” … 180 or 190 shelter beds we have provided through Hastings County with a warming shelter and we will have a warming shelter this year. Many of the homeless are drug addicts and they want a place where they can do their drugs, and land that they can form a formal encampment or some type of encampment.”
We asked Ma why there is such a crisis in the city.
“Belleville’s problem is that we’re the closest big city to Napanee, and that’s where prisoners – people get released here in Belleville. Now we have women getting released here that were just recently jailed, they get lost here in the system.”
A man helping to clean up the encampment at Market Square. (Photo: Tim Durkin/ Quinte News)
“My plan is to just go to the next corner and then when I get asked to leave there, I’m going to go to the next corner, and them I’m just going to keep cornering around until I get an answer.”
For many people in Belleville, patience is wearing thin and I asked her what she would say to the people who are getting fed up with everything that comes with the large encampment, including illegal activity, danger, theft, threats, and littering.
“You know we’re not all bad, we’re not all out doing drugs and drinking. We’re not that stereotype. Some of these people have real problems just like everybody else and the drug problems here in Belleville are real. If it was anyone in their own home, behind their four walls, it wouldn’t be as noticed. We don’t have four walls around us.”
Ma adds they want the city’s help so they can put down something stable.
“All we want is a piece of land or a piece of property that we will sign on, pay tax, we’ll pay whatever we need to to just be able to not have to push our carts around.”
I asked her what substances are being consumed by some of those on the streets.
“Fentanyl is a horrible drug, fentanyl is a pain reliever, they use it in hospitals. When people started using them at first, the (the drug) came in patches and they would cut the patches and they would put pieces on themselves, or they would suck on the patches, like a tab of acid. Now you can get it in powder form and there’s grades of it that they can give you. They call that “down” because that brings you way down.”
“Trank looks exactly the same, but the effects of it are, when you see someone passed out completely, they’re not nodding, they’re out, that is a trank drug. When we saw the differences, as a PSW I noticed it and the first day six people went down just like that and it was hard to bring them back – like 45 minutes. There’s two narcans in a narcan kit for a reason, that’s the maximum you’re supposed to use. You’re supposed to wait for someone’s heart to stop and breathing to alter before you use a nasal, right? That person’s going to wake up rather mad, because they just spent the money to get high and now someone’s taken it away from them. Sometimes it’s just about the routine and doing drugs, it’s the same with drinking, it’s the same with eating, it’s the same with going to the casino, all of it, it’s an addiction.”
Her full interview with us is below
We also chatted with “Preacher” also known as Colin Wright.
He says people are dying, even in the last few weeks.
An encampment that was taken down across from Market Square is slowly resurrected along the Moira River, across from City Hall. (Photo: Tim Durkin/ Quinte News)
An encampment set up along the Moira River, across from Belleville City Hall. (Photo: Zach McGibbon/ Quinte News)
