Alberta closing more supervised drug injection sites after study backs recovery approach

OTTAWA — Alberta is shutting down two of its five remaining supervised drug consumption sites, after a recent study of addictions services in the province provided evidence in support of recovery-oriented treatments.

Addictions Minister Rick Wilson and Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis announced on Friday that consumption sites in Calgary and Lethbridge, Alta. will be closed on June 30.

Ellis said the facilities, designed to give addicts a secure space to take illicit street drugs with emergency staff in case of overdoses, were always meant to be temporary.

“Consumption sites were introduced at the beginning of the opioid crisis as a short-term emergency measure (when) treatment options and recovery support then were far more limited than they are today,” said Ellis.

Ellis said the expansion of addictions services in both communities, including live-in recovery communities and virtual drug treatment, meant the consumption sites had run their course.

The closures will leave just three sites open in the province — two in Edmonton and one in Grande Prairie —  down from a peak of seven at the height of the opioid crisis.

The announcement follows the publication of a major study in the peer-reviewed journal Addiction tracking the activities of former users of a site in Red Deer, Alta., which shut its doors in March 2025.

The study, written by researchers with the Canadian Centre of Recovery Excellence (CoRE), a provincial Crown corporation, found that the facility’s closure did not lead to a significant uptick in overdose deaths, as critics at the time warned it would. Nor was there a meaningful increase to the number of emergency calls to the surrounding area.

Instead, there was 6.2 per cent increase in the uptake of rehabilitation services between when the site’s closure was announced (June 2024) and six months after it closed its doors (September 2025). The amount of people seeking recovery in Red Deer was more than that over the same period in Lethbridge, which kept open an active drug consumption site, at 2.4 per cent.

Dr. Robert Tanguay, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Calgary and one of the study’s co-authors, said the data tell a clear story.

“The hypothesis is, these individuals realize that the site’s not going to be open anymore, and we should probably get help, and they do access and utilize those resources,” said Tanguay.

Wilson said that the CoRE study was one of several “tools” he used to finalize his decision to shutter the Calgary and Lethbridge facilities.

“The people that did that study, these are some of the best research scientists that were out there, and it was published in … the most prestigious journal out there,” said Wilson.

Wilson said there was no definite plan yet for the closure of the three remaining sites in Edmonton and Grande Prairie.

First introduced by Alberta’s NDP government in 2017, supervised drug consumption sites have long been a controversial topic in the province. Critics complain about the visible intoxication and general disorder around the facilities.

The opposition Alberta NDP had not responded to Friday’s announcement in time for this story’s deadline.

Alberta is one of multiple jurisdictions across Canada pivoting away from supervised consumption sites. The Ontario government announced earlier this week that it was pulling funding for seven active drug-injection sites.

National Post

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