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Because the drugs involved are legal when prescribed, the program does not require a special exemption, as supervised-injection sites for illegal drugs do. But Inner City Health has contacted both the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario and the Ontario College of Nurses about the plan and for support.

Inner City Health, which provides health care to Ottawa’s homeless, has been thinking about introducing the program for some time, said executive director Wendy Muckle, but the fentanyl crisis has made the need urgent.

“We can’t sit around and talk about this any longer. This is like you are in a war zone, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” she said.

As she talked about the program Thursday morning, staff members from Inner City Health were being dispatched with naloxone kits to check on a large group of men shooting up on the sidewalk on Murray Street, some of them lying on the sidewalk beside a construction site, near the Shepherd’s of Good Hope.

This was the start of “cheque day,” when government cheques are mailed out. It’s considered the worst day of the month for those working with addicts because drug usage and overdoses spike and scenes such as the Murray Street “shooting party” become more common.

Drug overdoses have ramped up dramatically in Ottawa since the beginning of the year, said Muckle. In June, the organization saw an average of an overdose a day. In February, two of its longtime clients died from overdoses.