Operating hours at the Red Deer overdose prevention site could be cut in half within weeks as the Alberta government moves toward complete closure in 2025.
The province announced in September that it would shutter the city’s only supervised drug-consumption service next spring. The OPS funding is being redirected to an addiction medicine clinic, “recovery coach” outreach workers and additional detox services at Red Deer’s Safe Harbour homeless shelter.
Overdose response teams staffed by nurses and paramedics will also patrol in and around the shelter, with 12-hour overnight shifts expected to start Jan. 1, 2025.
Once that begins, 24-hour supervised consumption services in Red Deer will be reduced to 12 hours every day, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., according to an affidavit from an official in Alberta’s ministry of mental health and addiction. By April 1, the overdose teams will be working around the clock, and the OPS will close.
The affidavit says that the change is happening in stages, “In order to ensure a smooth transition and that no individuals are left without care.”
The document was filed in the Red Deer Court of King’s Bench last week in response to legal action from Red Deer resident Aaron Brown, who has been diagnosed with severe opioid use disorder and relies on OPS services daily.
“It is terrifying to imagine what my life will become once the Red Deer OPS closes,” Brown said in a November affidavit.
“It will essentially be a death sentence for me and the many others who use the facility.”
Lawyer seeks injunction to stop closure
Brown’s lawyer, Avnish Nanda, filed the application on Nov. 18, alleging that shutting down supervised consumption services in Red Deer violates the Charter rights of substance users in the central Alberta city.
“There are hundreds of people who rely on this site each month. There are thousands of individual consumption events at the Red Deer OPS,” Nanda said.
“This is as urgent as it gets.”
Nanda is also seeking an injunction to halt the OPS closure. He said after learning about plans for stopping overnight services, he wants the application to be heard as soon as possible.
“This seems to come out of nowhere, and folks are not ready for this major change,” he said.
The allegations in the legal filings have not been proven in court.
Reducing the OPS hours prior to spring 2025 wasn’t part of the province’s public announcement on closing it and pivoting to what it calls recovery-oriented care.
Alberta Mental Health and Addiction Minister Dan Williams said Wednesday that the transition will be finished by April, “with a staggered approach of reduced hours for the drug consumption site, and increased supports coming online.”
He added the government is committed to fulfilling Red Deer city council’s request to eliminate the OPS.
“We’re going to be working with the local shelter … to make sure we work with existing institutions that know the community and know the nature of the struggles and challenges on the street, so we’re working with them to make sure that we have the staff as we scale up.”
In Brown’s affidavit, he says he began using fentanyl and crystal methamphetamine after losing his job in the oil patch in 2017, and ended up living on the streets. He describes overdosing countless times and struggling with serious health issues.
But he says OPS staff have helped him get health care and housing, and that stability has helped him decrease the frequency of his drug use.
“I am not in a position yet to stop my substance use completely…. If I went to a recovery program, my withdrawal symptoms would be so strong I would leave immediately to use substances, and I would also lose my supportive housing,” Brown said.
While the new teams of health workers planned for Red Deer will be able to help people in distress and reverse overdoses when necessary, without the OPS, there will be no designated, supervised space for people to use substances in Red Deer.
The government affidavit says Safe Harbour will get funding to renovate an area of the shelter so health workers can monitor people “known to be at a high risk of overdose.”