Alberta Crown corporation study finds Red Deer OD prevention site closure didn’t lead to more deaths

New research by a Crown corporation created by Alberta’s UCP government has found that last year’s closure of Red Deer’s only overdose prevention site did not lead to an increase in overdose deaths, emergency department visits or ambulance calls among former site users.

The results of the study conducted by the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence (CoRE) were published by the scientific journal Addiction this week, but already some are raising concerns about the study itself, the impacts it could have and who did it in the first place.

The study looked at data related to the Red Deer site from June 2024 to six months after its closure, and also looked at data from the overdose prevention site in Lethbridge that continues to operate. It concluded that the announcement and closure resulted in “significantly increased rates of accepting treatment” among the identifiable site users “as the site prepared for closure and was ultimately closed.”

It also outlined that short-term effects on urgent health-care usage and fatalities appeared “stable,” but the findings remained inconclusive due to the limited followup period of 26 weeks.

Dr. Nathaniel Day, CoRE’s chief scientific officer, is the lead author of the report. He told CBC News that there is “a lot of conflicting information out there” when it comes to benefits and drawbacks of overdose prevention sites.

CoRE was created in 2024 to study recovery-oriented care. The research organization reports directly to Mental Health and Addiction Minister Rick Wilson.

“This research reinforces a fundamental belief that people struggling with addiction deserve, and need, a real path to recovery — not a system that leaves them trapped in perpetual addiction,” Wilson said in a statement he issued this week.

Alberta is shifting towards a recovery-oriented system of care. In that vein, Calgary's site will be closing this year. Lethbridge’s city council is pushing the province to close that city's site, the one compared to in the study.

If both those sites close, there would be only three remaining — two in Edmonton and one in Grande Prairie.

Dan Werb, chair of mental health and substance use disorders at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto, told CBC News he found parts of the report “troubling as an academic,” and expressed concern about the scope of the study and potential conflicts of interest.

“This is a report that has been produced by a Crown agency of the government, … by people who have key roles in creating the policy that this Alberta government is banking a lot of its reputation on,” he said. 

“Is it trying to make a political case against these services rather than a scientific case?”

Brad Readman, president of the International Association of Firefighters Local 1190 in Red Deer, says what he has been seeing on the ground since the closure of the city’s overdose prevention site is a significant increase in calls to opioid-related events.

“[The sites] were working,” he said. “[But] our members are [now] seeing more and more overdoses in treed areas [and] in homeless camps because [those in need] are not going down to the central location to get the needles — the Narcan isn’t available down there anymore.