The B.C. NDP wants to reopen an infamously mismanaged Vancouver-based supervised consumption site despite opposition from the local mayor and city council. Not only is the province acting undemocratically, such sites have been shown to fuel crime and do not actually save lives.

This controversy began earlier this month, when Vancouver Coastal Health (VCH), a provincial health authority, announced that it had acquired a new permanent downtown location for its Thomas Donaghy Overdose Prevention Site (TDOPS), which is expected to resume operations within the coming weeks.

The TDOPS was originally located in Vancouver’s Yaletown neighbourhood, but local residents sued the site’s operators, alleging that their “ham-fisted” management had fuelled drug trafficking, public disorder, assaults and vandalism. The lawsuit ultimately ended in an out-of-court settlement wherein the province committed to better respecting its minimum public safety standards.

The city declined to renew TDOPS’s lease in 2024, while the lawsuit was ongoing, citing public safety issues. Shortly afterwards, the consumption site relocated to another building slightly outside of Yaletown, where it continued to attract neighbourhood complaints. The new building owner then asked it to vacate this January, after less than two years of tenancy — perhaps the province’s commitments to guaranteeing minimum standards were just hot air.

That brings us to the current reopening: new location; same operator; no clear argument for why things will be different this time.

In response to TDOPS’s announced second revival, Vancouver Mayor Ken Sim forwarded an “urgent” motion directing city staff to “use all tools available to the city” to block the opening of all new supervised consumption sites — not just this one — unless they provide detailed proposals that include “meaningful consultation, a clear public safety strategy, defined recovery pathways, and transparent accountability measures.”

“We have seen the disastrous impact when OPS sites are introduced without the right planning, oversight, and accountability,” wrote Sim in an associated news release.

The motion passed with unanimous support from Sim’s ruling ABC Party, but was rejected by all opposition councillors. Yet, the province has made it clear that it intends to reopen TDOPS regardless of municipal opposition, as it sees consumption sites as a form of evidence-based health care.

Unfortunately for the B.C. NDP, though, there is compelling data showing that these sites do not save lives and actually fuel crime.

Notably, a recent peer-reviewed study published in Addiction, an academic journal, examined the impacts of closing a supervised consumption site in Red Deer, Alberta, by comparing municipal health outcomes with Lethbridge, a demographically-similar Albertan city whose consumption site remained open.

The study found that former clients of the Red Deer consumption site saw no statistically significant increase in deaths, emergency department visits or “opioid-related emergency medical services (EMS) events” compared to the clients of the Lethbridge site. In fact, uptake of opioid agonist therapy (i.e. evidence-based addiction treatments such as methadone) markedly increased after the closure of the Red Deer site was announced.

The only apparent negative effect, according to the study, was an increase in overnight, non-emergency hospitalizations — which could suggest that former Red Deer clients used hospitals to access health services that had previously been provided by the consumption site.

The closure of several of Ontario’s supervised consumption sites last year has also been illuminating. Although harm reduction activists predicted that their loss would cause mass deaths, fatal opioid overdoses and drug-related mortality have not risen and remain far below levels seen in previous years.

What about crime, though?

A preliminary study published by medRxiv in late 2024, which used publicly available online crime data from the Toronto Police Service, found that crime increased within 100 metres of the city’s supervised consumption sites — assaults and robberies increased by 61 and 62 per cent, respectively, for example. These impacts were less dramatic within a 200 and 500 radius, though, suggesting that crime increases were limited to the immediate vicinity of the sites and that including farther areas in the study’s measurements diluted these effects.

Unfortunately, the study authors, who are harm reduction advocates, more or less republished their results in JAMA in late 2025 using only a 400-radius measure, in what some might perceive as an attempt to omit unfavourable results. They then used their reformulated data to claim that supervised consumption sites do not cause crime, and were rewarded with a shower of media coverage from credulous journalists.

Toronto’s experience is consistent with crime data compiled by the Montreal police, which examined the impacts of a supervised consumption site that opened in the St. Henri neighbourhood in early 2024. Within a 250-metre radius around the site, mischief calls and crimes against people increased by 800 per cent and 93 per cent respectively.

Some studies claim that supervised consumption sites work, but many of them are authored by harm reduction activist-scholars who use misleading methodologies.

A classic example would be the original evaluations of InSite, Canada’s first supervised injection site. Published in the mid-2000s, the study claimed that InSite created thousands of referrals to recovery and caused no increase in crime.

Yet, a third party assessor hired by the RCMP in 2006 found that these evaluations had misrepresented reality — first, by defining a “referral” as simply handing someone a brochure (even if a recipient immediately discarded the brochure, they were “referred”), and, second, by discounting how the Vancouver police redeployed enormous amounts of officers and resources around InSite to keep crime under control.

Vancouver’s municipal leaders know that supervised consumption sites are generally ruinous. It’s too bad that the B.C. NDP wants to crush their democratic voice and double-down on failed experiments.

National Post