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?”

Sites ‘were working’: firefighters’ union 

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.

“I’m absolutely disappointed that that’s the government’s [takeaway] in the study. When they control the data, you can control the narrative.”

The study states that Alberta Health and Recovery Alberta holds the data supporting this study, which is not publicly available because of privacy and regulatory restrictions, and that requests for data access may be submitted to Alberta Health Services.

Concerns about impartiality

Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi told CBC News he finds it “awfully weird when someone hires themselves to evaluate their program instead of an unbiased external evaluator.” 

The study discloses “CoRE, with which several authors are affiliated, receives public funding from the government of Alberta. The funder had no role in the study design, data analysis, interpretation of results, manuscript preparation or the decision to submit this work for publication.”

When asked about trust in the independence of the study, Wilson said “Addiction is probably the most prestigious journal there is on addiction, and they peer reviewed it, … that gives it validity.” 

Werb agreed Addiction is “prestigious,” but said it doesn’t matter if not all the relevant information is in the study.

“There was a scale up of a number of different services by the government, including a 24/7 overdose prevention team, rapid access addiction medicine clinic and other resources that they set up on the day that the site closed,” he noted.

“People who then suddenly were at greater risk of dying of an overdose and had less access to treatment, that risk was mitigated somehow. … Why that wasn’t reported in this study is beyond me.

“If you don’t explain in your study the context of what’s happening in your study site, then how is the journal to know whether it’s missing anything?”

Short-term scope, long-term impacts

Alberta requires overdose prevention sites to collect health-care numbers or identifiers, which allowed researchers to follow the outcomes for all identified site users, rather than using community-level data or voluntary surveys. 

Werb noted other provinces don’t require the collection of that data to access such sites. 

“People don’t like to be surveiled and these are supposed to be low-barrier services,” he said.

Day said data was anonymized to “protect the integrity of the data sources.” 

“That enabled us to do this analysis. [For other jurisdictions,] it’s impossible for them to then look at the sort of complete health-care outcomes for people who are using services,” he said.

Nenshi said he had concerns about the scope of the study. 

“[It’s] a bit weird that we’re trying to look at long-term impacts on people with a very short time frame and a very small sample size,” he said.

Werb also voiced concern about the limited data used to come up with conclusions.

The study itself noted that “all outcomes warrant further evaluation over longer followup periods and with careful attention to contextual and methodological limitations.”

Day said there is so much public interest and concern about issues relating to overdose prevention sites that it was important to look at the impacts of policy changes early.

“We didn’t want to sit and wait for three years and then get back to you,” he said. “We needed, as best we could, to give a quick look at what are the early outcomes.

“I think that there always is a need for more understanding and more research. …

“[We] will benefit from looking at this again in another six months and maybe a year.”

When asked how the report could affect Alberta’s remaining overdose prevention sites, Wilson said he’s still reviewing the data that was gathered and there are no decisions currently being made on the future of the sites.

“Having a report like this, evidence-based and taking a look to make sure that we’re not doing harm, is important to me,” he said.