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The Alberta government is shutting down the province’s first-ever supervised drug consumption site.
Public Safety Minister Mike Ellis said the Sheldon M. Chumir Centre in Calgary, as well as a mobile service in Lethbridge will be shuttered as the next step in the province’s move to a recovery-oriented approach to addiction.
Ellis said the funding for the two sites will be transitioned into different support services.
“People will not be left without support,” he told reporters when he made the announcement Friday afternoon in Calgary.
Both sites are slated to close at the end of June.
Alberta’s Minister of Public Safety, Mike Ellis, said Friday that supervised drug consumption sites in Calgary and Lethbridge are being shut down in favour of a more recovery-oriented approach to addiction.
Global News
The Chumir Centre opened in 2017 in response to the ongoing opioid and overdose crisis, and six more sites opened in the following years across the province.
The closures mean just three supervised consumption sites will remain in Alberta, with two being in Edmonton.
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Last year the province closed a site housed within the Royal Alexandra Hospital just north of Edmonton’s downtown core, as well as a site in Red Deer.
Ellis said supervised consumption sites were always meant to be a temporary response to the opioid crisis.
“Treatment options and recovery support then were far more limited than they are today,” he said.
Calgary’s supervised consumption site, located in the Sheldon Chumir Centre, has been contentious since it opened in 2017, with many residents and businesses complaining that it contributed to social disorder in the area.
Global News
Addictions Minister Rick Wilson said the government doesn’t currently have plans to close the remaining sites.
Wilson said the additional treatment services and recovery facilities aren’t quite where they need to be in the capital city to close down the sites quite yet.
“We’ll get to them, but we’ve got some more work to do first.”
© 2026 The Canadian Press
