Parents speak out after children find drug paraphernalia, used needles in Halifax – Halifax

Halifax-area parents are raising concerns, saying children have found drug paraphernalia and, in one case, a child was stabbed by a discarded needle.

Five months ago, Emily Medford wouldn’t have batted an eye as her seven-year-old son played in a pile of leaves. That changed after he was pricked by a needle at a bus stop on Göttinger Strasse in the north of the city.

“You’re scared because you don’t know, was the person clean? What kind of drugs were they? And you don’t think, ‘Oh my God, I have to pack up this needle and take it to the hospital,'” she said.

“Just take your child and let’s go.”

Across the harbor in Dartmouth’s Highfield Park neighborhood, residents say they are used to seeing drug paraphernalia scattered on the streets, particularly at bus stops.

“My 2-year-old picks up everything, so he’s constantly picking things up off the floor,” said Karissa Duffy, who oversees the area. “Maybe there should be a sharps container at every bus stop. Maybe there should be one in front of every apartment building.”

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Medford told Global News she agrees with the idea of ​​supervised consumer sites and believes such sites could help.

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Duffy is not convinced.

“We should work towards more detox centers and not on a voluntary basis. Drugs take over everything. Addiction takes over the willingness to get help,” she said. “We have people who have no shelter and no food, so we are going to see more addictions because there are more people who have nothing.”

Some clinics in Nova Scotia – including the Open Door Clinic in Highfield Park – offer low-threshold opioid-assisted treatment as a means of harm reduction. Program participants receive prescriptions and can pick them up at their local pharmacy.

“People with substance use disorders never decide that this will be their life,” said Dr. David Saunders, an addiction doctor at the clinic. “I believe that people are born with a genetic predisposition to addiction and that social factors and trauma can contribute to this.”

Saunders said that while the number of people struggling with addiction has not increased, opioid use has.

“Eight years ago it would have been unusual to have people under 20 doing this work,” he said. “It is now common for there to be more and more people becoming addicted to opioids in late adolescence.”

— with a file from Rebecca Lau of Global News

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