Mylene Drouin, director of Montreal Public Health, hopes the upcoming opening of a supervised drug inhalation center near an elementary school in the Saint-Henri neighborhood will help improve safety in the neighborhood.
• Read more: Parents are protesting a supervised withdrawal center near a school in the southwest
During a press conference on Friday, Ms. Drouin addressed the issue for the first time.
The Benoît Labre house, located to the southwest, will move into the new complex, located a few meters from Atwater Market and Victor-Rousselot Elementary School, where a supervised inhalation center will be located.
“It’s an existing center, but now it’s been replaced with 36 housing units,” he explains. That’s the plan. There are elderly people who are discharged, there are people with mental illness, and there is a small segment of clients who use drugs. It could be 10 people a day.
“In this centre, we are going to put two cubicles so that people don’t eat outside, people eat inside,” he adds. If they have toxic mental illness, they will be monitored. So we say it’s safe as is.
However, the director of public health in Montreal says he understands the concerns of parents of children attending the school in question.
“People’s fears are completely justified,” he said. We should not compare it with CACTUS or a center with very high efficiency and it is specialized for drug addiction.
The new campus plan has been approved in its entirety, but both cubicles must receive approval from Health Canada.
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