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Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, a prominent harm reduction researcher known as the godfather of Toronto’s injection sites, provided testimony in a court hearing early this year that asserted there is “no evidence” that such sites “lead to increased drug selling.”

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Bayoumi’s testimony was contained in an affidavit he provided as an expert witness in litigation initiated by an injection site in Toronto’s Kensington neighbourhood that argued a new Ontario law prohibiting such sites within 200 meters of schools and daycares violates the Charter rights of drug users.

In the same affidavit, Bayoumi referred to a review he and his team conducted of the injection site in the South Riverdale Community Health Centre, which I happen to live across the street from on the east side of Toronto, after a mother of two young children, Karolina Huebner-Makurat, was killed in a gun fight between drug dealers in front of the site on July 7, 2023. Bayoumi had overseen “community consultation” sessions months after that tragic incident and heard from about 50 neighbours of the site “that there was a noticeable presence of drug selling” outside of it.

Bayoumi was not terribly moved by what he’d heard from people who lived and operated businesses near the South Riverdale injection site. He dismissed their concerns as “anecdotal evidence” — the weakest form of evidence in his opinion, something that shouldn’t be used to drive policy decisions.

It is against this backdrop of what constitutes compelling evidence and what doesn’t that the ongoing trial of the man charged with Huebner-Makurat’s murder, Damian Hudson, unfolds in a Toronto courtroom.

Three weeks into Hudson’s murder trial, it is now abundantly clear why Bayoumi’s review studiously avoided delving into the topic of drug dealing around the........

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