I totally agree. I've actually worked with Cactus, the group of people who are investigating. I guess the government has asked Cactus to be the front-line people in Montreal. I've been out to Montreal numerous times and worked with Cactus. You know, one only has to go up to St-Hubert Street to realize that it would be a perfect place to have a supervised injection site, and I think they're doing the right thing. I also believe that one of the things they're looking at, the mobile unit, is an extraordinarily good idea. That way, if there were all of a sudden an area that was overrun by, I guess, the drug issue, you could go in there and put a stopgap measure in there right way while you build up other services around it.
It's really important to get the people involved at that level. People on the streets are so paranoid. It's funny; they've changed their ideas of the police in Vancouver because of people like Scott Thompson and his crew, but they're so paranoid about police and the government and everything, thinking all they want to do is put them in jail or whatever and they don't want to help them, that it's very, very hard to get to those people. A mobile unit, I think, would be an incredibly good way of getting people involved in the medical aspect of their addiction.
It took me 30 years to walk through the doors and finally say, “I can't do this; I need help”. I tried many other times, and usually there was about a two- or three-week wait. By that time my circumstances had changed and, you know, I had left.
I think what Montreal is doing, and the whole Quebec government, is a really good idea.