Our Patrons Aren’t the Problem: Discourses of Safety Amidst a Toxic Drug Supply Crisis
In Brief
The toxic drug supply crisis has had profound impacts on workers in Canadian public libraries. While library workers struggle with changing job duties, understaffing, and the mental and emotional toll of laboring during death times, narratives of unsafety that pivot on “mental health and addiction” challenges experienced by our patrons have come to dominate library discourse and entrench an antagonism between library workers and our patrons. Using Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) theorization of affective economies, I will interrogate the “safety and security crisis” in Canadian public libraries as a discursive formation that relies on what, after Ahmed, I call the “sticky associations” between drug use, homelessness, mental health, and violence. It is through this process of articulating “violent associations” that delineate the ‘victim’ and the ‘perpetrator’ that the constitutive antagonism of library worker vs patron forms. In this article I will examine how mainstream media, library leadership, and library researchers contribute to a narrative of unsafety that hinges on the individuation of threat, safety, and solution. I then turn to how library workers make sense of, and act on, their affective experiences of threat and unsafety. Finally, I offer suggestions for how a labor framework of Occupational Health and Safety can be mobilized to address the structural and legislated violence shaping library work.
Introduction
My first week at a Toronto Public Library (TPL) branch I was put in-charge. Due to high turnover and understaffing, this is not as uncommon as one might hope. I was anxious, but less about what “incidents” could occur, and more about how I might be seen as responding to them. I was at a branch in the middle of a reckoning – a breakdown of trust between management and frontline staff who felt their wellbeing was not taken seriously. When an incident occurred, staff waited to see if their safety was prioritized and if management’s response was proportionate to the harm they felt they had experienced. We wore walkie-talkies to communicate about branch happenings, which often included tracking people’s movement. There was a board in the workroom that had pictures of “banned patrons” pinned to it and a “call the police immediately” protocol for when certain people entered the building.
I knew that my new colleagues were watching to see how I responded to these early incidents. Would I call the police as soon as X walked into the branch? Would I enforce a zero-tolerance alcohol policy? It felt as if I was forced to make a choice: show my colleagues I value their safety by punishing patrons or honor my abolitionist commitment to non-punitive, transformative responses to conflict. This tension is not unique to a single branch, nor TPL. It has haunted my time at the public library. I have regularly found myself struck by the animosity many colleagues feel towards our patrons – the threat they experience from interactions I do not register, surveillance they so willingly participate in, and their eagerness to see patrons punished.
In a chaotic ecosystem ripe with despair and uncertainty, the enforcement of both formal and informal rules of conduct is an assertion of order. Library rules of conduct are the mechanism through which frontline workers express institution-backed boundaries. With very little power and a whole lot of responsibility, library workers are expected to maintain a “safe” and orderly library for patrons and staff. While library policy and job duties over-determine staff responses to challenging patron interactions, many library workers come to view institutional practices of punishment as strategies for personal safety. Presented with few alternatives, library workers regularly punish patrons for our declining work conditions and public expressions of large-scale abandonment and legislated violence that we are under-resourced to address.
In addition to profound poverty, the toxic drug supply crisis has wreaked havoc on poor, unhoused, and racialized communities. From January 2016 through March 2025, Canada recorded 53,821 opioid toxicity deaths, with 26,000 people dying of a drug poisoning in Ontario (Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation, 2024; Government of Canada, 2025). These preventable deaths are a direct result of the criminalization of drugs and the people who use them. As experts have repeatedly pointed out, neither punishment nor prohibition reduce drug use or prevent drug poisonings. Instead, prohibition fuels stigma, deepens the dangers of illicit and unregulated drug markets, intensifies poverty and homelessness, and drives up rates of preventable illness and death (Boyd et al., 2016). Rather than responding to this crisis with evidence-based solutions, Canadian provinces continue to cut funding for harm reduction programs that save lives while ramping up forced treatment policy and the policing of public drug use (Canadian Public Health Association, 2025). As the drug supply becomes less predictable and more toxic, provincial governments continue to entrench prohibitionist policies, deepening the public health emergency confronting communities across the country.
Increased drug use and drug poisonings at the public library are symptoms of these government policies. As library workers can attest, the complexities of dispossession and private life turned public play out daily in the library. Some patrons exhibit signs of intoxication, fall asleep at computer stations, and experience drug poisonings in the library bathroom. Many patrons are frustrated at being abandoned by the state and the limited ability of the library to address gaps in social and health services. Other patrons are upset that they are confronted by a growing class divide while studying, attending a children’s storytime program, or picking up their holds. This anger is often directed at library workers trying to balance divergent and regularly oppositional desires of people sharing the library.
In a climate of collective unsafety, personal safety is both a real concern for people paid to interface with the public and a discourse that state institutions, including the library, use to assert order in a time of heightened instability. Library workers labor at the crux of this contradiction. While library workers have experienced increased violence and harassment on the job, they are also witness to tremendous human suffering intensified by the dismantling of social services (CUPE Research, 2023; Stevenson, 2021). The knot of bad feelings, or discomfort, brought on by all of the above experiences is often hard to untangle. Library workers are not only frustrated by the expanding scope and emotional toll of their work, but many have expressed feeling unsafe. Safety, as a framework for discussing the demands of public library work, and a lens through which to advocate for better work conditions, has come to dominate library discourse. While this framework may give voice to library workers struggling with the changing demands of their job, terms like violence, safety, and security are power-laden, doing the discursive work of the library seeking to re-assert order and a political project reliant on the dispossession and dislocation of marginalized people.
When fear stands in for a host of other affective experiences resourced by power, it overdetermines how we respond. While library workers, just like all workers, deserve a workplace free of violence, we must resist the co-option of our experiences by institutions with investments in punishing the working class. Safety is undoubtedly at the forefront of conversations about the Canadian public library. However, its usage needs to be further interrogated if what we desire is true, collective safety for everyone in the library. Safety, as prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba (2024) reminds us, is a social relation articulated through access to material resources and our relationships with others (para. 8). When people have what they need to live full, healthy lives free from legislated violence, communities are better resourced to respond generatively and restoratively to conflict.
In what follows, I hope to identify and unsettle the discourse of safety that pits library workers against their patrons, locating the source of unsafety in the patron, and the solution in their disciplining. Using Sarah Ahmed’s (2004) theorization of affective economies, I will interrogate the “safety and security crisis” in Canadian public libraries as a discursive formation that relies on what, after Ahmed, I call the “sticky associations” between drug use, homelessness, mental health, and violence. Sara Ahmed offers the language of the affective economy to name how “emotions circulate between bodies and signs” and “align individuals with communities – or bodily space with social space – through the very intensity of their attachments” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 119). It is through this process of articulating “violent associations” that delineate the ‘victim’ and the ‘perpetrator’ that the constitutive antagonism of library worker vs patron forms.
In the first half of this article I look at the different mechanisms that work to affix associations of homelessness, substance use, mental health, and violence to one another in library discourse. In particular, I examine how mainstream media, library leadership, and library researchers contribute to a narrative of unsafety that hinges on the individuation of threat, safety, and solution. I then turn to how library workers engage the changing landscape of their work. Drawing from my own experiences as a librarian, union representative, and organizer with Library Workers For Supervised Consumption Sites (LW4SCS), I share insights on how library workers act on their affective experiences of threat and unsafety. In the final section of this paper, I offer suggestions for how a labor framework of Occupational Health and Safety can be mobilized to address the structural and legislated violence shaping public library work.
Yes, library workers are struggling with the changing demands of their jobs. We are increasingly caught in the crossfire of the war on drugs. However, rather than capitulate to dominant narratives that criminalize our communities, we have a responsibility to resist becoming willing agents of institutional violence against our patrons.
Library Work in Death Times and the Defining of an Antagonism
The frequency and intensity of emotionally charged interactions with patrons mirrors a deepening racial wealth divide across Canada. The introduction of the Canadian welfare state rollbacks in the late 1980s, major cuts to social services, wage stagnation, an affordable housing crisis, and the rapidly rising cost of living have concentrated wealth in the hands of some, while further disenfranchising others. In Toronto, where market speculation and corporate landlords have hastened the affordable housing crisis, there are over 15,000 people without a home each night (Facts about Homelessness in Toronto, n.d.). This astounding number is only part of the story: approximately 1 in 3 Indigenous adults in Toronto are either precariously housed or sleeping rough (McConkey et al., 2024). Black Torontonians make up 31% of the city’s unhoused population while only constituting 7.5% of the whole population (Black Communities and Homelessness, n.d.). Twenty-one percent of youth in Toronto shelters identify as 2SLGBTQ (2SLGBTQ Youth Homelessness in Canada, 2016). The racial and gendered dynamics of state abandonment and immiseration in Toronto, while on a particular scale, echo across the country.
As I write this article in the fall of 2026, 16 supervised consumption sites (SCS) in Ontario have shut down, while the remaining 8 lost provincial funding in June. Beyond safe places to use drugs, these closures eliminated other life saving services offered at SCS, including drug checking services, primary care, housing support, and grief counseling. Alongside these closures, Ontario has moved to further criminalize public drug use. The Safer Municipalities Act, passed June 3, 2025, gives police power to clear encampments on suspicion of drug use, arrest those who don’t leave, and impose fines up to $10,000 or jail terms up to six months. This crackdown makes it harder for outreach services to reach people where they are, while exposing them to greater risk of police violence and incarceration. With few safe, private places left to use drugs, public drug use has increased, including at the library, which offers bathrooms, good lighting, a weather controlled environment, and a place to rest. As Jackson Davis, Isobel Heintzman, and Aditi Mehta (2025) identify, TPL has increasingly become a haven for precariously housed and disenfranchised Torontonians.
While library management seeks to introduce new positions, partnerships, and policies to address the impact of the toxic drug supply and housing crisis on their institutions, library workers continue to feel unsupported and ill-equipped to deal with these dynamics as they play out in real time (Saunders, 2025). The fissure between the vision of library leadership and employees’ experiences of that vision result in library workers being disillusioned and distrustful of management (Stevenson, 2022). With little power to make institutional or structural change, library workers grasp for action within their control, turning to what Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes (2023) call “rituals of order” – the reliance on systems of policing and punishment to resolve conflict, even when they rarely lead to resolution or safety (Hayes & Kaba, 2023, p. 33). In the library, these rituals include disciplinary actions, namely warnings, exclusions, and calling the police, that escalate even minor tensions. These actions locate the problem in the patron and the solution in their disciplining, reifying an antagonism that pits library workers against patrons. This antagonism leads to library workers punishing patrons and advocating for punitive policy and procedure that hurt all working class people.
Obviously, this antagonism does not start or end with library workers. The very foundations of the public library are based in class anxiety – the late 19th century idea that an increasingly agitated poor and working class base (during a time of labor unrest) needed to be pacified and transformed into productive and law-abiding citizens through soft power (Augst, 2007). The regulation of the social body, which necessarily includes formal and informal threats to its unity, permeates the public library’s history as well as its current day social-spatial architecture. From racially segregated libraries, to police enforced late fines, to turning over patron information to government agencies, to high tech securitization, libraries have always participated in the surveillance and policing of marginalized patrons (Kaba, 2025). These practices of social regulation in the library recreate historical inclusions and exclusions, defining public space as belonging to some people while being threatened by others. Many workers, tasked with enforcing the rules of the library and maintaining order in the branch, come to perform the disciplinary function of the institution not just because their job depends on it, but due to their own affective attachments to particular ideas of safety and security.
During a period of intensified neo-liberal austerity, it is no surprise that the regulation of poor and working class people comes to mark the current crisis of the Canadian public library. Rooted in narratives of declining “safety and security,” media and professional reports frame the challenges facing the public library as a result of a growing surplus population with “complex needs” (CULC, 2023; Ghobrial, 2026; Zoledziowski et al., 2024). While committed to “access for all,” immiseration has outpaced the public library’s ability to serve marginalized patrons. In 2023, the Canadian Urban Library Coalition’s (CULC) Safety and Security Working Group – comprised of prominent library leaders and representing more than 50 of the largest public library systems in Canada – declared that “mental health and addictions” prevent the library from performing its literacy function, keeping its workers safe, and maintaining an environment open to everyone. Even while compassionate library workers and committed library leadership seek to address the needs of their patrons, the sticky discursive associations that have come to identify this crisis accumulate as a limit to the possibilities of meaningfully addressing it.
Quantifying a Safety and Security Crisis in Canadian Public Libraries
There has been an increase in high intensity acts of violence in Canadian libraries over the last 5 years. Canadian news outlets have met this intensification with an uptick of coverage regarding safety and security in public libraries. Articles with headlines such as “Library workers punched, spat on as security incidents rise, data shows” and “Library staff facing security issues, including verbal abuse, drug use in branches” exemplify this trend (Ruby, 2025; Zoledziowski et al., 2024). Specific events include a staff assault at the Thunderbay Public Library, a mass stabbing at the Vancouver Public Library, and the 2022 murder of Tyree Cayer at the Winnipeg Public Library (Ketonen, 2025; Travers & Ridgen, 2023). Journalistic accounts of these painful events draw on aggregated incident stats, library tours, and interviews with library staff and leadership. The grand narrative is of a Canadian public library under siege and in decline: a chaotic environment where workers and patrons feel unsafe and the library is unable to honor its primary mission of meeting the literacy demands of its community.
As library workers, we know the importance of critical media literacy. Drawing a story of declining safety from generic incident data is a red herring. In the library world, incidents are the quantitative metric for tracking when and how often library codes of conduct are breached and medical emergencies occur. For library workers, incidents are part of the job. A sample of non-violent behaviours that constitute an incident across many Canadian libraries include: sleeping, excessive noise or disruption of others, having an animal that is not a service animal in the library, food and drink in undesignated areas, intoxication, possession of open alcohol, drugs, or drug paraphernalia, theft, and trespassing (CULC, 2023, pp. 9–10). The reality is that the majority of incidents in Canadian public libraries are non-violent.
Mainstream journalists tasked with covering “safety and security” in the public library often rely on incident logs as the raw data for their reports. For example, a 2024 CBC article cites a 71% spike – from 1,362 to 2,334 – in incidents at the Toronto Public Library (TPL) between 2022 and 2023 (Zoledziowski et al., 2024, para. 4). According to CTV News, the Hamilton Public Library recorded 771 incidents involving security during the first 5 weeks of 2026 (Ghobrial, 2026, para 4). While these numbers may be alarming, it is important to note that they are an aggregate of incidents ranging from mundane to violent. Neither story distinguishes between stats on serious cases in which library workers or patrons are in an unsafe environment – as in the presence of a weapon – and minor incidents of inconvenience – a noise violation, for example.
In fact, according to the CULC Safety and Security Toolkit, a study of 33 Urban Canadian library systems determined that violent incidents made up only 0.001% of all visits to the library (p. 42). In addition to limited violent incidents, the majority of incidents tracked by these 33 libraries fall under the categories of harassment, drugs or alcohol (including possession of paraphernalia and intoxication), and trespassing by banned patrons (CULC, 2023, p. 42).
Disaggregating incident data provides a more nuanced view of the difficulties facing the public library. It also troubles the categorical slippage of what otherwise might be called insubordination into violence and threat. Despite what some Canadian news outlets might have us believe, the library is not a place where random acts of physical violence are inescapable. It is a place where the complexities of life within a white supremacist settler colonial capitalist order are lived out publicly. This includes the many ways that people marginalized by systems of power make sense of their lives and prioritize survival. Substance use, intoxication, dissociation, and emotional or psychological distress all flow downstream from state violence directed at Indigenous, Black, queer, poor, and disabled people living in Canada. The sustained material and psychological harm of legislated violence often results in visible expressions of pain and adaptive strategies of survival. As people in the harm reduction and disability justice communities remind us, these are reasonable responses to subjugation.
Nevertheless, substance use, intoxication, and drug poisonings are key fulcrums on which these narratives of safety and insecurity pivot. Library leadership and professional organizations regularly conflate rare experiences of extreme violence with symptoms of the capitalist crisis under the banner of unsafety: houselessness, racialized policing, and a toxic drug supply. A drug poisoning, for example, is a medical emergency requiring medical attention. Though often scary for the responder, the person experiencing a drug poisoning is at risk of serious brain damage or death. Drug poisonings, just like public drug use and intoxication, are not inherently violent. Still, in most libraries, drug poisonings, drug use, and intoxication are tracked and treated as violent incidents. This is not just a matter of mislabelling. The framing of a safety and security crisis in which public libraries are overwhelmed with violent incidents due to “drug addictions and mental health” collapses categorically different forms of harm. Within this framework a medical emergency like a drug poisoning becomes indistinct from a disruptive but non-violent behavior like sleeping at a computer station or an act of interpersonal violence. This logic transforms distinct situations into an environment of undifferentiated threat, wherein a non-violent event equally contributes to the library as a site of unsafety. Through this collapse, we lose the ability to be precise about the challenges facing public library workers and the diverse responses these challenges require.
To put it another way, the process of creating an abstract and undifferentiated category of incident, feeds the carceral myth that people who use substances are a public safety threat while leaving the conditions that create public drug use and a toxic drug supply crisis unconsidered. Substance use and intoxication are not inherently violent or dangerous. In fact, people who use drugs experience interpersonal violence at disproportionately high rates, not to mention the violence of state neglect, policing, prohibition, and incarceration (Swaich et al., 2023). There are real safety issues associated with the toxic drug supply crisis, most urgently, death. It is through harm reduction, decriminalization, safe supply, affordable housing, and robust social services that we can begin to address the roots of the crisis. Conceiving of public drug use primarily as a safety and security threat to those who witness it imposes a distinction between “innocent patrons” (read sober, housed, white) who deserve safety and “problem patrons” (however outdated we like to think this framing is in library literature). These are racialized, classed, and colonial designations. Often, the very presence of people who use drugs or who are intoxicated (or who are merely assumed to be intoxicated because of their appearance or affect) triggers an alarm. Working as a public librarian in two large Canadian cities, I witnessed how complaint-based rules of conduct grounded in the vague language of “respect and consideration” resulted in the regulation not only of people’s behaviour towards others, but patrons’ state of mind, physical presentation, and use of space. The discomfort that some people experience when being in proximity to vectors of social abandonment and immiseration they are not used to interacting with becomes perversely rendered harm in and of itself. Disregard or transgression of social norms around hygiene, sobriety, and the use of public space are regularly surveilled and punished by both staff and patrons – a structural problem disguised as interpersonal conflict. It is not uncommon that after a complaint, a patron may be told they cannot return to the library until they have showered or sobered up, that they must leave their belongings outside before entering, or that they must quiet or quit the conversation with voices only they can hear. The consequences of these regulatory decisions are profound and often have dangerous impacts for our patrons most impacted by the war on drugs.
Data, aggregated or not, requires interpretation. While alarming numbers might help convey the magnitude of the crisis in public libraries, the articulation of fear and unsafety that accompany these stats give them an affective substance. By collapsing varied incidents into a single category of violence, diverse instances of discomfort on the job come to be experienced by workers as violence even when they are clearly not. In an affective economy where poverty is circulated in and through disgust or violence, fear and anxiety binds patrons and workers together along familiar classed and racialized lines. It is this opposition, wherein the presence of some leads to the perceived unsafety of others, that determines how discipline and punishment is exercised in the library. Together with stats and images (real and conjured), the affective experiences of library workers and patrons are central to the construction of a “safety and security” crisis in Canadian public libraries.
Framing a Safety and Security Crisis
Surveying Library Workers
The way library workers make sense of their experiences is shaped by broader discourse. As media and library leadership address the larger picture, library unions and scholars have increasingly turned attention to frontline workers’ experiences of safety (CUPE Research, 2023; Helfritz, 2018; Knox, 2024; LaPierre, 2021; Stevenson, 2021, 2022). Notable is Siobhan Stevenson’s 2022 survey of 527 library workers across four Canadian library systems about their experiences of third-party violence and incivility, which she frames as a continuum. In the survey section entitled “Feeling Safe”, Stevenson asks participants to consider “physical and sexual assault or threats thereof” alongside “rudeness, eye-rolling and a disrespectful attitude” (Stevenson, 2022, p. 338). The introduction continues: “essentially, any kind of negative interaction that leaves you hurt, feeling intimidated, fearful, or unsettled. It is important to note that you don’t have to experience these things personally to be affected negatively by them” (p. 340). Included in this section are questions about sexual assault, physical aggression, and “dealing with” substance use and mental health. When asked how often respondents felt unsafe – prefaced as including feeling “anxious, unsettled, disquieted, and vulnerable or physically unsafe” – 67% of respondents indicated they felt unsafe on a weekly or monthly basis (p.340).
Reflecting on the limitations of the survey, Stevenson acknowledges that situating questions about “feeling safe” within a continuum between incivility and violence “conflated and flattened affective nuances and differing subject positions” and “may have predisposed respondents to focus on their encounters with, and perceptions of, the less common experience of third-party violence over their exposure to incidents of incivility” (p.347). Stevenson goes on to highlight how “references to vulnerable and street-involved people and their characterization as threatening, for example, dominate the findings” (p.347). As Stevenson acknowledges, the survey instrument itself influences how workers come to interpret and report their experiences, collapsing meaningful differences in kind and severity into a single register of threat.
Notions of incivility have long served a disciplinary function in the library, rooted in ideas of respectability and used to police racialized, poor, and gendered bodies. That 73% of Stevenson’s respondents identified as white and 81% as female matters (p. 339). White womanhood serves as a marker of purity and white women have historically been positioned as “civilizing” agents of colonial and racial projects. As Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (2016) articulates, this led to the construction of the “Lady Bountiful” archetype in librarianship that fused patriarchal ideals of femininity with white supremacist missionary work. This legacy persists today, positioning the white woman librarian as the normative subject empowered to police, discipline, and manage “deviant” patrons under the guise of maternal benevolence and professional neutrality. The Lady Bountiful trope in library literature illuminates how “white supremacy and patriarchy have worked to produce a particular subject in librarianship” through which threats to civility are worked out and disciplined (Schlesselman-Tarango, 2016, p. 683).
Though Stevenson notes concerns about conflating incivility with violence, she does not interrogate incivility itself as a racialized, gendered, and classed category. Supplying frontline workers with a language for their experience, however validating, risks entrenching an interpretive lens in which behaviours such as substance use and intoxication fit into the same affective register as physical violence. This affective slippage is not confined to individual encounters or survey data. It scales up, providing the interpretive scaffolding for how library organizations, media outlets, and administrators frame substance use and mental health as an institutional crisis.
Sticky Associations and Policing the Homeless Body
It is undoubtedly true that public libraries across Canada have seen an increase in drug use and drug poisonings in their spaces. In 2022, the Edmonton Public Library (EPL) recorded almost 100 drug poisonings while TPL saw a 529% increase in suspected poisonings (CULC, 2023, p. 40; Zoledziowski et al., 2024, para. 4). In the first 3 months of 2025, SPL responded to nearly 50 drug poisonings (Warren, 2025), para. 3). This is the reality of the toxic drug supply crisis made worse by defunding harm reduction services and further criminalizing public drug use. The defunding of drug testing and poisoning reversal services alongside the grief and loss accompanying the closure of SCS has resulted in more drug poisonings in public, including the library. In the first 6 months after the initial closures of SCS in Ontario, there was a 69.5% increase in EMS-treated opioid toxicities and a 19.4% increase in opioid toxicity deaths (Kolla & Gomes, 2026, p. 3).
Even when leadership acknowledges the harms of the toxic drug supply crisis, the public library participates in stigmatizing, punishing, and criminalizing patrons who use drugs. Visible drug use, the presence of drugs or drug paraphernalia, and exposure to people who are intoxicated is treated as a safety and security issue. As examples, libraries like EPL and SPL have Code of Conduct rules about possession of substances and intoxication, ranging from a 1 day suspension up to a 6 month system wide suspension for repeatedly being caught with open alcohol or drugs (CULC, 2023, p. 10). Compounding punishment for ‘trespassing’ while banned from the library, can lead to months long suspensions for people who need the library most. Rules that regulate what a patron has on their person, and whether or not they are perceived as intoxicated, do not focus on the very real dangers associated with an unregulated and contaminated drug supply: exposure to biohazardous materials; or instances when intoxication is coupled with physical violence or harassment; and, most importantly, death. Instead, they seek to regulate deviant patrons that may upset the order of the library due to their embodiment.
Fig. 1: Edmonton public library code of conduct example (CULC, 2023, p. 10).
We need to be honest about what kind of substance use is targeted by code of conduct rules. When we talk about drug use in the public library, we are speaking directly to the intersection of poverty, homelessness, racialization, and street drugs. We need to be honest about the conditions under which people are forced to use in public due to the absence of housing, privacy, and now closed SCS. If we are still being honest, drugs are a survival strategy, and often a smart one. Drugs can help one cope with the unbearable suffering of state sanctioned violence and its accompanying grief; drugs can keep you alert and warm at night and they can keep hunger at bay; drugs can make you feel good and they can make you feel nothing. As the Indigenous Advisory Board at the Drug User’s Liberation Front (2023) reminds us, “illicit substances are necessary for many of us to continue surviving in unlivable conditions” (p. 5).
Through theorizing constructed associations between the asylum seeker and the international terrorist in Europe, feminist thinker Sara Ahmed (2004) helps us understand how the “homeless drug user” becomes a reified figure that circulates through social and cultural repetition, accumulating the affective residue of everything associated with it. Homelessness and drug use don’t have to exist together for this to work, they only have to be repeatedly proximate in discourse. Once that proximity is established, pity, fear, and revulsion don’t attach to particular behaviours but to the body itself, ready to be activated by anyone who fits its visible signs (an overflowing shopping cart, unkempt appearance, talking to oneself, nodding off).
For Ahmed, signs don’t have affective value on their own, affect is accumulated through repeated association, so that emotion appears to reside in an object or body when it has actually adhered there through a history of contact between signs. “Homeless,” “addict,” “dangerous,” “dirty,” “unstable” circulate together in media coverage, in policy language, and in conversations with co-workers. Through this repeated association, they begin to stick to one another, so that invoking one is enough to summon the affective charge of the others. A person doesn’t need to be observed using drugs to be deemed scary or wielding a weapon to be considered violent, the visible signs of homelessness are already sticky with the associations of drug use, criminality, and unpredictability, because those signs have circulated together so often that the boundary between them has dissolved.
Regardless of behaviour, the “homeless body” is a threat to the publicness of the library and the safety of its “average” (or in Ahmed’s terms, ordinary) patrons. The signs and associations not only stick to each other but to the object or body in question. Samira Kawash (1998) uses the language of the “the homeless body” to articulate the process through which the “ideological and discursive specter of homelessness” creates a sticky figure – one that “emerges as a particular mode of corporeality in contingent circumstances through which the public struggles to define and secure itself as distinct and whole” (Kawash, 1998, p. 324). It is through the act of exclusion of the homeless, drug-using body in all its supposed violence, that the public makes proprietary claims about spaces like the library. As Kawash says, public space comes to be seen as belonging to the public, of which homeless people are not part. It is the homeless body, Kawash articulates, that is “the stake and site of the contest over public space” (p.323).
By declaring the presence of embodied precarity experienced by an “overwhelming” number of library patrons a crisis of safety and security, new safety and security measures (security guards, trespass bans, carding policies, surveillence) become the logical response. The effect becomes the cause. For example, in a conversation with local Hamilton news channel CHCH (2026), HPL CEO Paul Takala told viewers that patrons who use drugs make the library unsafe for families, newcomers, and seniors, among other marginalized groups. In this declaration, Takala not only erased the intersecting experiences of people made vulnerable to state violence through legacies of white supremacist settler colonialism, xenophobia, and prohibitionist state policies, but made drug users the primary source of insecurity and unsafety in the library – the barrier preventing all other marginalized members of the community from flourishing.
This does not diminish the reality that all kinds of patrons do fucked up things at the library. Transphobia, homophobia, racism, misogyny, and ableism are regularly wielded against people who work at and use the library. Many of my most aggravating encounters have been with entitled, privileged patrons. These include racist mocking and sexual harassment of low-paid library staff; angry yelling when made to wait for the printer; and my personal favorite, the strong suggestion that we “could be the first library to permanently ban homeless people”. And still, a marginalized identity does not preclude someone from being aggressive, violent, or discriminatory. In attempting to disentangle ideas about harm at the library, I want to be careful to not suggest that things are not difficult, complicated, or anxiety-inducing, nor that people do not experience actual threat to their physical safety. However, how we respond to moments of crisis, conflict, and discomfort have real, material impacts for marginalized patrons. When discomfort around visible drug use leads to the banishment of an unhoused patron in the middle of winter, or when staff calling the cops to remove someone who is trespassing leads to criminalization, we must ask ourselves what kind of safety we prioritize and whether or not we truly feel that such actions meet our needs. Individual incidents of frustration, anger, and even violence need not undermine our project of seeking material, sustained safety that leaves no one behind.
Library Workers Responding to the Crisis and Rituals of Order
Rituals of Order
Fear, whether it registers or not, drives the impulse to reach for rituals of order. Fear of losing control of the branch, fear of losing your job, fear for your safety, and fear of the homeless body. As Kaba and Hayes say:
governed by fear, people are largely cooperative with systems that produce torture, mass death, and annihilation. That is the greatest danger that fear poses: not panic amid disorder, but co-operation with an order that we ought to find unspeakable – one that is actually poised to bring about our own distinction (p. 38).
When people are scared, they want to feel safe, they want a restoration to order. This is a human impulse, a reaction to emotional associations that are socially constructed and maintained but felt all the same. Attention to these impulses is important. They are informative even if not how we imagine. Safety promised by expulsion and criminalization allow us to quiet the bad feelings, ignore our own precarity, and detach from the conditions that position us closer to our patrons who use drugs than we want to admit.
However, safety is social and always in flux. It articulates a relationship to harm, including the structural distribution of harm (or absence of harm) within a society. “Safety isn’t a thing: it’s a social relation” Kaba reminds us. “I’m more or less safe depending on my relationship to others and to my proximity to the resources I need to survive” (Kaba, 2024, para. 8). Safety cannot be possessed, but is a function of social and economic relations that unevenly distribute state produced vulnerabilities. Unsafety is not just a feeling but a material reality for many. Wealth and whiteness are two major predictors of safety established through carceral infrastructure built to uphold their supremacy and protect them from threat. However, a vision of safety dependent on the disappearance of others is always tedious, subject to disruption by a mere encounter with the other.
Library workers must be involved in articulating processes of accountability and redress that do not pit us against our patrons. We must figure out how to respond to the difficulty of public library work during death times. For instance, when library workers and patrons are exposed to second-hand harms of substance use – exposure to biohazardous materials and sharps, people who may become aggressive when intoxicated, or the emotional impact of responding to an overdose – we can turn to strategies that help mitigate the harm. We can wear gloves and advocate for sharps disposals, practice de-escalation skills, and insist on paid time to self-regulate and process. Library workers must continue to demand access to resources that allow us to respond to our patrons with compassion, grace, and skill. This includes more staffing and better training, but it also includes SCS, affordable housing, food security and an end to the drug war. From resisting the discursive associations between violence, substance use, and intoxication in our language and our reporting mechanisms to showing up in solidarity with people being evicted from encampments, library workers can best advocate for better work conditions by recognizing that our struggle is connected to that of our marginalized patrons. Safety and security come from having our material needs met, from being in a community that cares for each other, and from learning the skills and building the infrastructure that supports us when things get tough.
Library Workers for Supervised Consumption Sites
Responsibility carries many valences in a workplace like the public library and competing needs rarely reconcile themselves. Patrons, co-workers, and leadership all have expectations that shape how staff respond to incidents. However, it is the wage-relation that often structures a prioritization of staff responsibilities. As the front-line representative of the institution, library workers absorb its liability almost by default. Property starts to outweigh people, and the loudest voice outweighs the most marginalized. This slide occurs not just because library workers want to keep their jobs or have their own investments in punishment, but due to an institutional liability framework that positions safety as an administrative problem rather than a relational one. As Ben Robinson (2019) describes, through the framework of liability, security is treated as one undifferentiated task, lumping fire and flood prevention, theft, digital privacy, and violent behavior into a single risk-management mandate. Bundled with it is a “security ethos” that deputizes staff to surveil and discipline patrons read as engaged in “suspicious activity” (Robinson, 2019, Section Fire, Flood, and Fist Fights). A security ethos and the tremendous amount of responsibility experienced by library works leads to hypervigilance often actioned through surveillance. And because a liability framework is built around assessing and neutralizing risk, its default responses are removal and punishment.
My desire is not to blame frontline library workers for the way we participate in the punishment of our patrons. Library workers, more than most, are aware of the social conditions that shape public space and thus our work. Staying tethered to the compassion and care that got many of us into the field in the first place is an ongoing practice. However, in the absence of meaningful support, resources, and compensation, library workers reach for what they know, and seek to restore order to an always fragile ecosystem. As I have written elsewhere, even those who resist the imperative to police our patrons or punish communities to which they belong, are regularly compelled by the wage relation to comply. While this too can create bad feelings or a sense of moral injury – an affective response to the alienation one feels due to the inability to direct their own labor – it does not diminish the real material impact such punitive practices have on our patrons (Cowley, in press).
As a founding member of Library Workers for Supervised Consumption Sites (LW4SCS) I have had the privilege of engaging many library workers across the province about their experience of the toxic drug supply crisis. LW4SCS formed in fall 2024 in response to Ontario’s Bill 223, the Safer Streets, Stronger Communities Act, which mandated the closure of SCS within 200 meters of schools and childcare centres. As library workers, we recognized that these closures would significantly impact our communities, our patrons, and our work. Beginning with an open letter to Premier Doug Ford, LW4SCS has since grown into a collective that holds regular meetings, compiles frontline data and testimony, publishes zines and articles, hosts workshops, presents at conferences and staff days, delivers board deputations, and pushes our individual locals into action.
Our central aim is to introduce frontline library workers’ voices into the conversation, and to give workers the space, time, and language to organize around the toxic drug supply crisis as it manifests in their workplaces. We believe that when we come together and engage in rigorous analysis and self reflection, we can produce an alternative conceptualization of the crisis that prioritizes collective safety over punishment. Grounded in the commitment that our right to safe and supported work must never be weaponized against patrons who use drugs, we believe we have a responsibility to push not only our employers but our unions to develop a substantive analysis of, and response to, the compounding crises of our time. LW4SCS seeks to create spaces where workers can sit with the complexity and contradiction inherent in frontline library work. As Harsha Walia offers, “complicity and solidarity are always entangled and not easily compartmentalized, and holding both together is the real challenge” (Walia, 2012, para. 9). Our futures are bound up with our patrons’, and thus LW4SCS rejects the premise that patrons are our enemies or that punitive measures can resolve either the toxic drug supply crisis or our own deteriorating working conditions. We encourage library workers to build skills, shift their language, find one another, and get organized. Together, we have the ability to transform not only the narrative around safety in the library, but practices that pit us against our patrons.
An Injury to One is an Injury to All
When it comes to evicting unhoused people, I want to remind people: [Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE)] members have the right to refuse unsafe work – work that endangers their lives or the lives of others. If any worker feels that participating in the eviction of unhoused people from encampments is unsafe, for themselves or for anyone, including the people who are homeless, they have the right to refuse that work (Hahn, 2023).
At a 2023 event put on by Voices for Unhoused Liberation in Toronto, CUPE Ontario President Fred Hahn reminded CUPE workers, in particular city workers tasked with dismantling encampments, that they have a right to refuse unsafe work. What has stuck with me about Hahn’s statement is the assertion that the right to refuse includes the right to refuse to endanger others. His statement not only names the connection between housing and safety, but positions workers as active agents with rights and responsibilities towards others, including unhoused people who are regularly and systematically denied access to safety. While I am not suggesting that library workers assert their right to refuse unsafe work in response to the toxic drug supply crisis – I am not certain we have the collective will to do this just yet – I do believe that health and safety mechanism such as the right to refuse provide leverage for workers who oppose the state violence they are expected to perform.
Despite the well-documented limits and betrayals of corporate unionism, labor organizing is one of the best tools available for library workers navigating the toxic drug supply crisis. As an analytic, labor provides us with a framework for linking our own exploitation with the precarity of our patrons. After all, how many library pages can afford to live anything but paycheck-to-paycheck in Toronto? As a tool, the union provides us with an avenue to operationalize this analysis. Unions ask us to redirect our anger away from our patrons and towards our employer and the larger structures that shape our work conditions. As a horizon, labor organizing requires us to collectively articulate and organize around our demands and link them to larger labor struggles. An injury to one is an injury to all.
Health and Safety (H&S) is the bread and butter of union organizing. Workers in Canada are guaranteed three basic health and safety rights: the right to know about hazards, the right to participate in workplace H&S decisions, and the right to refuse unsafe work (Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety Government of Canada, 2025). Together, these rights offer distinct yet interconnected points of intervention for library workers hoping to address the toxic drug supply crisis and the library’s punitive response. It is through the language of H&S that a facility manager at one of my branches argued for safe disposal containers and for PPE during Covid. Through H&S language, the TPL workers union, CUPE 4948 has been able to advocate for a 3 day leave after serious incidents, and push through “no working alone” language in the collective agreement (CUPE, 2020). These are vital initiatives that the employer would certainly not have adopted on their own and that lay the groundwork for other locals to seek similar agreements with their employers.
As I have been arguing throughout this paper, labor organizers need to adopt an expansive understanding of H&S in order to be effective on this issue. Our aims must match our analysis, acknowledging the uneven, structural impact of punitive workplace policies. Take for example the increased use of security guards and partnerships with the police to address drug use in the library. We know that police and security disproportionately target, criminalize, and kill BIPOC people. What would it mean for us to organize around an analysis of police and security presence as a workplace hazard? One that disproportionately targets poor and racialized people, making the library and library work unsafe for many. Could the language of H&S help us push our bosses to invest in alternatives to policing and transformative approaches to conflict?
Organized around the recognition that police presence in the library is a hazard, library workers meaningfully included in decisions about H&S in the library can take a different approach than the employer who prioritizes liability above all else. While an employer may look at the cost saving benefit of contracting low paid security guards to deter and remove potential ‘threats’, unions can advocate for better staffing models, real and substantial training, and deeper community partnerships. Frontline workers can use the wisdom they have earned to devise alternatives to police in the library that seek to address conflict and harm in ways that aim to restore community, not dismantle it. We do not need to settle for the crumbs management provides, we can continue to struggle for real investment in our communities.
The right to refuse unsafe work is perhaps the bedrock of labor activism. The right to refuse is relatively straightforward in contexts like a construction site, where the hazard is immediate and physical. What makes Hahn’s invocation of this right in defense of unhoused peoples striking is its application to a situation that is less immediate. Even though the argument might admittedly stretch the current legal and political framework governing the right of refusal, rank and file labor organizing must build the capacity to withhold our labour in politically charged circumstances, where pushback from both employer and state is expected. When exercised individually, the invocation of this right will likely be ineffective. For example, I refused to call the police on a patron recovering from drug poisoning in a branch washroom. Despite my training as a first-responder and extensive experience in frontline harm reduction, I was fired for insubordination. Even as the central branch of EPL hosted a press conference about a public health partnership providing patrons with free Naloxone kits the very same week, no recourse to structural analysis or safety was available through my union: how could there have been? What if my individual action, though, was part of a collective refusal — an entire branch’s staff declining to call the police in situations that could be handled otherwise? Whether formalized through the avenues of union protection, or instigated directly by rank and file self organization, the right to refuse is most meaningful, effective, and defensible, when it is asserted collectively.
The ability to rearticulate the scope and language of harm is one mechanism through which library unions might begin to unseat the safety and security narrative that defines conversations about the toxic drug supply crisis in the library. This work, however, is demanding, and possible only once frontline library workers acknowledge that we have more in common with patrons who use drugs than with the library CEO. Antagonism between library workers and patrons serves management alone, which mobilizes worker fear and anxiety to enforce punitive order within the branch. Once library workers recognize that our safety is tied to that of our patrons, and to working-class people across the country more broadly, we will be positioned to advocate for policies and procedures that rise the tide for all. This is not easy work; it requires developing practices that allow us to keep our jobs and pay our bills while resisting the institutional imperative to punish our patrons. For this reason, those of us committed to abolition and harm reduction must find one another, talk to our co-workers, interrupt the criminalization of our patrons, and hold our union leadership’s feet to the fire.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Brittany Paloma Fiedler, Jaena Rae Cabrera, and Emily Drabinski for the energy and care they dedicated to editing this article. Publishing with In the Library with The Lead Pipe was a wonderful experience under their thoughtful guidance.
Thank you to my comrades in LW4SCS. Your care, commitment, and sharp analysis has sustained me over the last few years. I have been so lucky to learn with and from some of the most badass library workers in Canada. Beth Capper, may we always support each other in ‘saying the thing’. Finally, thank you Rob Jackson, the best intellectual and life partner I could ask for. Your edits and feedback make my thinking demonstrably better.
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