“Four and a half years,” says Gonidis, 31, as if she can’t believe it herself.

Some days she can’t. She vividly remembers depending on this site, east of downtown while homeless and addicted to fentanyl. Today she is in recovery, working as a hospital peer-support worker, and going back to school to study social work. But she says she wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her family and the staff at the sites.

Moss Park started as an unsanctioned tent erected by activists, the first of its kind in Ontario, in response to a generation-defining public health crisis that was killing thousands. Since it opened, its staff has reversed more than 4,000 overdoses. On Saturday, it closes its supervised consumption site for good, alongside nearby Fred Victor, due to the Ford government slashing funding for the service provincewide.

The closures are expected to place further strain on an area already buckling under pressure: a neighbourhood with the city’s lowest life expectancy, a dense concentration of social services and homeless shelters and one of the highest rates of EMS calls for overdoses. Consumption sites in other parts of the city are seeing huge surges in client volumes after nine community and shelter-based safe consumption sites closed in 2025, while ones continuing to operate with private funding are anxious about an influx of new clients.

Outside the Moss Park building on a hot June day, clients here are living on borrowed time. One man leaning against the building’s facade lights an unidentified substance under a piece of tinfoil, before a staff worker pokes his head out scolds him for smoking drugs out front. A woman with a vacant stare leans against a friend. The wail of ambulance sirens constantly cuts through the air.

Within the unassuming brick building are tales of hope and despair, a refuge for the city’s most vulnerable, a place where life and death are negotiated daily.

Moss Park was always known as a neighbourhood with rough edges. Joe Furfaro, who owns Moss Park Espresso, directly between the Moss Park and Fred Victor sites, said the clients rarely cause him trouble, but they hurt business.

“Half the storefronts on this block are empty,” he said. “I close at 6 p.m. As a gelato shop, that should be my busiest time of night during the summer. But nobody’s here.”

Furfaro, like many Torontonians, is frustrated seeing tents in parks or people using drugs on the TTC. But he still supports both consumption sites; he said when the nearby Regent Park site closed last year, he noticed more people on the street in “bad shape.”

“If you can save a life, you should,” Furfaro said. “But it seems some lives are more meaningful than others.”

Back at the Moss Park site, Gonidis’s friend Dina Hartrick, still a regular user of the site, jokes about how she still remembers Gonidis’s arm tattoo: The Serenity Prayer, a mantra in Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous circles to stay on the straight and narrow.

“I felt bad shooting up in it,” Gonidis says wryly. 

Gonidis used to bounce around Moss Park, Fred Victor and now-closed The Works to use their consumption sites and credits them for saving her life. She reminisces as she walks, pointing to park benches and stairwells she would sleep on, corners she’d frequent to cop her next fix.  

Then one day, during routine bloodwork, she learned she was pregnant.

“I was terrified,” Gonidis recalled. “I was just like, how? I have nowhere to live. I’m a junkie. I can’t take care of myself.

“I knew I wanted her, but I just didn’t know how it was going to work out.”

While the two upcoming closures are concentrated in one part of town, ripples will likely be felt citywide. Workers say they’re seeing more public overdoses, depending on EMS services more frequently and seeing a deluge of new clients at existing sites.

This wave of closures, including two in Toronto and nine provincewide, coincides with public health officials contending with an extremely toxic drug supply. Potent tranquilizers, in particular, have resulted in more complex overdoses responses that often require hospitalization.

In April, the number of non-fatal suspected opioid overdose EMS calls in Toronto was the highest monthly total since 2021, while both fatal and non-fatal were higher than the previous six-month average.

“The drug supply has never been worse,” said OPS supervisor Matt Johnson at Street Health, among three remaining privately funded supervised consumption sites in the city.

“Last month, we called 911 for half of our overdoses,” Johnson added. “And every single one was because of the low and slow heartrates.”

Clients have skyrocketed at the Kensington Market site since last summer, said Bill Sinclair, executive director of the The Neighbourhood Group Community Services. It recorded a quadrupling in clients, from 417 in August 2025 to 1,602 in May 2026.

 “Any idea that you can close sites and there’s no impact … is just not true,” Sinclair said.

Fred Victor CEO Keith Hambly said there’s no indication the funding for its soon-to-close supervised consumption site will be reinvested in the community, so his staff will have to do more with less.

He said they’re looking at extending their drop-in space hours and finding ways to retain the connections and trust they’ve built with clients who used the consumption site, so they can still assist them with health care, housing and other services.

In a statement, Toronto Public Health said it has been bringing in different city divisions and community organizations to address the impact of the closures. It continues to offer harm reduction services, Naloxone (to reverse opioid overdoses) and substance use supports.

“Closures may also contribute to more visible drug use, increased congregation and more discarded drug paraphernalia in public spaces, placing additional pressure on municipal services,” TPH said, in addition to increased risk of fatal overdoses.

“Instead of giving people tools to use harmful, illegal drugs, our government is helping people break the tragic cycle of drug addiction by making record investments in more mental health and wrap-around supports.”

Gonidis said she grew up in a “good family” and was close with her parents. She dabbled in substances in high school but didn’t get heavily into opioids until the loss of a close relative.

Gonidis would sometimes avoid hospitals, saying drug users are often treated poorly. When she got pregnant, workers from the consumption sites walked her to ultrasounds and appointments.

“There was no judgment,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine what I’d have gone through all those years without those sites.”

Hartrick started coming to the Moss Park consumption site to use fentanyl after about 15 overdose hospitalizations.

“I can’t see how they think they’re going to save money when these sites probably save at least 10 ambulance calls a day.”

Trish Craw, Gonidis’s mother, remembers feeling helpless when she first found out her daughter was in trouble. Many nights, she walked the streets and alleys of Moss Park, trying to find her.

When she learned her daughter was using supervised consumption sites, she was skeptical. But when she entered one, her view changed. She said she was amazed at how clean and orderly it was, and it comforted her knowing there was a place her daughter was safe.

“I wish the public knew, because in my mind, I probably would have had to bury my daughter it was not for the sites and the support that is offered.”

Gonidis was still in an impossible situation: she knew she wanted her baby, but was unhoused and in active addiction.

“I could picture giving birth to her and somebody ripping her out of my arms,” she recalled. “And I didn’t want that.”

Gonidis ultimately delivered the baby and decided it would be best if her child lived with her mother while she got better.

With a long waitlist for a publicly funded bed, her family paid to get her into a private treatment facility. They spent about $50,000 to support her in her recovery journey.

“I don’t think I’d be where I am today without having the access to treatment right away,” she said, noting it took her three tries before achieving sobriety.

In a sense, Gonidis recognizes she is one of the fortunate ones. She completed treatment, and has family and friends, and supports others in their recoveries. While she’s worried about her friends who don’t have those supports after the sites closed, she’s grateful she has the one person that kept her going.

“The most important thing to me is that my daughter will never have a memory of me on drugs.”