Supervised consumption sites (SCSs), which offer drug users a place to get high under the observation of staff, have become a popular proposed solution to the North American overdose epidemic. But a recently released Canadian study shows that, contrary to the claims of harm reduction activists, these sites do not save lives. American policymakers should take heed and avoid replicating their northern neighbors’ failed experiments.
The peer-reviewed study, published in the academic journal Addiction, examined patient outcomes from two Alberta-based consumption sites operating in demographically similar cities. One, in Red Deer, closed in March 2025; the other, in Lethbridge, remained open and acted as a control group.
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The researchers found that, after the Red Deer consumption site closed, its former clients saw no statistically significant increase in deaths, emergency department visits, or “opioid-related emergency medical services (EMS) events” compared with the clients of the Lethbridge site. These findings are even more notable because the illicit drug supply in the city was heavily adulterated with carfentanil, a highly potent synthetic opioid. If SCSs reduced overdoses deaths, the prevalence of this dangerous drug should have made the closure even more deadly.
The authors cautioned that the mortality results “should not be interpreted as clear evidence of safety.” They note that the study period was too short, and the general frequency of deaths too low, for confident statistical results with this particular indicator. But while a larger study could theoretically yield a different outcome, even this limited finding seems to refute the popular activist narrative that closing consumption sites leads to mass overdose death.
The only negative effect of closing the Red Deer site was a moderate increase in overnight, non-emergency hospitalizations. One possible explanation for this finding is that clients used hospitals to access health services they may previously have obtained at the consumption site.
The study also found a marked increase in the proportion of Red Deer clients receiving opioid agonist therapy (OAT)—treatments such as methadone and Suboxone that reduce cravings and withdrawal symptoms. These life-saving medications are considered the gold standard of addiction treatment.
The study authors stressed that their data cannot, by itself, explain why the closure of the Red Deer consumption site was associated with elevated OAT uptake. A “plausible” explanation, they argue, is that closing the site made OAT treatment relatively more attractive. But it is also possible that the closure “prompted intensified outreach, referral activity or administrative transitions towards treatment services.”
Neither explanation reflects well on SCS advocates. Either the supervised consumption site made drug use comfortable enough to discourage treatment, or service providers were not adequately pressuring their clients into seeking treatment until the site’s looming closure threatened harm reduction services. Both possibilities undermine the claim that supervised consumption sites offer a critical pathway toward recovery—a key part of harm reductionists’ argument for SCSs.
The new study’s results are consistent with emerging data in Ontario, where the provincial government shut down several consumption sites last year. Harm reduction activists predicted a wave of death. But fatal opioid overdoses and drug-related deaths have not risen, and they remain far below levels seen in previous years. Non-fatal opioid overdoses have slowly increased but have stayed well within the range of recent years.
The public would benefit from further research on SCSs, but getting more information has proved challenging. No province, aside from Alberta, requires site operators to gather client identifiers, which are essential to tracking health outcomes over time. Canadian public-health policymakers, under the sway of harm reduction activists, have generally claimed that collecting such data is a “stigmatizing” barrier to access.
The resultant data gap has allowed ideologically driven activist-researchers to dominate the policy debate through low-quality data and shoddy research methodologies. For example, failing to identify and track clients over time means that studies regularly omit those who become too ill or dysfunctional to use a site (or who die). That creates artificially positive results through the phenomenon of “survivorship bias.”
There is a long track record of such “oversights.” For example, early research into Canada’s first supervised consumption site, InSite, asserted that it had made thousands of referrals to recovery services. It was only later discovered by the Drug Prevention Network of Canada that a “referral” was defined as handing a client a brochure, with no follow-up.
The Alberta study is the first to use administrative health data to track the impacts of a consumption site closure on individual clients. While more research is needed, the study gives a sense of how the harm reduction movement’s best arguments melt away when subjected to proper scientific scrutiny.
Photo: Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images