neighbourhood will soon be in someone else's back yard, but no longer
in theirs.

There is no other conclusion to be drawn.

The new "backyard" -- once building permits are issued for the
proposed renovations -- will be less than 1 km east in the Corktown
district, at the southeast corner of King E. and Trinity and, as irony
has it, the relocated methadone clinic for opiate addicts will set up
shop in a place that once carried the business name of Cravings.

Since last Tuesday's column on the clinic's slated move, letters from
concerned Corktown citizenry taking me to task have come fast and
furious -- and even borderline libellous.

Where a methadone clinic lands is often an emotive issue. After all,
given the option of a methadone clinic in one's backyard -- or no
methadone clinic -- the choice would be rather obvious.

But that, unfortunately, is often not a choice when one decides to
live in an inner-city environment, especially one as socially taxing
and welfare-saturated as 51 Division.

WHERE I LIVE

It is where I live, too, by the way. In fact, during all the years I
have lived in Toronto, it is the only place I have lived.

Unlike some core-city newbies with a blinkered perspective, however, I
am not blind to the area's reality.

Nonetheless, it would have been interesting to have met with Sharon
Thompson, who, for the last eight years, has been head concierge at
the condo which, for now, has the unwanted methadone clinic operating
next door.

"For the last three years, our building has kept a log of all the
incidents pertaining to the methadone patients and their abusive
behaviour towards the residents, staff, and total respect for the
property," she wrote in an e-mail.

"I have had patients threaten me, verbally abuse me, throw their
garbage and coffee cups in our planters, urinate on our property,
shoot up drugs and sell drugs outside the building," she continued,
stating that she has "documented proof and security video" to prove
her accusations.

That proof, however, was supposed to be laid out yesterday morning --
until that meeting was nixed by an emergency meeting of the condo's
board of directors.

There were accusations, as well, that I was ignorant of the opinions
of Corktown residents, unaware perhaps of my attendance at a recent
meeting at the nearby Dominion Hotel where objections to the clinic
were tabled, and means of thwarting it from moving into Corktown were
discussed.

But, as I wrote then, the now-vacant building at the corner of King E.
and Trinity is zoned commercial, and methadone clinics fit neatly into
that category, without restrictions.

And, as local Councillor Pam McConnell told the crowd at the Dominion
Hotel, no legal loopholes exist -- including an interim control bylaw
- -- which could put the brakes on the projected substance abuse facility.

DONE DEAL

The clinic's move, therefore, is all but a done deal.

For the time being, however, it continues to exist behind a windowless
door at the side of the Front Street Pharmacy, right next to the condo
unit that wants no part of it.

It has, however, been operating there for 15 years.

Ashwin Gupta is the pharmacist who dispenses the methadone to the 200
or so recovering heroin and opiate addicts who come to the clinic, and
who are patients of substance-abuse doctors such as Elisa Venier and
Neal Belluzo.

"We are not a needle-exchange facility, and we don't supply crack
pipes. What we do is treat heroin addicts who are seeking recovery,"
Dr. Venie said in this space last week. "What we strive for here is
abstinence. That is our goal.

"But addicts exist. This is the inner city, after all. It's where
there are social nets. It's not the suburbs. We are not bringing them
in, much as our critics would like to tell you," said Venier. "They
are already here, and the numbers who want to enter the recovery state
are growing."

When the Corktown Residents and Business Association first went public
with its fight to keep the methadone clinic from moving into its
backyard, a little too much misinformation was being distributed as
fact.

Prior to the Dominion Hotel meeting, for example, residents of
Corktown were told by organizers that Ashwin Gupta was directly
related to Dr. Kumar Gupta, a member of the methadone committee at the
Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, and therefore was
privileged to some sort of insider's track when it came to dispensing
the synthetic opiate.

But he is not.

It was also put out that Ashwin Gupta, and any other pharmacist
dispensing methadone, was being paid a dispensing fee of $70 per dose,
making it a cash cow for someone wanting to make a fast buck by taking
on a segment of society that had hooked itself on an opiate.

But it is not $70. It is closer to $7.

This, however, did not stop someone -- a Corktown accountant, as it
turns out -- from doing the math, noting that addicts need their
methadone daily, and that the numbers therefore cumulatively add up to
a tidy sum for Gupta of close to a million dollars a year in profit,
all which makes him "a capitalist, not a socialist."

It's all hypothetical, of course -- both the mathematics and the
insinuations over motive.

But the rhetoric is nonetheless provocative.

Just as it is not unexpected.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Derek