Over the past two years, there has been a heated debate about the closure of overdose prevention sites, not just in Alberta cities such as Red Deer, but also in Toronto and Ottawa. Such supervised injection sites — increasingly seen as hubs of crime or disorder and often dropped into neighbourhoods with high concentrations of social services — have become so unpopular that relentless campaigns opposing new sites have made headlines in Winnipeg and Montreal as well.

On Tuesday, a striking new study about injection sites was published online in the scientific journal Addiction, which is likely to raise further questions about the evidence Health Canada and others have relied on to justify drug policy decisions that often override community safety concerns.

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There are two unique elements to this study. First, the study focuses on an overdose prevention site (OPS) in Red Deer that was closed at the same time as four sites in Toronto, on March 31, 2025. It studies several outcomes between June 30, 2024, and September 27, 2025, and compares six months of data after the closure to what happened in the months prior.

Second, this study relies on data linked to the provincial health-card numbers of the clients using the Red Deer OPS. In 2024, Alberta became the first province to link injection site clients to their provincial health numbers. As a result, the study’s 11 authors believe this is “the first Canadian study to assess the effects” of an injection site closure “using individual-level, linkable administrative health data.”

While some of the authors are affiliated with various departments at the University of Calgary, all but one have an association with the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence (CoRE), a Calgary-based research organization that receives funding from the Government of Alberta, albeit not specifically for this study, which the authors say it was not involved in.

The analysis includes 381 clients at the Red Deer site and 300 clients at an OPS in Lethbridge, which remained open during the months of the study and is comparable to Red Deer “in terms of population size, median income and Indigenous population proportions.”

The findings are fascinating. For starters, there was no increase........

© Calgary Herald