New study obscures what's going on

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The authors of a study that concludes supervised injection sites in Toronto didn’t cause increases in crime kicked off the new year with a coordinated media blitz to promote their findings.

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On Jan. 9, one of the study’s co-authors, Dimitra Panagiotoglou, an associate professor at McGill University and Canada Research Chair in the Economics of Harm Reduction, appeared on a radio show in Montreal; I was interviewed in the next segment.

The program’s host, Elias Makos, began his discussion with Panagiotoglou by reading some headlines about her study. The first one was: “Supervised consumption sites aren’t linked to increased crime.” The second: “No link between supervised consumption sites and crime rates.”

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“Do those headlines accurately describe what you found?” Makos asked.

“No,” Panagiotoglou responded. She said it was more complicated than that.

The researcher explained that the study, published online in JAMA in late November, was prompted by the Government of Ontario announcing in August of 2024 that it planned to prohibit injection sites from operating within 250 metres of schools and daycare facilities in part due to concerns about criminal activity around such sites.

Panagiotoglou said that her study, using publicly available online crime data from the Toronto Police Service, determined that from the time Toronto sites opened in 2017 to June 30, 2024 “there was no consistent evidence of increases in crime.”

She conceded some exceptions, though. For example, there was an “immediate” increase of about 50 per cent in break and enters “across multiple sites.” She also said that some sites, such as the one I live across the street from in east Toronto, the South Riverdale........

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