First impressions are the most difficult impressions to shake, so the tourists so vital to our town’s survival will no doubt having a difficult time shaking off the fact that there is now a methadone clinic in Bancroft – and not on a side street, but on the main drag.
Why? And why there?
Well, the first “why” is easy. Bancroft, sad to say, does need a methadone clinic to deal with its addiction to opiates. That’s a fact.
If the numbers weren’t here, there’d be no business plan to support it. I know this, as well, because I sit on an advisory committee with the Bancroft Family Health Team.
Bancroft is not without its addicts.
The “why there” is not so easy to answer. It will look like a pharmacy from the outside, but only just.
It will be a facade, leaving many to wonder how such a small outfit could compete with the IDA across the street or the Shoppers up the road.
The answer will soon be obvious.
The main street of Bancroft is hardly attractive. There are closed shops, and struggling businesses.
And now, instead of beautifying the street, we’ll have a methadone clinic dead centre.
What will the tourists think of that?
Categories: General
Why do we have a methadone clinic in Owen Sound? Some have suggested that this clinic is a cash cow for the doctors who own it. That could only be because there are enough opiate addicts in the region to give them a brisk business. So the more important question is why do we have so many addicts? People use drugs for relief of physical and emotional pain. Hopelessness, stress, loneliness, illness, grief, low self-image, even extreme boredom. Highly addictive drugs like the opiate family of painkillers — OxyContin, Percocet, codeine, morphine and heroin — bring their own pain whenever the user withholds them from the re-wired brain.
Mark Bonokoski has disclosed in his recent commentary that the new Guardian being built on the main street of Bancroft is in fact going to be a methadone clinic.