WARMINGTON: A morning jolt of crack and beer on the TTC

Woman on TTC streetcar shares her smoke and brew with fellow passengers and driver

Published Aug 07, 2026  •  4 minute read

A screenshot from video taken by Selwyn Pieters and provided to the Toronto Sun of a woman on a TTC streetcar.

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There’s nothing like the smell of a crack pipe in the morning!

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Whether they wanted such a wake-up jolt or not, no one on their morning commute aboard this TTC 505 streetcar Thursday was consulted that they would be sharing a hit of crack and a beer with a fellow rider.

Not only is this rolling stock not licensed for booze or drugs, it’s also supposed to be a no-smoking area. But this was not just a makeshift bar car but an unsafe ingestion site too. Move over that first cup of coffee. This was something stronger.

Blowing toxic smoke

As captured on video by Toronto lawyer Selwyn Pieters, you can see a woman at the back of the red rocket blowing the toxic smoke and dumping the end of her beer on her metaphoric commute to “high” park.

“This morning’s episode of Toronto is not a real place,” Pieters posted to X, under his moniker Mr. Toronto Lawyer. “Crack smoking and beer drinking early O’clock on the 505 streetcar. Toronto Transit Commission TTC party streetcar.”

He tagged the TTC, Toronto Police and the mayor’s office but so far there has been no official recording of a complaint about this incident.

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“Our advice is that anyone seeing this kind of behaviour immediately reports it so we can have it addressed,” said TTC spokesperson Stuart Green. “Simply posting it on social media without any additional context or information is not helpful for us to have staff attend, remove the individual and clean the vehicle.”

Green added “things like this need to be reported to staff, customer service or in real-time through the SafeTTC app. A vehicle number, location, time, direction and route are all important pieces of information.”

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He’s right. But Pieters was also right to film and post it. There’s no point in trying to hide something happening in plain sight. The drug crisis in Toronto has been swept under the carpet for long enough. The users are the tip of the iceberg but underneath that are dark stories of drug dealers’ profiting and a court system which has had no success in shutting the profiteers down.

Dumping all of these problems on the TTC and assigning it all the blame is not right either. There’s plenty of blame to spread around. It’s not easy for the TTC because things like this happen every day since they have so little control of who goes onto streetcars, buses or the subway. The system has become a moving homeless shelter and drug intake site which is also a huge challenge for the transit system’s security and special constables, and the Toronto Police, who are limited in what they can do about it.

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New approach to curb public drug use

There are provincial offences tickets for smoking and trespassing and there are drug laws, but none of that will have any teeth in preventing people addicted to hard street drugs from getting their fix. What needs to be talked about in this municipal election cycle is a new approach backed by the federal and provincial governments to allow for people with drug issues like this to be brought straight into a treatment facility triage centre with no waiting list or worry about funding coverage.

There are enough empty box store spaces and shopping malls that would be retrofitted to meet this need. They could be altered to be open for the so-called “unhoused” to hang out there after checking out of homeless shelters in the morning – rather than have them spread their smoke and problems onto people going to work or school.

Whatever Toronto, and many other cities and towns, are doing now is not working. It’s ruining the urban centres and turns off business and tourism while fostering a profit for the drug world. Earlier this summer, the Toronto Sun did a story on the zombie land that is all around Union Station and in many other parts of the city.

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The problem with such a label is individuals under the influence is illegal drugs is a person – somebody’s child or parent or loved one.

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Wanting to help this troubled woman, always big-hearted Pieters talked to her and in his short video you can hear her be very honest about her “bad habits” and see that she did apologize for smoking crack on his ride with many others on board.

She goes by “Pudding” on the streets and if someone knows her or is in a position to help her, hopefully this story will lead to that. I am using this space to ask Mayor Olivia Chow, Premier Doug Ford and Prime Minister Mark Carney – the people whose policies on the drug crisis are not having great success – to assign somebody to seek out this fellow human and see if there is something that can be done to get her to a doctor, a dentist and rehabilitation expert.

Perhaps a life can be saved and also the public protected. Not everybody wants to experience the smell of crack in the morning – or at any time of the day.

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