PEERS Alliance Faces Fierce Push-Back by Communities in PEI

Peers Alliance recently announced their plan to bring harm reduction supplies to communities outside the Charlottetown area. Every Monday members of the organization plan to travel West from Charlottetown and make stops in various communities in order to distribute supplies which include syringes, pipes and cookers among others. On Thursdays they plan to travel East and visit various communities there with the same intention.

Although the Adventure Group has received the most backlash for the debacle of the recently relocated Outreach Center last winter, PEERS Alliance was not left unscathed. Many residents in the area questioned the activities of PEERS Alliance at the Outreach Center and how their actions might have contributed to a spike of crime in the area.

Unfortunately, the King government was not interested in telling the public who exactly was responsible for turning the Outreach Center into an unauthorized injection site. At the end of the day nobody was ever held accountable and no apology was ever made to the residents in the area.

Having seen what harm reduction did to the neighborhoods near the Outreach Center, it appears many residents in these rural communities are not interested in PEERS Alliance doing the same thing in their towns. Plenty of messages were posted to PEERS Alliance’s Facebook post stating they were not welcome in their communities.

The board of the Tignish Arena has also made it clear they were neither consulted nor approve of the actions PEERS Alliance plans to take.

It seems tensions are high and PEERS Alliance has since deleted many of those messages and numerous people are reporting being blocked from their Facebook group.

PEERS Alliance was contracted to run the Island’s first supervised injection site but the city of Charlottetown voted to deny a permit for the Park Street location last September. It seems like the King government does not have any plans at the moment to move forward with another location — most likely due to the negative reaction the Outreach Center has received.

The government has admitted that members responsible for the Center had instituted a policy of allowing clients to consume drugs in the parking lot. This essentially turned the Center into an injection site.

It now appears that PEERS Alliance has no clear path for implementing their agenda and has to instead settle for this mobile outreach.

It remains to be seen what type of effect these new activities will have on communities if they are allowed to proceed.

In their latest annual report, PEERS Alliance stated they received upwards of $250,000 from the Department of Health and more money from Social Development for “street outreach.” It would be beneficial to learn if the funds released by the Province actually allow for this type of specific outreach to take place.

Since Bloyce Thompson, the Minister for Public Safety, refused to investigate illegal drug use at the Outreach Center, the public is still unaware of how much of a role PEERS Alliance played in that debacle. Regardless, it seems a lot of residents in these communities do not trust them.

It will be be interesting to see how the government reacts. Will they keep supporting PEERS Alliance despite the public becoming increasingly more skeptical of them? Or will they begin to pull back funding and focus more on treatment rather than enabling?

Time will tell.