WARMINGTON: TTC being used as hotel beds makes transit unsafe for everybody

· Toronto Sun

Just call it Hotel 501.

Visit asg-reflektory.pl for more information.

Or the 501 Hotel. Many people coming down from their narcotics fixes call it home.

Welcome to the zombie shelter on wheels. That’s the TTC streetcar where Lynne Brooks stumbled over four guests fast asleep at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

“It’s the 501 streetcar at Beech Avenue, in the Beaches travelling westbound,” said Brookes, who captured video of the passengers on her phone.

She has seen this before. It’s often not pretty on there.

“I’ve (seen) guys masturbating,” she said in disgust.

People relieving themselves on a transit ride is not uncommon either. These troubled souls don’t seem to care that there are families with children travelling on the same ride. They don’t care about the rules or basic decency or their health or anybody else’s. What they seem to care about is getting their drugs.

For some, these vehicles are an extension of the so-called harm reduction, safe-injection sites where addicts can get drug-ingesting paraphernalia and receive their drugs in peace. But once that delivery to their system has been achieved, then what?

Sleeping off drug highs

Head to the warm transit system – streetcars, buses and subway trains – and sleep off their crack high in peace and relative safety at no charge to them but at significant cost to the citizens who pay their taxes and the fares to ride on these transit systems. This may be comfortable for them but not for others on the same train car.

Actually, in some ways, when they are asleep it’s when they are at their most benign. The trip to and from the temporary beds on transit can sometimes be a problem.

As my friend John Moore , a caring person who is famous for his morning show on Newstalk 1010 but is quietly philanthropic in his efforts to help homeless people and specifically homeless youth, was telling me by email during March break, he bumped into a scary incident at Osgoode Station where a woman was “punching the hell out of a guy’s face.” Concerned for the man, John assertively yelled for her to “get off this train!”

She did. But not until after she “charged toward” John before deciding to run up the escalator. John put his life at risk to help another citizen.

Everybody knows that stabbings , fires, and assaults that has resulted in murders and woundings on the TTC over the years have stemmed from these kinds of incidents.

This is not normal

None of what they and others face daily on the TTC or on Toronto’s streets is normal. No matter their political persuasion, all sides need to put their heads together and not allow the transit system to be the catch basin for the city’s drug crisis. There is nothing safe about this — for those who have drug and mental health issues, or for anybody else on board. Many of these fellow human beings are rotting alive in public with no structure in place to stop it. Lynne said she watched a “guy with gangrene that stank so bad” that she “called an ambulance.”

These stories are everywhere in Toronto. The addicts stay close to their drug supply, which being on the transit line provides them.

It will be interesting to see if Toronto lets them stay checked in for the free housing when the world arrives here for the FIFA World Cup of soccer. With the stabbings and open inhaling of drugs on the TTC , there will be hell to pay if a visitor is killed or wounded if they do.

Former mayors weigh in

Meanwhile, as Premier Doug Ford’s government wants to move away from funding safe injection sites as a model in favour of a $550-million abstinence-based approach through HART (Homelessness and Addiction Recovery Treatment) hubs, six former Toronto mayors – John Tory, David Miller, David Crombie, Art Eggleton, Barbara Hall and John Sewell — want it to stay as is.

In a letter they signed to the government, they wrote “these decisions to close sites, which provide integrated health and social services as well as facilities to test drug supply, have caused much physical harm and death and have resulted in increased public expenditures, without resulting in any positive impacts.”

But all of these mayors — who have had their chance but failed on this file — have never offered to let any of these drug addicts in need of a place to slumber check into a couch in their homes or pass out in the back of their cars.

Seems the rolling zombie hotel strategy for resting between highs is something they prefer Toronto to stay with.

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